The Constant Princess Read online

  “Oh, she knows all about it!” the boy burst out resentfully. “She has no…”

  His father waited. “No…what?”

  “No shame at all.”

  Henry caught his breath. “She is shameless? She is passionate?” He tried to keep the desire from his voice, a sudden lascivious picture of his daughter-in-law, naked and shameless, in his mind.

  “No! She goes at it like a man harnessing a horse,” Arthur said miserably. “A task to be done.”

  Henry choked down a laugh. “But at least she does it,” he said. “You don’t have to beg her or persuade her. She knows what she has to do?”

  Arthur turned from him to the window and looked out of the arrow slit to the cold river Thames below. “I don’t think she likes me. She only likes her Spanish friends, and Mary, and perhaps Henry. I see her laughing with them and dancing with them as if she were very merry in their company. She chatters away with her own people, she is courteous to everyone who passes by. She has a smile for everyone. I hardly ever see her, and I don’t want to see her either.”

  Henry dropped his hand on his son’s shoulder. “My boy, she doesn’t know what she thinks of you,” he assured him. “She’s too busy in her own little world of dresses and jewels and those damned gossipy Spanish women. The sooner you and she are alone together, the sooner you two will come to terms. You can take her with you to Ludlow, and you can get acquainted.”

  The boy nodded, but he did not look convinced. “If it is your wish, sire,” he said formally.

  “Shall I ask her if she wants to go?”

  The color flooded into the young man’s cheeks. “What if she says no?” he asked anxiously.

  His father laughed. “She won’t,” he promised. “You’ll see.”

  Henry was right. Catalina was too much of a princess to say either yes or no to a king. When he asked her if she would like to go to Ludlow with the prince, she said that she would do whatever the king wished.

  “Is Lady Margaret Pole still at the castle?” she asked, her voice a little nervous.

  He scowled at her. Lady Margaret was now safely married to Sir Richard Pole, one of the solid Tudor warhorses, and warden of Ludlow Castle. But Lady Margaret had been born Margaret Plantagenet, beloved daughter of the Duke of Clarence, cousin to King Edward and sister to Edward of Warwick, whose claim to the throne had been so much greater than Henry’s own.

  “What of it?”

  “Nothing,” she said hastily.

  “You have no cause to avoid her,” he said gruffly. “What was done was done in my name, by my order. You don’t bear any blame for it.”

  She flushed as if they were talking of something shameful. “I know.”

  “I can’t have anyone challenging my right to the throne,” he said abruptly. “There are too many of them, Yorks and Beauforts, and Lancasters too, and endless others who fancy their chances as pretenders. You don’t know this country. We’re all married and intermarried like so many coneys in a warren.” He paused to see if she would laugh, but she was frowning, following his rapid French. “I can’t have anyone claiming by their pretended right what I have won by conquest,” he said. “And I won’t have anyone else claiming by conquest either.”

  “I thought you were the true king,” Catalina said hesitantly.

  “I am now,” said Henry Tudor bluntly. “And that’s all that matters.”

  “You were anointed.”

  “I am now,” he repeated with a grim smile.

  “But you are of the royal line?”

  “I have royal blood in my veins,” he said, his voice hard. “No need to measure how much or how little. I picked up my crown off the battlefield, literally, it was at my feet in the mud. So I knew; everyone knew—everyone saw God give me the victory because I was his chosen king. The archbishop anointed me because he knew that too. I am as much king as any in Christendom, and more than most because I did not just inherit as a baby, the fruit of another man’s struggle—God gave me my kingdom when I was a man. It is my just desert.”

  “But you had to claim it…”

  “I claimed my own,” he said finally. “I won my own. God gave my own to me. That’s an end to it.”

  She bowed her head to the energy in his words. “I know, sire.”

  Her submissiveness, and the pride that was hidden behind it, fascinated him. He thought that there had never been a young woman whose smooth face could hide her thoughts like this one.

  “D’you want to stay here with me?” Henry asked softly, knowing that he should not ask her such a thing, praying, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, that she would say no and silence his secret desire for her.

  “Why, I wish whatever Your Majesty wishes,” she said coolly.

  “I suppose you want to be with Arthur?” he asked, daring her to deny it.

  “As you wish, sire,” she said steadily.

  “Tell me! Would you like to go to Ludlow with Arthur, or would you rather stay here with me?”

  She smiled faintly and would not be drawn. “You are the king,” she said quietly. “I must do whatever you command.”

  Henry knew he should not keep her at court beside him but he could not resist playing with the idea. He consulted her Spanish advisors, and found them hopelessly divided and squabbling among themselves. The Spanish ambassador, who had worked so hard to deliver the intractable marriage contract, insisted that the princess should go with her new husband and that she should be seen to be a married woman in every way. Her confessor, who alone of all of them seemed to have a tenderness for the little princess, urged that the young couple should be allowed to stay together. Her duenna, the formidable and difficult Doña Elvira, preferred not to leave London. She had heard that Wales was a hundred miles away, a mountainous and rocky land. If Catalina stayed in Baynard’s Castle and the household was rid of Arthur, then they would make a little Spanish enclave in the heart of the City, and the duenna’s power would be unchallenged, she would rule the princess and the little Spanish court.

  The queen volunteered her opinion that Catalina would find Ludlow too cold and lonely in mid-December and suggested that perhaps the young couple could stay together in London until spring.

  “You just hope to keep Arthur with you, but he has to go,” Henry said brusquely to her. “He has to learn the business of kingship and there is no better way to learn to rule England than to rule the principality.”

  “He’s still young, and he is shy with her.”

  “He has to learn to be a husband too.”

  “They will have to learn to deal together.”

  “Better that they learn in private then.”

  In the end, it was the king’s mother who gave the decisive advice. “Send her,” she said to her son. “We need a child off her. She won’t make one on her own in London. Send her with Arthur to Ludlow.” She laughed shortly. God knows, they’ll have nothing else to do there.”

  “Elizabeth is afraid that she will be sad and lonely,” the king remarked. “And Arthur is afraid that they will not deal well together.”

  “Who cares?” his mother asked. “What difference does that make? They are married and they have to live together and make an heir.”

  He shot her a swift smile. “She is only just sixteen,” he said, “and the baby of her family, still missing her mother. You don’t make any allowances for her youth, do you?”

  “I was married at twelve years old, and gave birth to you in the same year,” she returned. “No one made any allowances for me. And yet I survived.”

  “I doubt you were happy.”

  “I was not. I doubt that she is. But that, surely, is the last thing that matters?”

  Doña Elvira told me that I must refuse to go to Ludlow. Father Geraldini said that it was my duty to go with my husband. Dr. de Puebla said that for certain my mother would want me to live with my husband, to do everything to show that the marriage is complete in word and deed. Arthur, the hopeless beanpole, said nothing, and his