Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (20 page)

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us. This is worse than if it was his mistress. I knew I would have to face her one day. This is her home, but she was away when we got here and I thought she had deliberately snubbed me by being away and staying away. I thought she was avoiding me out of hatred, as I would avoid her from shame. Lady Margaret Pole is sister to that poor boy, the Duke of Warwick, beheaded to make the succession safe for me, and for my line. I have been dreading the moment when I would have to meet her. I have been praying to the saints that she would stay away, hating me, blaming me, but keeping her distance.

Arthur saw her quick gesture of rejection, but he had known of no way to prepare her for this. ‘Please,’ he said hurriedly. ‘She has been away caring for her children or she would have been here with her husband to welcome you to the castle when we first arrived. I told you she would return. She wants to greet you now. We all have to live together here. Sir Richard is a trusted friend of my father, the lord of my council and the warden of this castle. We will all have to live together.’

Catalina put out a shaking hand to him and at once he came closer, ignoring the fascinated attention of her ladies.

‘I cannot meet her,’ she whispered. ‘Truly, I can’t. I know that her brother was put to death for my sake. I know my parents insisted on it, before they would send me to England. I know he was innocent, innocent as a flower, kept in the Tower by your father so that men should not gather round him and claim the throne in his name. He could have lived there in safety all his life but for my parents demanding his death. She must hate me.’

‘She doesn’t hate you,’ he said truthfully. ‘Believe me, Catalina, I would not expose you to anyone’s unkindness. She does not hate you, she doesn’t hate me, she doesn’t even hate my father who ordered the execution. She knows that these things happen. She is a princess, she knows as well as you do that it is not choice but policy that governs us. It was not your choice, nor mine. She knows that your father and mother had to be sure that there were no rival princes to claim the throne, that my father would clear my way, whatever it cost him. She is resigned.’

‘Resigned?’ she gasped incredulously. ‘How can a woman be resigned to the murder of her brother, the heir of the family? How can she greet me with friendship when he died for my convenience? When we lost my brother our world ended, our hopes died with him. Our future was buried with him. My mother, who is a living saint, still cannot bear it. She has not been happy since the day of his death. It is unbearable to her. If he had been executed for some
stranger I swear she would have taken a life in return. How could Lady Margaret lose her brother and bear it? How can she bear me?’

‘She has resignation,’ he said simply. ‘She is a most spiritual woman and if she looked for reward, she has one in that she is married to Sir Richard Pole, a man most trusted by my father, and she lives here in the highest regard and she is my friend and I hope will be yours.’

He took her hand and felt it tremble. ‘Come, Catalina. This isn’t like you. Be brave, my love. She won’t blame you.’

‘She must blame me,’ she said in an anguished whisper. ‘My parents insisted that there should be no doubt over your inheritance. I know they did. Your own father promised that there would be no rival princes. They knew what he meant to do. They did not tell him to leave an innocent man with his life. They let him do it. They wanted him to do it. Edward Plantagenet’s blood is on my head. Our marriage is under the curse of his death.’

Arthur recoiled, he had never before seen her so distressed. ‘My God, Catalina, you cannot call us accursed.’

She nodded miserably.

‘You have never spoken of this.’

‘I could not bear to say it.’

‘But you have thought it?’

‘From the moment they told me that he was put to death for my sake.’

‘My love, you cannot really think that we are accursed?’

‘In this one thing.’

He tried to laugh off her intensity. ‘No. You must know we are blessed.’ He drew closer and said very quietly, so that no-one else could hear, ‘Every morning when you wake in my arms, do you feel accursed then?’

‘No,’ she said unwillingly. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Every night when I come to your rooms, do you feel the shadow of sin upon you?’

‘No,’ she conceded.

‘We are not cursed,’ he said firmly. ‘We are blessed with God’s favour. Catalina, my love, trust me. She has forgiven my father, she certainly would never blame you. I swear to you, she is a woman with a heart as big as a cathedral. She wants to meet you. Come with me and let me present her to you.’

‘Alone then,’ she said, still fearing some terrible scene.

‘Alone. She is in the castle warden’s rooms now. If you come at once, we can leave them all here, and go quietly by ourselves and see her.’

She rose from her seat and put her hand on the crook of his arm. ‘I am walking alone with the princess,’ Arthur said to her ladies. ‘You can all stay here.’

They looked surprised to be excluded, and some of them were openly disappointed. Catalina went past them without looking up.

Once out of the door he preceded her down the tight spiral staircase, one hand on the central stone post, one on the wall. Catalina followed him, lingering at every deep-set arrowslit window, looking down into the valley where the Teme had burst its banks and was like a silver lake over the water meadows. It was cold, even for March in the Borders, and Catalina shivered as if a stranger was walking on her grave.

‘My love,’ he said, looking back up the narrow stairs towards her. ‘Courage. Your mother would have courage.’

‘She ordered this thing,’ she said crossly. ‘She thought it was for my benefit. But a man died for her ambition, and now I have to face his sister.’

‘She did it for you,’ he reminded her. ‘And nobody blames you.’ They came to the floor below the princess’s suite of rooms and without hesitation, Arthur tapped on the thick wooden door of the warden’s apartments and went in.

