The Constant Princess Read online

  I turn from his inquiring, honest gaze. “I don’t know,” I say evasively.

  “Infanta, I think you do know.”

  “How can I know?”

  “With a woman’s sense.”

  “I have it not.”

  He smiles at my stubbornness. “Well, then, woman without any feelings, what do you think with your clever mind, since you have decided to deny what your body tells you?”

  “How can I know what I should think?” I ask. “My mother is dead. My greatest friend in England—” I break off before I can say the name of Arthur. “I have no one to confide in. One midwife says one thing, one says another. The physician is sure…but he wants to be sure. The king rewards him only for good news. How can I know the truth?”

  “I should think you do know, despite yourself,” he insists gently. “Your body will tell you. I suppose your courses have not returned?”

  “No, I have bled,” I admit unwillingly. “Last week.”

  “With pain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your breasts are tender?”

  “They were.”

  “Are they fuller than usual?”

  “No.”

  “You can feel the child? He moves inside you?”

  “I can’t feel anything since I lost the girl.”

  “You are in pain now?”

  “Not anymore. I feel…”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. I feel nothing.”

  He says nothing; he sits quietly, he breathes so softly it is like sitting with a quietly sleeping black cat. He looks at María. “May I touch her?”

  “No,” she says. “She is the queen. Nobody can touch her.”

  He shrugs his shoulders. “She is a woman like any other. She wants a child like any woman. Why should I not touch her belly as I would touch any woman?”

  “She is the queen,” she repeats. “She cannot be touched. She has an anointed body.”

  He smiles as if the holy truth is amusing. “Well, I hope someone has touched her, or there cannot be a child at all,” he remarks.

  “Her husband. An anointed king,” María says shortly. “And take care of how you speak. These are sacred matters.”

  “If I may not examine her, then I shall have to say only what I think from looking at her. If she cannot bear examination then she will have to make do with guesswork.” He turns to me. “If you were an ordinary woman and not a queen, I would take your hands in mine now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is a hard word I have to tell you.”

  Slowly, I stretch out my hands with the priceless rings on my fingers. He takes them gently, his dark hands as soft as the touch of a child. His dark eyes look into mine without fear, his face is tender, moved. “If you are bleeding then it is most likely that your womb is empty,” he says. “There is no child there. If your breasts are not full then they are not filling with milk, your body is not preparing to feed a child. If you do not feel a child move inside you in the sixth month, then either the child is dead, or there is no child there. If you feel nothing then that is most probably because there is nothing to feel.”

  “My belly is still swollen.” I draw back my cloak and show him the curve of my belly under my shift. “It is hard, I am not fat, I look as I did before I lost the first baby.”

  “It could be an infection,” he says consideringly. “Or—pray Allah that it is not—it could be a growth, a swelling. Or it could be a miscarriage which you have not yet expelled.”

  I draw my hands back. “You are ill-wishing me!”

  “Never,” he says. “To me, here and now, you are not Catalina, Infanta of Spain, but simply a woman who has asked for my help. I am sorry for you.”

  “Some help!” María de Salinas interrupts crossly. “Some help you have been!”

  “Anyway, I don’t believe it,” I say. “Yours is one opinion, Dr. Fielding has another. Why should I believe you, rather than a good Christian?”

  He looks at me for a long time, his face tender. “I wish I could tell you a better opinion,” he says. “But I imagine there are many who will tell you agreeable lies. I believe in telling the truth. I will pray for you.”

  “I don’t want your heathen prayers,” I say roughly. “You can go, and take your bad opinion and your heresies with you.”

  “Go with God, Infanta,” he says with dignity, as if I have not insulted him. He bows. “And since you don’t want my prayers to my God (praise be to His holy name), I shall hope instead that when you are in your time of trouble that your doctor is right, and your own God is with you.”

  I let him leave, as silent as a dark cat down the hidden staircase and I say nothing. I hear his sandals clicking down the stone steps, just like the hushed footsteps of the servants at my home. I hear the whisper of his long gown, so unlike the stiff brush of English cloth. I feel the air gradually lose the scent of him, the warm, spicy scent of my home.

  And when he is gone, quite gone, and the downstairs door is shut and I hear María de Salinas turn the key in the lock then I find that I want to weep—not just because he has told me such bad news, but because one of the few people in the world who has ever told me the truth has gone.

  SPRING 1510

  Katherine did not tell her young husband of the visit of the Moor doctor, nor of the bad opinion that he had so honestly given her. She did not mention his visit to anyone, not even Lady Margaret Pole. She drew on her sense of destiny, on her pride, and on her faith that she was still especially favored by God, and she continued with the pregnancy, not even allowing herself to doubt.

  She had good reason. The English physician, Dr. Fielding, remained confident; the midwives did not contradict him; the court behaved as if Katherine would be brought to bed of a child in March or April; and so she went through the spring weather, the greening gardens, the bursting trees, with a serene smile and her hand clasped gently against her rounded belly.

  Henry was excited by the imminent birth of his child; he was planning a great tournament to be held at Greenwich once the baby was born. The loss of the girl had taught him no caution; he bragged all round the court that a healthy baby would soon come. He was forewarned only not to predict a boy. He told everyone that he did not mind if this first child was a prince or princess—he would love this baby for being the firstborn, for coming to himself and the queen in the first flush of their happiness.

  Katherine stifled her doubts, and never even said to María de Salinas that she had not felt her baby kick, that she felt a little colder, a little more distant from everything every day. She spent longer and longer on her knees in her chapel; but God did not speak to her, and even the voice of her mother seemed to have grown silent. She found that she missed Arthur—not with the passionate longing of a young widow, but because he had been her dearest friend in England, and the only one she could have trusted now with her doubts.

  In February she attended the great Shrove Tuesday feast and shone before the court and laughed. They saw the broad curve of her belly, they saw her confidence as they celebrated the start of Lent. They moved to Greenwich, certain that the baby would be born just after Easter.

  We are going to Greenwich for the birth of my child. The rooms are prepared for me as laid down in My Lady the King’s Mother’s Royal Book—hung with tapestries with pleasing and encouraging scenes, carpeted with rugs and strewn with fresh herbs. I hesitate at the doorway, behind me my friends raise their glasses of spiced wine. This is where I shall do my greatest work for England, this is my moment of destiny. This is what I was born and bred to do. I take a deep breath and go inside. The door closes behind me. I will not see my friends—the Duke of Buckingham, my dear knight Edward Howard, my confessor, the Spanish ambassador—until my baby is born.

  My women come in with me. Lady Elizabeth Boleyn places a sweet-smelling pomander on my bedside table. Lady Elizabeth and Lady Anne, sisters to the Duke of Buckingham straighten a tapestry, one at each corner, laughing over whether it l