The Constant Princess

Dogmersfield Palace, Hampshire, Autumn 1501

‘I say, you cannot come in! If you were the King of England himself – you could not come in.’

‘I am the King of England,’ Henry Tudor said, without a flicker of amusement. ‘And she can either come out right now, or I damned well will come in and my son will follow me.’

‘The Infanta has already sent word to the king that she cannot see him,’ the duenna said witheringly. ‘The noblemen of her court rode out to explain to him that she is in seclusion, as a lady of Spain. Do you think the King of England would come riding down the road when the Infanta has refused to receive him? What sort of a man do you think he is?’

‘Exactly like this one,’ he said and thrust his fist with the great gold ring towards her face. The Count de Cabra came into the hall in a rush, and at once recognised the lean forty-year-old man threatening the Infanta’s duenna with a clenched fist, a few aghast servitors behind him, and gasped out: ‘The king!’

At the same moment the duenna recognised the new badge of England, the combined roses of York and Lancaster, and recoiled. The count skidded to a halt and threw himself into a low bow.

‘It is the king,’ he hissed, his voice muffled by speaking with his head on his knees. The duenna gave a little gasp of horror and dropped into a deep curtsey.

‘Get up,’ the king said shortly. ‘And fetch her.’

‘But she is a princess of Spain, Your Grace,’ the woman said, rising but with her head still bowed low. ‘She is to stay in seclusion. She cannot be seen by you before her wedding day. This is the tradition. Her gentlemen went out to explain to you …’

‘It’s your tradition. It’s not my tradition. And since she is my daughter-in-law in my country, under my laws, she will obey my tradition.’

‘She has been brought up most carefully, most modestly, most properly …’

‘Then she will be very shocked to find an angry man in her bedroom. Madam, I suggest that you get her up at once.’

‘I will not, Your Grace. I take my orders from the Queen of Spain herself and she charged me to make sure that every respect was shown to the Infanta and that her behaviour was in every way …’

‘Madam, you can take your working orders from me; or your marching orders from me. I don’t care which. Now send the girl out or I swear on my crown I will come in and if I catch her naked in bed then she won’t be the first woman I have ever seen in such a case. But she had better pray that she is the prettiest.’

The Spanish duenna went quite white at the insult.

‘Choose,’ the king said stonily.

‘I cannot fetch the Infanta,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Dear God! That’s it! Tell her I am coming in at once.’

She scuttled backwards like an angry crow, her face blanched with shock. Henry gave her a few moments to prepare, and then called her bluff by striding in behind her.

The room was lit only by candles and firelight. The covers of the bed were turned back as if the girl had hastily jumped up. Henry registered the intimacy of being in her bedroom, with her sheets still warm, the scent of her lingering in the enclosed space, before he looked at her. She was standing by the bed, one small white hand on the carved wooden post. She had a cloak of dark blue thrown over her shoulders and her white nightgown trimmed with priceless lace peeped through the opening at the front. Her rich auburn hair, plaited for sleep, hung down her back, but her face was completely shrouded in a hastily thrown mantilla of dark lace.

Dona Elvira darted between the girl and the king. ‘This is the Infanta,’ she said. ‘Veiled until her wedding day.’

‘Not on my money,’ Henry Tudor said bitterly. ‘I’ll see what I’ve bought, thank you.’

He stepped forwards. The desperate duenna nearly threw herself to her knees. ‘Her modesty …’

‘Has she got some awful mark?’ he demanded, driven to voice his deepest fear. ‘Some blemish? Is she scarred by the pox and they did not tell me?’

‘No! I swear.’

Silently, the girl put out her white hand and took the ornate lace hem of her veil. Her duenna gasped a protest but could do nothing to stop the princess as she raised the veil, and then flung it back. Her clear blue eyes stared into the lined, angry face of Henry Tudor without wavering. The king drank her in, and then gave a little sigh of relief at the sight of her.

She was an utter beauty: a smooth, rounded face, a straight, long nose, a full, sulky, sexy mouth. Her chin was up, he saw; her gaze challenging. This was no shrinking maiden fearing ravishment. This was a fighting princess standing on her dignity even in this most appalling moment of embarrassment.

He bowed. ‘I am Henry Tudor, King of England,’ he said.

She curtseyed.