The square room overlooking the valley was the match of Catalina’s presence chamber upstairs, panelled with wood and hung
with bright tapestries. There was a lady waiting for them, seated by the fireside, and when the door opened she rose. She was dressed in a pale grey gown with a grey hood on her hair. She was about thirty years of age; she looked at Catalina with friendly interest, and then she sank into a deep, respectful curtsey.

Disobeying the nip of his bride’s fingers, Arthur withdrew his arm and stepped back as far as the doorway. Catalina looked back at him reproachfully and then bobbed a small curtsey to the older woman. They rose up together.

‘I am so pleased to meet you,’ Lady Pole said sweetly. ‘And I am sorry not to have been here to greet you. But one of my children was ill and I went to make sure that he was well nursed.’

‘Your husband has been very kind,’ Catalina managed to say.

‘I hope so, for I left him a long list of commandments; I so wanted your rooms to be warm and comfortable. You must tell me if there is anything you would like. I don’t know Spain, so I didn’t know what things would give you pleasure.’

‘No! It is all…absolutely.’

The older woman looked at the princess. ‘Then I hope you will be very happy here with us,’ she said.

‘I hope to…’ Catalina breathed. ‘But I…I…’

‘Yes?’

‘I was very sorry to hear of the death of your brother.’ Catalina dived in. Her face, which had been white with discomfort, now flushed scarlet. She could feel her ears burning, and to her horror she heard her voice tremble. ‘Indeed, I was very sorry. Very…’

‘It was a great loss to me, and to mine,’ the woman said steadily. ‘But it is the way of the world.’

‘I am afraid that my coming…’

‘I never thought that it was any choice or any fault of yours, Princess. When our dear Prince Arthur was to be married his father was bound to make sure that his inheritance was secured. I know that my brother would never have threatened the peace of the
Tudors, but they were not to know that. And he was ill-advised by a mischievous young man, drawn into some foolish plot…’ She broke off as her voice shook; but rapidly she recovered herself. ‘Forgive me. It still grieves me. He was an innocent, my brother. His silly plotting was proof of his innocence, not of his guilt. There is no doubt in my mind that he is in God’s keeping now, with all innocents.’

She smiled at the princess. ‘In this world, we women often find that we have no power over what men do. I am sure you would have wished my brother no harm, and indeed, I am sure that he would not have stood against you or against our dearest prince here – but it is the way of the world that harsh measures are sometimes taken. My father made some bad choices in his life, and God knows he paid for them in full. His son, though innocent, went the way of his father. A turn of the coin and it could all have been different. I think a woman has to learn to live with the turn of the coin even when it falls against her.’

Catalina was listening intently. ‘I know my mother and father wanted to be sure that the Tudor line was without challenge,’ she breathed. ‘I know that they told the king.’ She felt as if she had to make sure that this woman knew the depth of her guilt.

‘As I might have done if I had been them,’ Lady Margaret said simply. ‘Princess, I do not blame you, nor your mother or father. I do not blame our great king. Were I any one of them, I might have behaved just as they have done, and explained myself only to God. All I have to do, since I am not one of these great people but merely the humble wife to a fine man, is to take care how I behave, and how I will explain myself to God.’

‘I felt that I came to this country with his death on my conscience,’ Catalina admitted in a sudden rush.

The older woman shook her head. ‘His death is not on your conscience,’ she said firmly. ‘And it is wrong to blame yourself for another’s doing. Indeed, I would think your confessor would tell
you: it is a form of pride. Let that be the sin that you confess, you need not take the blame for the sins of others.’

Catalina looked up for the first time and met the steady eyes of Lady Pole, and saw her smile. Cautiously she smiled back, and the older woman stretched out her hand, as a man would offer to shake on a bargain. ‘You see,’ she said pleasantly. ‘I was a Princess Royal myself once. I was the last Plantagenet princess, raised by King Richard in his nursery with his son. Of all the women in the world, I should know that there is more to life than a woman can ever control. There is the will of your husband, and of your parents, and of your king, and of your God. Nobody could blame a princess for the doings of a king. How could one ever challenge it? Or make any difference? Our way has to be obedience.’

Catalina, her hand in the warm, firm grasp, felt wonderfully reassured. ‘I am afraid I am not always very obedient,’ she confessed.

The older woman laughed. ‘Oh yes, for one would be a fool not to think for oneself,’ she allowed. ‘True obedience can only happen when you secretly think you know better, and you choose to bow your head. Anything short of that is just agreement, and any ninny-in-waiting can agree. Don’t you think?’

And Catalina, giggling with an English woman for the first time, laughed aloud and said: ‘I never wanted to be a ninny-in-waiting.’

‘Neither did I,’ gleamed Margaret Pole, who had been a Plantagenet, a Princess Royal and was now a mere wife buried in the fastness of the Tudor Borders. ‘I always know that I am myself, in my heart, whatever title I am given.’

I am so surprised to find that the woman whose presence I have dreaded is making the castle at Ludlow feel like a home for me. Lady Margaret Pole is a companion and friend to comfort me for the loss of my mother and sisters. I realise now that I have always lived in a
world dominated by women: the queen my mother, my sisters, our ladies- and maids-in-waiting, and all the women servants of the seraglio. In the Alhambra we lived almost withdrawn from men, in rooms built for the pleasure and comfort of women. We lived almost in seclusion, in the privacy of the cool rooms, and ran through the courtyards and leaned on the balconies secure in the knowledge that half the palace was exclusively in the ownership of us women.