Philippa Gregory - The Constant Princess

I should give thanks for Arthur, but I dare not even think of him when I am on my knees to God. I cannot think of him without the sin of desire. The very image of him in my mind is a deep secret, a pagan pleasure. I am certain that this is not the holy joy of matrimony. Such intense pleasure must be a sin. Such dark, deep desire and satisfaction cannot be the pure conception of a little prince that is the whole point and purpose of this marriage. We were put to bed by an archbishop, but our passionate coupling is as animal as a pair of sun-warmed snakes twisted all around in their pleasure. I keep my joy in Arthur a secret from everyone, even from God.

I could not confide in anyone, even if I wanted to. We are expressly forbidden from being together as we wish. His grandmother, My Lady the King’s Mother, has ordered this, as she orders everything, even everything here in the Welsh Marches. She has said that he should come to my room once a week every week, except for the time of my courses, he should arrive before ten of the clock and leave by six. We obey her, of course—everybody obeys her. Once a week, as she has commanded, he comes through the great hall, like a young man reluctantly obedient, and in the morning he leaves me in silence and goes quietly away as a young man who has done his duty, not one that has been awake all night in breathless delight. He never boasts of pleasure; when they come to fetch him from my chamber he says nothing, nobody knows the joy we take in each other’s passion. No one will ever know that we are together every night. We meet on the battlements which run from his rooms to mine at the very top of the castle, gray-blue sky arching above us, and we consort like lovers in secret. Concealed by the night, we go to my room, or to his, and we make a private world together, filled with hidden joy.

Even in this crowded small castle filled with busybodies and the king’s mother’s spies, nobody knows that we are together, and nobody knows how much we are in love.

After Mass the royal pair went to break their fast in their separate rooms, though they would rather have been together. Ludlow Castle was a small reproduction of the formality of the king’s court. The king’s mother had commanded that after breakfast Arthur must work with his tutor at his books or at sports as the weather allowed; and Catalina must work with her tutor, sew, or read, or walk in the garden.

“A garden!” Catalina whispered under her breath in the little patch of green with the sodden turf bench on one side of a thin border, set in the corner of the castle walls. “I wonder if she has ever seen a real garden.”

In the afternoon they might ride out together to hunt in the woods around the castle. It was a rich countryside, the river fast-flowing through a wide valley with old, thick woodlands on the sides of the hills. Catalina thought she would grow to love the pasturelands around the River Teme and, on the horizon, the way the darkness of the hills gave way to the sky. But in the midwinter weather it was a landscape of gray and white, only the frost or the snow bringing brightness to the blackness of the cold woods. The weather was often too bad for the princess to go out at all. She hated the damp fog or when it drizzled with icy sleet. Arthur often rode alone.

“Even if I stayed behind I would not be allowed to be with you,” he said mournfully. “My grandmother would have set me something else to do.”

“So go!” she said, smiling, though it seemed a long, long time until dinner and she had nothing to do but to wait for the hunt to come home.

They went out into the town once a week, to go to St. Laurence’s Church for Mass or to visit the little chapel by the castle wall, to attend a dinner organized by one of the great guilds or to see a cockfight, a bull baiting, or players. Catalina was impressed by the neat prettiness of the town; the place had escaped the violence of the wars between York and Lancaster that had finally been ended by Henry Tudor.

“Peace is everything to a kingdom,” she observed to Arthur.

“The only thing that can threaten us now is the Scots,” he said. “The Yorkist line are my forebears, the Lancasters too, so the rivalry ends with me. All we have to do is keep the north safe.”

“And your father thinks he has done that with Princess Margaret’s marriage?”

“Pray God he is right, but they are a faithless lot. When I am king, I shall keep the border strong. You shall advise me. We’ll go out together and make sure the border castles are repaired.”

“I shall like that,” she said.

“Of course, you spent your childhood with an army fighting for borderlands; you would know better than I what to look for.”

She smiled. “I am glad it is a skill of mine that you can use. My father always complained that my mother was making Amazons, not princesses.”

They dined together at dusk, and, thankfully, dusk came very early on those cold winter nights. At last they could be close, seated side by side at the high table looking down the hall of the castle, the great hearth heaped with logs on the side wall. Arthur always put Catalina on his left, closest to the fire, and she wore a cloak lined with fur and had layer upon layer of linen shifts under her ornate gown. Even so, she was still cold when she came down the icy stairs from her warm rooms to the smoky hall. Her Spanish ladies—María de Salinas; her duenna, Doña Elvira; and a few others—were seated at one table, the English ladies who were supposed to be her companions at another, and her retinue of Spanish servants were seated at another. The great lords of Arthur’s council—his chamberlain, Sir Richard Pole; warden of the castle, Bishop William Smith of Lincoln; his physician, Dr. Bereworth; his treasurer, Sir Henry Vernon; the steward of his household, Sir Richard Croft; his groom of the privy chamber, Sir William Thomas of Carmarthen—and all the leading men of the principality were seated in the body of the hall. At the back and in the gallery every nosy parker, every busybody in Wales could pile in to see the Spanish princess take her dinner and speculate if she pleased the young prince or no.

There was no way to tell. Most of them thought that he had failed to bed her. For see! The Infanta sat like a stiff little doll and leaned towards her young husband. The Prince of Wales spoke to her as if by rote, every ten minutes. They were little patterns of good behavior, and they scarcely even looked at each other. The gossips said that he went to her rooms as ordered, but only once a week and never of his own choice. Perhaps the young couple did not please each other. They were young, perhaps too young for marriage.

No one could tell that Catalina’s hands were gripped tight in her lap to stop herself from touching her husband, nor that every half hour or so he glanced at her, apparently indifferent, and whispered so low that only she could hear: “I want you right now.”

After dinner there would be dancing and perhaps mummers or a storyteller, a Welsh bard or strolling players to watch. Sometimes the poets would come in from the high hills and tell old, strange tales in their own tongue that Arthur could follow only with difficulty, but which he would try to translate for Catalina.

“When the long yellow summer comes and victory comes to us,

And the spreading of the sails of Brittany,

And when the heat comes and when the fever is kindled,

There are portents that victory will be given to us.”

“What is that about?” she asked him.

“The long yellow summer is when my father decided to invade from Brittany. His road took him to Bosworth and victory.”

She nodded.

“It was hot, that year, and the troops came with the Sweat, a new disease, which now curses England as it does Europe with the heat of every summer.”