He stepped forwards and saw her curb her instinct to flinch away. He took her firmly at the shoulders, and kissed one warm, smooth cheek and then the other. The perfume of her hair and the warm, female smell of her body came to him and he felt desire pulse in his groin and at his temples. Quickly he stepped back and let her go.

‘You are welcome to England,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘You will forgive my impatience to see you. My son too is on his way to visit you.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said icily, speaking in perfectly phrased French. ‘I was not informed until a few moments ago that Your Grace was insisting on the honour of this unexpected visit.’

Henry fell back a little from the whip of her temper. ‘I have a right …’

She shrugged, an absolutely Spanish gesture. ‘Of course. You have every right over me.’

At the ambiguous, provocative words, he was again aware of his closeness to her: of the intimacy of the small room, the tester bed hung with rich draperies, the sheets invitingly turned back, the pillow still impressed with the shape of her head. It was a scene for ravishment, not for a royal greeting. Again he felt the secret thud-thud of lust.

‘I’ll see you outside,’ he said abruptly, as if it was her fault that he could not rid himself of the flash in his mind of what it would be like to have this ripe little beauty that he had bought. What would it be like if he had bought her for himself, rather than for his son?

‘I shall be honoured,’ she said coldly.

He got himself out of the room briskly enough, and nearly collided with Prince Arthur, hovering anxiously in the doorway.

‘Fool,’ he remarked.

Prince Arthur, pale with nerves, pushed his blond fringe back from his face, stood still and said nothing.

‘I’ll send that duenna home at the first moment I can,’ the king said. ‘And the rest of them. She can’t make a little Spain in England, my son. The country won’t stand for it, and I damned well won’t stand for it.’

‘People don’t object. The country people seem to love the princess,’ Arthur suggested mildly. ‘Her escort says …’

‘Because she wears a stupid hat. Because she is odd: Spanish, rare. Because she is young and –’ he broke off ‘– pretty.’

‘Is she?’ he gasped. ‘I mean: is she?’

‘Haven’t I just gone in to make sure? But no Englishman will stand for any Spanish nonsense once they get over the novelty. And neither will I. This is a marriage to cement an alliance; not to flatter her vanity. Whether they like her or not, she’s marrying you. Whether you like her or not, she’s marrying you. Whether she likes it or not, she’s marrying you. And she’d better get out here now or I won’t like her and that will be the only thing that can make a difference.’

I have to go out, I have won only the briefest of reprieves and I know he is waiting for me outside the door to my bedchamber and he has demonstrated, powerfully enough, that if I do not go to him, then the mountain will come to Mohammed and I will be shamed again.

I brush Dona Elvira aside as a duenna who cannot protect me now, and I go to the door of my rooms. My servants are frozen, like slaves enchanted in a fairy tale by this extraordinary behaviour from a king. My heart hammers in my ears and I know a girl’s embarrassment at having to step forwards in public, but also a soldier’s desire to let battle be joined, the eagerness to know the worst, to face danger rather than evade it.

Henry of England wants me to meet his son, before his travelling party, without ceremony, without dignity as if we were a scramble of peasants. So be it. He will not find a princess of Spain falling back for fear. I grit my teeth, I smile as my mother commanded me.

I nod to my herald, who is as stunned as the rest of my companions. ‘Announce me,’ I order him.

His face blank with shock, he throws open the door. ‘The Infanta

Catalina, Princess of Spain and Princess of Wales,’ he bellows.

This is me. This is my moment. This is my battle cry.

I step forwards.

The Spanish Infanta – with her face naked to every man’s gaze – stood in the darkened doorway and then walked into the room, only a little flame of colour in both cheeks betraying her ordeal.

At his father’s side, Prince Arthur swallowed. She was far more beautiful than he had imagined, and a million times more haughty. She was dressed in a gown of dark black velvet, slashed to show an undergown of carnation silk, the neck cut square and low over her plump breasts, hung with ropes of pearls. Her auburn hair, freed from the plait, tumbled down her back in a great wave of red-gold. On her head was a black lace mantilla flung determinedly back. She swept a deep curtsey and came up with her head held high, graceful as a dancer.

‘I beg your pardon for not being ready to greet you,’ she said in French. ‘If I had known you were coming I would have been prepared.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t hear the racket,’ the king said. ‘I was arguing at your door for a good ten minutes.’

