Philippa Gregory - The Constant Princess

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.