Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (12 page)

I did not like him very well at first, but I am becoming accustomed to his abrupt speech and his quick ways. He is a man whose word is law in this court and in this land, and he owes thanks to no one for anything, except perhaps his Lady Mother. He has no close friends, no intimates but her and the soldiers who fought with him, who are now the great men of his court. He is not tender to his wife nor warm to his daughters, but I like it that he attends to me. Perhaps I will come to love him as a daughter. Already I am glad when he singles me out. In a court such as this, which revolves around his approval, it makes me feel like a princess indeed when he praises me or spends time with me.

If it were not for him then I think I would be even more lonely than I am. The prince my husband treats me as if I were a table or a chair. He never speaks to me, he never smiles at me, he never starts a conversation; it is all he can do to find a reply. I think I was a fool when I thought he
looked like a troubadour. He looks like a milksop and that is the truth. He never raises his voice above a whisper, he never says anything of any interest. He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say—what good are they? We live as strangers, and if he did not come to my bedchamber at night, once a week as if on duty, I would not know I was married at all.

I show the sapphires to his sister, the Princess Margaret, and she is eaten up with jealousy. I shall have to confess to the sin of vanity and of pride. It is not right for me to flaunt them before her; but if she had ever been kind to me by word or deed, then I would not have shown her. I want her to know that her father values me, even if she and her grandmother and her brother do not. But now all I have done is upset her and put myself in the wrong, and I will have to confess and make a penance.

Worst of all, I did not behave with the dignity that a princess of Spain should always show. If she were not such a fishwife’s apprentice, then I could have been better. This court dances around the king as if nothing matters more in the world than his favor, and I should know better than to join in. At the very least I should not be measuring myself against a girl four years younger than me and only a princess of England, even if she calls herself Queen of Scotland at every opportunity.

*     *     *

The young Prince and Princess of Wales finished their visit to Richmond and started to make their own royal household in Baynard’s Castle. Catalina had her rooms at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens and the river, with her household, her Spanish ladies, her Spanish chaplain, and duenna, and Arthur’s rooms overlooked the City with his household, his chaplain, and his tutor. They met formally only once a day for dinner, when the two households sat at opposite sides of the hall and stared at each other with mutual suspicion, more like enemies in the middle of a forced truce than members of a united home.

The castle was run according to the commands of Lady Margaret, the king’s mother. The feast days and fast days, the entertainments and the daily timetable were all commanded by her. Even the nights when Arthur was to visit his wife in her bedchamber had been appointed by her. She did not want the young people becoming exhausted, nor did she want them neglecting their duties. So once a week the prince’s household and friends solemnly escorted him to the princess’s rooms and left him there overnight. For both young people the experience was
an ordeal of embarrassment. Arthur became no more skilled. Catalina endured his silent determination as politely as she could. But then, one day in early December, Catalina’s monthly course started and she told Doña Elvira. The duenna at once told the prince’s groom of the bedchamber that the prince could not come to the Infanta’s bed for a week; the Infanta was indisposed. Within half an hour, everyone from the king at Whitehall to the spit boy at Baynard’s Castle knew that the Princess of Wales was having her course and so no child had yet been conceived, and everyone from the king to the spit boy wondered, since the girl was lusty and strong and since she was bleeding—obviously fertile—if Arthur was capable of doing his side of their duty.

In the middle of December, when the court was preparing for the great twelve-day feast of Christmas, Arthur was summoned by his father and ordered to prepare to leave for his castle at Ludlow.

“I suppose you’ll want to take your wife with you,” the king said, smiling at his son in an effort to seem unconcerned.

“As you wish, sir,” Arthur replied carefully.

“What would you wish?”

After enduring a week’s ban from Catalina’s bed, with everyone remarking among themselves that no child had been made—but to be sure, it was early days yet, and it might be nobody’s fault—Arthur felt embarrassed and discouraged. He had not gone back to her bedroom, and she had sent no message to invite him. He could not expect an invitation—he knew that was ridiculous—a princess of Spain could hardly send for the prince of England; but she had not smiled or encouraged him in any way at all. He had received no message to tell him to resume his visits, and he had no idea how long these mysteries usually took. There was no one that he could ask, and he did not know what he should do.

“She does not seem very merry,” Arthur observed.

“She’s homesick,” his father said briskly. “It’s up to you to divert her. Take her to Ludlow with you. Buy her things. She’s a girl like any other. Praise her beauty. Tell her jokes. Flirt with her.”

Arthur looked quite blank. “In Latin?”

His father barked his harsh laugh. “Lad. You can do it in Welsh if your eyes are smiling and your cock is hard. She’ll know what you mean. I swear it. She’s a girl who knows well enough what a man means.”

There was no answering brightness from his son. “Yes, sir.”

“If you don’t want her with you, you’re not obliged to take her this year, you know. You were supposed to marry and then spend the first year apart.”

“That was when I was fourteen.”

“Only a year ago.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“So you do want her with you?”

His son flushed. The father regarded the boy with sympathy. “You want her, but you are afraid she will make a fool of you?” he suggested.

The blond head drooped, nodded.

“And you think if you and she are far from court and from me, then she will be able to torment you.”

Another small nod. “And all her ladies. And her duenna.”

“And time will hang heavy on your hands.”

The boy looked up, his face a picture of misery.

“And she will be bored and sulky and she will make your little court at Ludlow a miserable prison for both of you.”

“If she dislikes me . . .” he started, his voice very low.

Henry rested a heavy hand on his boy’s shoulder. “Oh, my son. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of you,” he said. “Perhaps your mother was not my choice, perhaps I was not hers. When a throne is involved the heart comes in second place if it ever matters at all. She knows what she has to do; and that is all that counts.”

“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.”