Philippa Gregory - The Constant Princess

She nodded again. A new poet came forwards, played a chord on his harp, and sang.

“And this?”

“It’s about a red dragon that flies over the principality,” he said. “It kills the boar.”

“What does it mean?” Catalina asked.

“The dragon is the Tudors: us,” he said. “You’ll have seen the red dragon on our standard. The boar is the usurper, Richard. It’s a compliment to my father based on an old tale. All their songs are ancient songs. They probably sang them in the ark.” He grinned. “Songs of Noah.”

“Do they give you Tudors credit for surviving the Flood? Was Noah a Tudor?”

“Probably. My grandmother would take credit for the Garden of Eden itself,” he returned. “This is the Welsh border. We come from Owen ap Tudor, from Glendower. We are happy to take the credit for everything.”

As Arthur predicted, when the fire burned low they would sing the old Welsh songs of magical doings in dark woods that no man could know. And they would tell of battles and glorious victories won by skill and courage. In their strange tongue they would tell stories of Arthur and Camelot, and Merlin the prince, and Guinevere: the queen who betrayed her husband for a guilty love.

“I should die if you took a lover,” he whispered to her as a page shielded them from the hall and poured wine.

“I can never even see anyone else when you are here,” she assured him. “All I see is you.”

Every evening there was music or some entertainment for the Ludlow court. The king’s mother had ruled that the prince should keep a merry house—it was a reward for the loyalty of Wales that had put her son Henry Tudor on an uncertain throne. Her grandson must repay the men who had come out of the hills to fight for the Tudors and remind them that he was a Welsh prince and that he would go on counting on their support to rule the English, whom no one could count on at all. The Welsh must join with England, and together the two of them could keep out the Scots, and manage the Irish.

When the musicians played the slow, formal dances of Spain, Catalina would dance with one of her ladies, conscious of Arthur’s gaze on her, keeping her face prim, like a little mummer’s mask of respectability, though she longed to twirl around and swing her hips like a woman in the seraglio, like a Moorish slave girl dancing for a sultan. But My Lady the King’s Mother’s spies watched everything, even in Ludlow, and would be quick to report any indiscreet behavior by the young princess. Sometimes Catalina would slide a glance at her husband and see his eyes on her, his look that of a man in love. She would snap her fingers as if part of the dance, but in fact to warn him that he was staring at her in a way that his grandmother would not like, and he would turn aside and speak to someone, tearing his gaze away from her.

Even after the music was over and the entertainers gone away, the young couple could not be alone. There were always men who sought council with Arthur, who wanted favors or land or influence, and they would approach him and talk low-voiced, in English, which Catalina did not yet fully understand, or in Welsh, which she thought no one could ever understand. The rule of law barely ran in the borderlands, each landowner was like a warlord in his own domain. Deeper in the mountains there were people who still thought that Richard was on the throne, who knew nothing of the changed world, who spoke no English, who obeyed no laws at all.

Arthur argued, and praised, and suggested that feuds should be forgiven, that trespasses should be made good, that the proud Welsh chieftains should work together to make their land as prosperous as their neighbor England, instead of wasting their time in envy. The valleys and coastal lands were dominated by a dozen petty lords, and in the high hills the men ran in clans like wild tribes. Slowly, Arthur was determined to make the law run throughout the land.

“Every man has to know that the law is greater than his lord,” Catalina said. “That is what the Moors did in Spain, and my mother and father followed them. The Moors did not trouble themselves to change people’s religions nor their language; they just brought peace and prosperity and imposed the rule of law.”

“Half of my lords would think that was heresy,” he teased her. “And your mother and father are now imposing their religion: they have driven out the Jews already, the Moors will be next.”

She frowned. “I know,” she said. “And there is much suffering. But their intention was to allow people to practice their own religion. When they won Granada that was their promise.”

“D’you not think that to make one country, the people must always be of one faith?” he asked.

“Heretics can live like that,” she said decidedly. “In al Andalus the Moors and Christians and Jews lived in peace and friendship alongside one another. But if you are a Christian king, it is your duty to bring your subjects to God.”

Catalina would watch Arthur as he talked with one man and then another, and then, at a sign from Doña Elvira, she would curtsey to her husband and withdraw from the hall. She would read her evening prayers, change into her robe for the night, sit with her ladies, go to her bedroom and wait, and wait and wait.

“You can go, I shall sleep alone tonight,” she said to Doña Elvira.

“Again?” The duenna frowned. “You have not had a bed companion since we came to the castle. What if you wake in the night and need some service?”

“I sleep better with no one else in the room,” Catalina would say. “You can leave me now.”

The duenna and the ladies would bid her good night and leave; the maids would come and unlace her bodice, unpin her headdress, untie her shoes, and pull off her stockings. They would hold out her warmed linen nightgown and she would ask for her cape and say she would sit by the fire for a few moments, and then send them away.

In the silence, as the castle settled for the night, she would wait for him. Then, at last she would hear the quiet sound of his footfall at the outer door of her room, where it opened onto the battlements that ran between his tower and hers. She would fly to the door and unbolt it, he would be pink-cheeked from the cold, his cape thrown over his own nightshirt as he tumbled in, the cold wind blowing in with him as she threw herself into his arms.

“Tell me a story.”

“Which story tonight?”

“Tell me about your family.”

“Shall I tell you about my mother when she was a girl?”

“Oh yes. Was she a princess of Castile like you?”

Catalina shook her head. “No, not at all. She was not protected or safe. She lived in the court of her brother, her father was dead, and her brother did not love her as he should. He knew that she was his only true heir. He favored his daughter; but everyone knew that she was a bastard, palmed off on him by his queen. She was even nicknamed by the name of the queen’s lover. They called her La Beltraneja after her father. Can you think of anything more shameful?”

Arthur obediently shook his head. “Nothing.”

“My mother was all but a prisoner at her brother’s court; the queen hated her, of course, the courtiers were unfriendly, and her brother was plotting to disinherit her. Even their own mother could not make him see reason.”

“Why not?” he asked, and then caught her hand when he saw the shadow cross her face. “Ah, love, I am sorry. What is the matter?”

“Her mother was sick,” she said. “Sick with sadness. I don’t understand quite why, or why it was so very bad. But she could hardly speak or move. She could only cry.”

“So your mother had no protector?”

“No, and then the king her brother ordered that she should be betrothed to Don Pedro Girón.” She sat up a little and clasped her hands around her knees. “They said he had sold his soul to the devil, a most wicked man. My mother swore that she would offer her soul to God and God would save her, a virgin, from such a fate. She said that surely no merciful God would take a girl like her, a princess, who had survived long years in one of the worst courts of Europe, and then throw her at the end into the arms of a man who wanted her ruin, who desired her only because she was young and untouched, who wanted to despoil her.”