‘I thought it was a pair of porters brawling,’ she said coolly.

Arthur suppressed a gasp of horror at her impertinence; but his father was eyeing her with a smile as if a new filly was showing promising spirit.

‘No. It was me; threatening your lady-in-waiting. I am sorry that I had to march in on you.’

She inclined her head. ‘That was my duenna, Dona Elvira. I am sorry if she displeased you. Her English is not good. She cannot have understood what you wanted.’

‘I wanted to see my daughter-in-law, and my son wanted to see his bride, and I expect an English princess to behave like an English princess, and not like some damned sequestered girl in a harem. I thought your parents had beaten the Moors. I didn’t expect to find them set up as your models.’

Catalina ignored the insult with a slight turn of her head. ‘I am sure that you will teach me good English manners,’ she said. ‘Who better to advise me?’ She turned to Prince Arthur and swept him a royal curtsey. ‘My lord.’

He faltered in his bow in return, amazed at the serenity that she could muster in this most embarrassing of moments. He reached into his jacket for her present, fumbled with the little purse of jewels, dropped them, picked them up again and finally thrust them towards her, feeling like a fool.

She took them and inclined her head in thanks, but did not open them. ‘Have you dined, Your Grace?’

‘We’ll eat here,’ he said bluntly. ‘I ordered dinner already.’

‘Then can I offer you a drink? Or somewhere to wash and change your clothes before you dine?’ She examined the long, lean length of him consideringly, from the mud spattering his pale, lined face to his dusty boots. The English were a prodigiously dirty nation, not even a great house such as this one had an adequate hammam or even piped water. ‘Or perhaps you don’t like to wash?’

A harsh chuckle was forced from the king. ‘You can order me a cup of ale and have them send fresh clothes and hot water to the best bedroom and I’ll change before dinner.’ He raised a hand. ‘You needn’t take it as a compliment to you. I always wash before dinner.’

Arthur saw her nip her lower lip with little white teeth as if to refrain from some sarcastic reply. ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ she said pleasantly. ‘As you wish.’ She summoned her lady-in-waiting to her side and gave her low-voiced orders in rapid Spanish. The woman curtseyed and led the king from the room.

The princess turned to Prince Arthur.

‘Et tu?’ she asked in Latin. ‘And you?’

‘I? What?’ he stammered.

He felt that she was trying not to sigh with impatience.

‘Would you like to wash and change your coat also?’

‘I’ve washed,’ he said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he could have bitten off his own tongue. He sounded like a child being scolded by a nurse, he thought. ‘I’ve washed,’ indeed. What was he going to do next? Hold out his hands palms-upwards so that she could see he was a good boy?

‘Then will you take a glass of wine? Or ale?’

Catalina turned to the table, where the servants were hastily laying cups and flagons.

‘Wine.’

She raised a glass and a flagon and the two chinked together, and then chink-chink-chinked again. In amazement, he saw that her hands were trembling.

She poured the wine quickly and held it to him. His gaze went from her hand and the slightly rippled surface of the wine to her pale face.

She was not laughing at him, he saw. She was not at all at ease with him. His father’s rudeness had brought out the pride in her, but alone with him she was just a girl, some months older than him, but still just a girl. The daughter of the two most formidable monarchs in Europe; but still just a girl with shaking hands.

‘You need not be frightened,’ he said very quietly. ‘I am sorry about all this.’

He meant – your failed attempt to avoid this meeting, my father’s brusque informality, my own inability to stop him or soften him, and, more than anything else, the misery that this business must be for you: coming far from your home among strangers and meeting your new husband, dragged from your bed under protest.

She looked down. He stared at the flawless pallor of her skin, at the fair eyelashes and pale eyebrows.

Then she looked up at him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I have seen far worse than this, I have been in far worse places than this, and I have known worse men than your father. You need not fear for me. I am afraid of nothing.’

No-one will ever know what it cost me to smile, what it cost me to stand before your father and not tremble. I am not yet sixteen, I am far from my mother, I am in a strange country, I cannot speak the language and I know nobody here. I have no friends but the party of companions and servants that I have brought with me, and they look to me to protect them. They do not think to help me.

