Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (8 page)

He hesitated. “Can’t you just go in that?”

Catalina laughed. “This is velvet and silk. I can’t ride in it. And besides, I can’t gallop around England looking like a mummer.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, shall you go in your litter, then? Won’t it make us very slow?”

“I am sorry for that, but I am ordered to travel in a litter,” she said. “With the curtains drawn. I can’t think that even your father would want me to charge around the country with my skirts tucked up.”

“Of course the princess cannot ride today,” the Duke of Buckingham ruled. “As I told you. She has to go in her litter.”

Harry shrugged. “Well, I didn’t know. Nobody told me what you were going to wear. Can I go ahead, then? My horses will be so much faster than the mules.”

“You can ride ahead but not out of sight,” Catalina decided. “Since you are supposed to be escorting me, you should be with me.”

“As I said,” the Duke of Buckingham observed quietly and exchanged a little smile with the princess.

“I’ll wait at every crossroads,” Harry promised. “I am escorting you, remember. And on your wedding day I shall be escorting you again. I have a white suit with gold slashing.”

“How handsome you will look,” she said, and saw him flush with pleasure.

“Oh, I don’t know . . .”

“I am sure everyone will remark what a handsome boy you are,” she said, as he looked pleased.

“Everyone always cheers most loudly for me,” he confided. “And I like to know that the people love me. Father says that the only way to keep a throne is to be beloved by the people. That was King Richard’s mistake, Father says.”

“My mother says that the way to keep the throne is to do God’s work.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly unimpressed. “Well, different countries, I suppose.”

“So we shall travel together,” she said. “I will tell my people that we are ready to move on.”

“I will tell them,” he insisted. “It is me who escorts you. I shall give the orders, and you shall rest in your litter.” He gave one quick sideways glance at her. “When we get to Lambeth Palace, you shall stay in your litter till I come for you. I shall draw back the curtains and take you in, and you should hold my hand.”

“I should like that very much,” she assured him and saw his ready rush of color once again.

He bustled off, and the duke bowed to her with a smile. “He is a very bright boy, very eager,” he said. “You must forgive his enthusiasm. He has been much indulged.”

“His mother’s favorite?” she asked, thinking of her own mother’s adoration for her only son.

“Worse still,” the duke said with a smile. “His mother loves him as she should; but he is the absolute apple of his grandmother’s eye, and it is she who rules the court. Luckily he is a good boy, and well-mannered. He has too good a nature to be spoiled, and the king’s mother tempers her treats with lessons.”

“She is an indulgent woman?” she asked.

He gave a little gulp of laughter. “Only to her son,” he said. “The rest of us find her—er—more majestic than motherly.”

“May we talk again at Lambeth?” Catalina asked, tempted to know more about this household that she was to join.

“At Lambeth and London, I shall be proud to serve you,” the young man said, his eyes warm with admiration. “You must command me as you wish. I shall be your friend in England; you can call on me.”

*     *     *

I must have courage: I am the daughter of a brave woman, and I have prepared for this all my life. When the young duke spoke so kindly to me, there was no need for me to feel like weeping; that was foolish. I must keep my head up and smile. My mother said to me that if I smile, no one will know that I am homesick or afraid. I shall smile and smile however odd things seem.

And though this England seems so strange now, I will become accustomed. I will learn their ways and feel at home here. Their odd ways will become my ways, and the worst things—the things that I utterly cannot bear—those I shall change when I am queen. And anyway, it will be better for me than it was for Isabel, my sister. She was only married a few months and then she had to come home, a widow. Better for me than for
María, who had to follow in Isabel’s footsteps to Portugal, better for me than for Juana, who is sick with love for her husband, Philip. It must be better for me than it was for Juan, my poor brother, who died so soon after finding happiness. And always better for me than for my mother, whose childhood was lived on a knife edge.

