The Constant Princess Read online

“But they are my ladies-in-waiting. In service to me. They cannot leave without my permission.”

  “It is very wrong of them, indeed,” Margaret said. Something in the way she folded her hands in her lap and looked so steadily and calmly warned Katherine not to probe.

  “So what have you been doing in my absence?” Katherine turned to the ladies, trying to lighten the mood of the room.

  At once they all looked sheepish. “Have you learned any new songs? Have you danced in any masques?” Katherine asked.

  “I know a new song,” one of the girls volunteered. “Shall I sing it?”

  Katherine nodded; at once one of the other women picked up a lute. It was as if everyone was quick to divert her. Katherine smiled and beat the time with her hand on the arm of her chair. She knew, as a woman who had been born and raised in a court of conspirators, that something was very wrong indeed.

  There was the sound of company approaching and Katherine’s guards threw open the door to the king and his court. The ladies stood up, shook out their skirts, bit their lips to make them pink, and sparkled in anticipation. Someone laughed gaily at nothing. Henry strode in, still in his riding clothes, his friends around him, William Compton’s arm in his.

  Katherine was again alert to some difference in her husband. He did not come in, take her in his arms, and kiss her cheeks. He did not stride into the very center of the room and bow to her either. He came in, twinned with his best friend, the two almost hiding behind each other, like boys caught out in a petty crime: part shamefaced, part braggart. At Katherine’s sharp look Compton awkwardly disengaged himself, Henry greeted his wife without enthusiasm, his eyes downcast, he took her hand and then kissed her cheek, not her mouth.

  “Are you well now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “I am quite well now. And how are you, sire?”

  “Oh,” he said carelessly. “I am well. We had such a chase this morning. I wish you had been with us. We were halfway to Sussex, I do believe.”

  “I shall come out tomorrow,” Katherine promised him.

  “Will you be well enough?”

  “I am quite well,” she repeated.

  He looked relieved. “I thought you would be ill for months,” he blurted out.

  Smiling, she shook her head, wondering who had told him that.

  “Let’s break our fast,” he said. “I am starving.”

  He took her hand and led her to the great hall. The court fell in informally behind them. Katherine could hear the overexcited buzz of whispers. She leaned her head towards Henry so that no one could catch her words. “I hear there have been some quarrels in court.”

  “Oh! You have heard of our little storm already, have you?” he said. He was far too loud, he was far too jovial. He was acting the part of a man with nothing to trouble his conscience. He threw a laugh over his shoulder and looked for someone to join in his forced amusement. Half a dozen men and women smiled, anxious to share his good humor. “It is something and nothing. I have had a quarrel with your great friend, the Duke of Buckingham. He has left the court in a temper!” He laughed again, even more heartily, glancing at her sideways to see if she was smiling, trying to judge if she already knew all about it.

  “Indeed?” Katherine said coolly.

  “He was insulting,” Henry said, gathering his sense of offense. “He can stay away until he is ready to apologize. He is such a pompous man, you know. Always thinks he knows everything. And his sour sister Elizabeth can go too.”

  “She is a good lady-in-waiting and a kind companion to me,” Katherine observed. “I expected her to greet me this day. I have no quarrel with her, nor with her sister Anne. I take it you have no quarrel with them either?”

  “Nonetheless I am most displeased with their brother,” Henry said. “They can all go.”

  Katherine paused, took a breath. “She and her sister are in my household,” she observed. “I have the right to choose and dismiss my own ladies.”

  She saw the quick flush of his childish temper. “You will oblige me by sending them away from your household! Whatever your rights! I don’t expect to hear talk of rights between us!”

  The court behind them fell silent at once. Everyone wanted to hear the first royal quarrel.

  Katherine released his hand and went around the high table to take her place. It gave her a moment to remind herself to be calm. When he came to his seat beside hers she took a breath and smiled at him. “As you wish,” she said evenly. “I have no great preference in the matter. But how am I to run a well-ordered court if I send away young women of good family who have done nothing wrong?”

  “You were not here, so you have no idea what she did or didn’t do!” Henry sought for another complaint and found one. He waved the court to sit and dropped into his own chair. “You locked yourself away for months. What am I supposed to do without you? How are things supposed to be run if you just go away and leave everything?”

  Katherine nodded, keeping her face absolutely serene. She was very well aware that the attention of the entire court was focused on her like a burning glass on fine paper. “I hardly left for my own amusement,” she observed.

  “It has been most awkward for me,” he said, taking her words at face value. “Most awkward. It is all very well for you, taking to your bed for weeks at a time, but how is the court to run without a queen? Your ladies were without discipline, nobody knew how things were to go on, I couldn’t see you, I had to sleep alone—” He broke off.

  Katherine realized, belatedly, that his bluster was hiding a genuine sense of hurt. In his selfishness, he had transformed her long endurance of pain and fear into his own difficulty. He had managed to see her fruitless confinement as her willfully deserting him, leaving him alone to rule over a lopsided court; in his eyes, she had let him down.

  “I think at the very least you should do as I ask,” he said pettishly. “I have had trouble enough these last months. All this reflects very badly on me, I have been made to look a fool. And no help from you at all.”

  “Very well,” Katherine said peaceably. “I shall send Elizabeth away and her sister Anne too, since you ask it of me. Of course.”

  Henry found his smile, as if the sun were coming out from behind clouds. “Yes. And now you are back we can get everything back to normal.”

  Not a word for me, not one word of comfort, not one thought of understanding. I could have died trying to bring his child into the world; without his child I have to face sorrow, grief and a haunting fear of sin. But he does not think of me at all.

  I find a smile to reply to his. I knew when I married him that he was a selfish boy and I knew he would grow into a selfish man. I have set myself the task of guiding him and helping him to be a better man, the best man that he can be. There are bound to be times when I think he has failed to be the man he should be. And when those times come, as now, I must see it as my failure to guide him. I must forgive him.

  Without my forgiveness, without me extending my patience further than I thought possible, our marriage will be a poorer one. He is always ready to resent a woman who cares for him—he learned that from his grandmother. And I, God forgive me, am too quick to think of the husband that I lost, and not of the husband that I won. He is not the man that Arthur was, and he will never be the king that Arthur would have been. But he is my husband and my king and I should respect him.

  Indeed: I will respect him, whether he deserves it or not.

  The court was subdued over breakfast, few of them could drag their eyes from the high table where, under the gold canopy of state, seated on their thrones, the king and queen exchanged conversation and seemed to be quite reconciled.

  “But does she know?” one courtier whispered to one of Katherine’s ladies.

  “Who would tell her?” she replied. “If María de Salinas and Lady Margaret have not told her already then she doesn’t know. I would put my earrings on it.”

  “Done,” he said. “Ten shillings that she finds out