I know what I have to do. I have to be a Spanish princess for the English, and an English princess for the Spanish. I have to seem at ease where I am not, and assume confidence when I am afraid. You may be my husband, but I can hardly see you, I have no sense of you yet. I have no time to consider you, I am absorbed in being the princess that your father has bought, the princess that my mother has delivered, the princess that will fulfil the bargain and secure a treaty between England and Spain.

No-one will ever know that I have to pretend to ease, pretend to confidence, pretend to grace. Of course I am afraid. But I will never, never show it. And, when they call my name I will always step forwards.

The king, having washed and taken a couple of glasses of wine before he came to his dinner, was affable with the young princess, determined to overlook their introduction. Once or twice she caught him glancing at her sideways, as if to get the measure of her, and she turned to look at him, full on, one sandy eyebrow slightly raised as if to interrogate him.

‘Yes?’ he demanded.

‘I beg your pardon,’she said equably. ‘I thought Your Grace needed something. You glanced at me.’

‘I was thinking you’re not much like your portrait,’ he said.

She flushed a little. Portraits were designed to flatter the sitter, and when the sitter was a royal princess on the marriage market, even more so.

‘Better-looking,’ Henry said begrudgingly, to reassure her. ‘Younger, softer, prettier.’

She did not warm to the praise as he expected her to do. She merely nodded as if it were an interesting observation.

‘You had a bad voyage,’ Henry remarked.

‘Very bad,’ she said. She turned to Prince Arthur. ‘We were driven back as we set out from Corunna in August and we had to wait for the storms to pass. When we finally set sail it was still terribly rough, and then we were forced into Plymouth. We couldn’t get to Southampton at all. We were all quite sure we would be drowned.’

‘Well, you couldn’t have come overland,’ Henry said flatly, thinking of the parlous state of France and the enmity of the French king. ‘You’d be a priceless hostage for a king who was heartless enough to take you. Thank God you never fell into enemy hands.’

She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Pray God I never do.’

‘Well, your troubles are over now,’ Henry concluded. ‘The next boat you are on will be the royal barge when you go down the Thames. How shall you like to become Princess of Wales?’

‘I have been the Princess of Wales ever since I was three years old,’ she corrected him. ‘They always called me Catalina, the Infanta, Princess of Wales. I knew it was my destiny.’ She looked at Arthur, who still sat silently observing the table. ‘I have known we would be married all my life. It was kind of you to write to me so often. It made me feel that we were not complete strangers.’

He flushed. ‘I was ordered to write to you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘As part of my studies. But I liked getting your replies.’

‘Good God, boy, you don’t exactly sparkle, do you?’ asked his father critically.

Arthur flushed scarlet to his ears.

‘There was no need to tell her that you were ordered to write,’ his father ruled. ‘Better to let her think that you were writing of your own choice.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Catalina said quietly. ‘I was ordered to reply. And, as it happens, I should like us always to speak the truth to each other.’

The king barked out a laugh. ‘Not in a year’s time you won’t,’ he predicted. ‘You will be all in favour of the polite lie then. The great saviour of a marriage is mutual ignorance.’

Arthur nodded obediently, but Catalina merely smiled, as if his observations were of interest, but not necessarily true. Henry found himself piqued by the girl, and still aroused by her prettiness.

‘I daresay your father does not tell your mother every thought that crosses his mind,’ he said, trying to make her look at him again.

He succeeded. She gave him a long, slow, considering gaze from her blue eyes. ‘Perhaps he does not,’she conceded. ‘I would not know. It is not fitting that I should know. But whether he tells her or not: my mother knows everything anyway.’

He laughed. Her dignity was quite delightful in a girl whose head barely came up to his chest. ‘She is a visionary, your mother? She has the gift of Sight?’

She did not laugh in reply. ‘She is wise,’ she said simply. ‘She is the wisest monarch in Europe.’

The king thought he would be foolish to bridle at a girl’s devotion to her mother, and it would be graceless to point out that her mother might have unified the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon but that she was still a long way from creating a peaceful and united Spain. The tactical skill of Isabella and Ferdinand had forged a single country from the Moorish kingdoms, they had yet to make everyone accept their peace. Catalina’s own journey to London had been disrupted by rebellions of Moors and Jews who could not bear the tyranny of the Spanish kings. He changed the subject. ‘Why don’t you show us a dance?’ he demanded, thinking that he would like to see her move. ‘Or is that not allowed in Spain either?’