My story won’t be like hers, of course. I have been born to less exciting times. I shall hope to make terms with my husband, Arthur, and with his odd, loud father, and with his sweet little braggart brother. I shall hope that his mother and his grandmother will love me or at the very least teach me how to be a Princess of Wales, a Queen of England. I shall not have to ride in desperate dashes by night from one besieged fortress to another as my mother did. I shall not have to pawn my own jewels to pay mercenary soldiers, as she did. I shall not have to ride out in my own armor to rally my troops. I shall not be threatened by the wicked French on one side and the heretic Moors on the other, as my mother was. I shall marry Arthur, and when his father dies—which must be soon, for he is so very old and so very bad-tempered—then we shall be King and Queen of England, and my mother will rule in Spain as I rule in England and she will see me keep England in alliance with Spain as I have promised her. She will see me hold my country in an unbreakable treaty with hers; she will see I shall be safe forever.

London, 14th November 1501

O
N THE MORNING OF HER WEDDING DAY
Catalina was called early; but she had been awake for hours, stirring as soon as the cold, wintry sun had started to light the pale sky. They had prepared a great bath—her ladies told her that the English were amazed that she was going to wash before her wedding day and that most of them thought that she was risking her life. Catalina, brought up in the Alhambra, where the bathhouses were the most beautiful suite of rooms in the palace, centers of gossip, laughter, and scented water, was equally amazed to hear that the English thought it perfectly adequate to bathe only occasionally and that the poor people would bathe only once a year.

She had already realized that the scent of musk and ambergris which had wafted in with the king and Prince Arthur had underlying notes of sweat and horse, and that she would live for the rest of her life among people who did not change their underwear from one year to the next. She had seen it as another thing that she must learn to endure, as an angel from heaven endures the privations of earth. She had come from al-Yanna—the garden, the paradise—to the ordinary world. She had come from the Alhambra Palace to England; she had anticipated some disagreeable changes.

“I suppose it is always so cold that it does not matter,” she said uncertainly to Doña Elvira.

“It matters to us,” the duenna said. “And you shall bathe like an Infanta of Spain though all the cooks in the kitchen have had to stop what they are doing to boil up water.”

Doña Elvira had commanded a great tureen from the flesh kitchen which was usually deployed to scald beast carcasses, had it scoured by three scullions, lined it with linen sheets and filled it to the brim with hot water scattered with rose petals and scented with oil of roses brought from Spain. She lovingly supervised the washing of Catalina’s long white
limbs, the manicuring of her toes, the filing of her fingernails, the brushing of her teeth, and finally the three-rinse washing of her hair. Time after time, the incredulous English maids toiled to the door to receive another ewer of hot water from exhausted page boys and tipped it in the tub to keep the temperature of the bath hot.

“If only we had a proper bathhouse,” Doña Elvira mourned, “with steam and a tepidarium and a proper clean marble floor! Hot water on tap and somewhere for you to sit and be properly scrubbed.”

“Don’t fuss,” Catalina said dreamily as they helped her from the bath and patted her all over with scented towels. One maid took her hair, squeezed out the water, and rubbed it gently with red silk soaked in oil to give it shine and color.

“Your mother would be so proud of you,” Doña Elvira said as they led the Infanta towards her wardrobe and started to dress her in the layer after layer of shifts and gowns. “Pull that lace tighter, girl, so that the skirt lies flat. This is her day as well as yours, Catalina. She said that you would marry him whatever it cost her.”

*     *     *

Yes, but she did not pay the greatest price. I know they bought me this wedding with a king’s ransom for my dowry, and I know that they endured long and hard negotiations, and I survived the worst voyage anyone has ever taken, but there was another price paid that we never speak of—wasn’t there? And the thought of that price is in my mind today, as it has been on the journey, as it was on the voyage, as it has been ever since I first heard of it.

There was a man of only twenty-four years old, Edward Plantagenet, the Duke of Warwick and a son of the Kings of England, with—truth be told—a better claim to the throne of England than that of my father-in-law. He was a prince, nephew to the king, and of blood royal. He committed no crime, he did nothing wrong, but he was arrested for my sake, taken to the Tower for my benefit, and finally killed, beheaded on the block, for my gain, so that my parents could be satisfied that there were no pretenders to the throne that they had bought for me.

