The Constant Princess Read online

  If she could have brought herself to speak of Arthur to her mother-in-law or to the king then perhaps they would have sought her out to share their grief. But she could not use his name to curry favor with them. Even a year since his death, she could not think of him without a tightness in her chest which was so great that she thought it could stop her breathing for very grief. She still could not say his name out loud. She certainly could not play on her grief to help her at court.

  “But what will happen?” Doña Elvira continued.

  Catalina turned her head away. “I don’t know,” she said shortly.

  “Perhaps if the queen has another son with this baby, the king will send us back to Spain,” the duenna pursued.

  Catalina nodded. “Perhaps.”

  The duenna knew her well enough to recognize Catalina’s silent determination. “Your trouble is that you still don’t want to go,” she whispered. “The king may keep you as a hostage against the dowry money, your parents may let you stay; but if you insisted you could get home. You still think you can make them marry you to Harry; but if that was going to happen you would be betrothed by now. You have to give up. We have been here a year now and you make no progress. You will trap us all here while you are defeated.”

  Catalina’s sandy eyelashes swept down to veil her eyes. “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t think that.”

  There was a sharp rap at the door. “Urgent message for the Dowager Princess of Wales!” the voice called out.

  Catalina dropped her sewing and rose to her feet. Her ladies sprang up too. It was so unusual for anything to happen in the quiet court of Durham House that they were thrown into a flutter.

  “Well, let him in!” Catalina exclaimed.

  María de Salinas flung open the door, and one of the royal grooms of the chamber came in and kneeled before the princess. “Grave news,” he said shortly. “A son, a prince, has been born of the queen and has died. Her Grace the Queen has died too. God pray for His Grace in his kingly grief.”

  “What?” demanded Doña Elvira, trying to take in the astounding rush of events.

  “God save her soul,” Catalina replied correctly. “God save the King.”

  “Heavenly Father, take Your daughter Elizabeth into Your keeping. You must love her, she was a woman of great gentleness and grace.”

  I sit back on my heels and abandon the prayer. I think the queen’s life, ended so tragically, was one of sorrow. If Arthur’s version of the scandal were true, then she had been prepared to marry King Richard, however despicable a tyrant. She had wanted to marry him and be his queen. Her mother and My Lady the King’s Mother and the victory of Bosworth had forced her to take King Henry. She had been born to be Queen of England, and she had married the man who could give her the throne.

  I thought that if I had been able to tell her of my promise, then she would have known the pain that seeps through me like ice every time I think of Arthur and know that I promised him I would marry Harry. I thought that she might have understood if you are born to be Queen of England you have to be Queen of England, whoever is king. Whoever your husband will have to be.

  Without her quiet presence at court I feel that I am more at risk, further from my goal. She was kind to me, she was a loving woman. I was waiting out my year of mourning and trusting that she would help me into marriage with Harry, because he would be a refuge for me and because I would be a good wife to him. I was trusting that she knew one could marry a man for whom one feels nothing but indifference and still be a good wife.

  But now the court will be ruled by My Lady the King’s Mother, and she is a formidable woman, no friend to anyone but her own cause, no affection for anyone but her son Henry and his son, Prince Harry.

  She will help no one, but she will serve the interests of her own family first. She will consider me as only one candidate among many for his hand in marriage. God forgive her, she might even look to a French bride for him, and then I will have failed not only Arthur but my own mother and father too, who need me to maintain the alliance between England and Spain and the enmity between England and France.

  This year has been hard for me. I had expected a year of mourning and then a new betrothal; I have been growing more and more anxious since no one seems to be planning such a thing. And now I am afraid that it will get worse. What if King Henry decides to surrender the second part of the dowry and sends me home? What if they betroth Harry, that foolish boy, to someone else? What if they just forget me? Hold me as a hostage to the good behavior of Spain but neglect me? Leave me at Durham House, a shadow princess over a shadow court, while the real world goes on elsewhere?

  I hate this time of year in England, the way the winter lingers on and on in cold mists and gray skies. In the Alhambra the water in the canals will be released from frost and starting to flow again, icy cold, rushing deep with meltwater from the snows of the sierra. The earth will be starting to warm in the gardens, the men will be planting flowers and young saplings, the sun will be warm in the mornings and the thick hangings will be taken down from the windows so the warm breezes can blow through the palace again.

  The birds of summer will come back to the high hills and the olive trees will shimmer their leaves of green and gray. Everywhere the farmers will be turning over the red soil, and there will be the scent of life and growth.

  I long to be home, but I will not leave my post. I am not a soldier who forgets his duty, I am a sentry who wakes all night. I will not fail my love. I said, “I promise,” and I do not forget it. I will be constant to him. The garden that is immortal life, al-Yanna, will wait for me, the rose will wait for me in al-Yanna, Arthur will wait for me there. I will be Queen of England as I was born to be, as I promised him I would be. The rose will bloom in England as well as in heaven.

  There was a great state funeral for Queen Elizabeth, and Catalina was in mourning black again. Through the dark lace of her mantilla she watched the orders of precedence, the arrangements for the service, she saw how everything was commanded by the great book of the king’s mother. Even her own place was laid down, behind the princesses but before all the other ladies of the court.

  Lady Margaret, the king’s mother, had written down all the procedures to be followed at the Tudor court, from birth chambers to lying in state, so that her son and the generations which she prayed would come after him would be prepared for every occasion, so that each occasion would match another, and so that every occasion, however distant in the future, would be commanded by her.

  Now her first great funeral, for her unloved daughter-in-law, went off with the order and grace of a well-planned masque at court, and as the great manager of everything, she stepped up visibly, unquestionably, to her place as the greatest lady at court.

  2ND APRIL 1503

  It was a year to the day that Arthur had died, and Catalina spent the day alone in the chapel of Durham House. Father Geraldini held a memorial Mass for the young prince at dawn and Catalina stayed in the little church, without breaking her fast, without taking so much as a cup of small ale, all the day.

  Some of the time she kneeled before the altar, her lips moving in silent prayer, struggling with the loss of him with a grief which was as sharp and as raw as the day that she had stood on the threshold of his room and learned that they could not save him, that he would die, that she would have to live without him.

  For some of the long hours, she prowled around the empty chapel, pausing to look at the devotional pictures on the walls or the exquisite carving of the pew ends and the rood screen. Her horror was that she was forgetting him. There were mornings when she woke and tried to see his face and found that she could see nothing beneath her closed eyelids or, worse, all she could see was some rough sketch of him, a poor likeness: the simulacrum and no longer the real thing. Those mornings she would sit up quickly, clench her knees up to her belly, and hold herself tight so that she did not give way to her agonizing sense of loss.

  Then, later in the day, she would be ta