My father himself told King Henry himself that he would not send me to England while the Duke of Warwick was alive, and so I am like Death himself, carrying the scythe. When they ordered the ship for me to come to England, Warwick was a dead man.

They say he was a simpleton. He did not really understand that he was
under arrest, he thought that he was housed in the Tower as a way of giving him honor. He knew he was the last of the Plantagenet princes, and he knew that the Tower has always been royal lodgings as well as a prison. When they put a pretender, a cunning man who had tried to pass himself off as a royal prince, into the room next door to poor Warwick, he thought it was for company. When the other man invited him to escape, he thought it was a clever thing to do, and, like the innocent he was, he whispered of their plans where his guards could hear. That gave them the excuse they needed for a charge of treason. They trapped him very easily; they beheaded him with little protest from anyone.

The country wants peace and the security of an unchallenged king. The country will wink at a dead claimant or two. I am expected to wink at it also. Especially as it is done for my benefit. It was done at my father’s request, for me. To make my way smooth.

When they told me that he was dead, I said nothing, for I am an Infanta of Spain. Before anything else, I am my mother’s daughter. I do not weep like a girl and tell all the world my every thought. But when I was alone in the gardens of the Alhambra in the evening with the sun going down and leaving the world cool and sweet, I walked beside a long canal of still water, hidden by the trees, and I thought that I would never walk in the shade of trees again and enjoy the flicker of hot sunshine through cool green leaves without thinking that Edward, Duke of Warwick, will see the sun no more, so that I might live my life in wealth and luxury. I prayed then that I might be forgiven for the death of an innocent man.

My mother and father have fought down the length of Castile and Aragon, have ridden the breadth of Spain to make justice run in every village, in the smallest of hamlets—so that no Spaniard can lose his life on the whim of another. Even the greatest lords cannot murder a peasant; they have to be ruled by the law. But when it came to England and to me, they forgot this. They forgot that we live in a palace where the walls are engraved with the promise: “Enter and ask. Do not be afraid to seek justice for here you will find it.” They just wrote to King Henry and said that they would not send me until Warwick was dead, and in a moment, at their expressed wish, Warwick was killed.

And sometimes—when I do not remember to be Infanta of Spain nor Princess of Wales but just the Catalina who walked behind her mother through the great gate into the Alhambra Palace and knew that her mother was the greatest power the world had ever known—sometimes I wonder
childishly if my mother has not made a great mistake. If she has not driven God’s will too far. Farther even than God would want? For this wedding is launched in blood and sails in a sea of innocent blood. How can such a wedding ever be the start of a good marriage? Must it not—as night follows sunset—be tragic and bloody too? How can any happiness ever come to Prince Arthur and to me that has been bought at such a terrible price? And if we could be happy, would it not be an utterly sinfully selfish joy?

*     *     *

Prince Harry, the ten-year-old Duke of York, was so proud of his white taffeta suit that he scarcely glanced at Catalina until they were at the west doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and then he turned and stared, trying to see her face through the exquisite lace of the white mantilla. Ahead of them stretched a raised pathway, lined with red cloth, studded with golden nails, running at head height from the great doorway of the church where the citizens of London crowded to get a better view, up the long aisle to the altar where Prince Arthur stood, pale with nerves, six hundred slow ceremonial paces away.

Catalina smiled at the young boy at her side, and he beamed with delight. Her hand was steady on his proffered arm. He paused for a moment more, until everyone in the enormous church realized that the bride and prince were at the doorway, waiting to make their entrance, a hush fell, everyone craned to see the bride, and then, at the precise, most theatrical moment, he led her forwards.

Catalina felt the congregation murmur around her feet as she went past them, high on the stage that King Henry had ordered to be built so that everyone should see the flower of Spain meet the rosebush of England. The prince turned as she came towards him, but was blinded for a moment by irritation at the sight of his brother, leading the princess as if he himself were the bridegroom, glancing around as he walked, acknowledging the doffing of caps and the whispering of curtseys with his smug little smile, as if it were him that everyone had come to see.