Philippa Gregory - The Constant Princess

Then I start to wonder if I might go home for a short visit on my own. I cannot bear to be without Arthur for even a night, but then I think that unless I go to Spain alone I will never see my mother again, and the thought of that, never feeling the touch of her hand on my hair or seeing her smile at me—I don’t know how I would bear to never see her again.

I am glad and proud to be Princess of Wales and the Queen of England-to-be, but I did not think, I did not realize—I know, how silly this is of me—but I did not quite understand that it would mean that I would live here forever, that I would never come home again. Somehow, although I knew I would be married to the Prince of Wales and one day be Queen of England, I did not fully understand that this would be my home now and forever and that I may never see my mother or my father or my home again.

I expected at least that we would write, I thought I would hear from her often. But it is as she was with Isabel, with María, with Juana; she sends instructions through the ambassador, I have my orders as a princess of Spain. But as a mother to her daughter, I hear from her only rarely.

I don’t know how to bear it. I never thought such a thing could happen. My sister Isabel came home to us after she was widowed, though she married again and had to leave again. And Juana writes to me that she will go home on a visit with her husband. It isn’t fair that she should go and I not be allowed to. I am only just sixteen. I am not ready to live without my mother’s advice. I am not old enough to live without a mother. I look for her every day to tell me what I should do—and she is not there.

My husband’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, is a cipher in her own household. She cannot be a mother to me, she cannot command her own time, how should she advise me? It is the king’s mother, Lady Margaret, who rules everything; and she is a most well-thought-of, hardhearted woman. She cannot be a mother to me, she couldn’t be a mother to anyone. She worships her son because thanks to him she is the mother of the king; but she does not love him, she has no tenderness. She does not even love Arthur and if a woman could not love him she must be utterly without a heart. Actually, I am quite sure that she dislikes me, though I don’t know why she should.

And anyway, I am sure my mother must miss me as I miss her? Surely, very soon, she will write to the king and ask him if I can come home for a visit? Before it gets much colder here? And it is terribly cold and wet already. I am sure I cannot stay here all the long winter. I am sure I will beill. I am sure she must want me to come home….

Catalina, seated at the table before the window, trying to catch the failing light of a gray February afternoon, took up her letter, asking her mother if she could come for a visit to Spain, and tore it gently in half and then in half again and fed the pieces into the fire in her room. It was not the first letter she had written to her mother asking to come home, but—like the others—it would never be sent. She would not betray her mother’s training by turning tail and running from gray skies and cold rain and people whose language no one could ever understand and whose joys and sorrows were a mystery.

She was not to know that even if she had sent the letter to the Spanish ambassador in London, then that wily diplomat would have opened it, read it, and torn it up himself, and then reported the whole to the King of England. Rodrigo Gonsalvi de Puebla knew, though Catalina did not yet understand, that her marriage had forged an alliance between the emerging power of Spain and the emerging power of England against the emerging power of France. No homesick princess wanting her mother would be allowed to unbalance that.

“Tell me a story.”

“I am like Scheherazade, you want a thousand stories from me.”

“Oh yes!” he said. “I will have a thousand and one stories. How many have you told me already?”

“I have told you a story every night since we were together, that first night, at Burford,” she said.

“Forty-nine days,” he said.

“Only forty-nine stories. If I were Scheherazade I would have nine hundred and fifty-two to go.”

He smiled at her. “Do you know, Catalina, I have been happier in these forty-nine days than ever in my life before?”

She took his hand and put it to her lips.

“And the nights!”

Her eyes darkened with desire. “Yes, the nights,” she said quietly.

“I long for every nine hundred and fifty-two more,” he said. “And then I will have another thousand after that.”

“And a thousand after that?”

“And a thousand after that forever and ever until we are both dead.”

She smiled. “Pray God we have long years together,” she said tenderly.

“So what will you tell me tonight?”

She thought. “I shall tell you of a Moor’s poem.”

Arthur settled back against the pillows as she leaned forwards and fixed her blue gaze on the curtains of the bed, as if she could see beyond them, to somewhere else.

“He was born in the deserts of Arabia,” she explained. “So when he came to Spain he missed everything about his home. He wrote this poem.

“A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa,

Born in the west, far from the land of palms.

I said to it: How like me you are, far away and in exile

In long separation from your family and friends.

You have sprung from soil in which you are a stranger

And I, like you, am far from home.”

He was silent, taking in the simplicity of the poem. “It is not like our poetry,” he said.

“No,” she replied quietly. “They are a people who have a great love of words, they love to say a true thing simply.”

He opened his arms to her and she slid alongside him so that they were lying, thigh to thigh, side to side. He touched her face, her cheek was wet.

“Oh my love! Tears?”

She said nothing.

“I know that you miss your home,” he said softly, taking her hand in his and kissing the fingertips. “But you will become accustomed to your life here, to your thousand thousand days here.”

“I am happy with you,” Catalina said quickly. “It is just…” Her voice trailed away. “My mother,” she said, her voice very small. “I miss her. And I worry about her. Because…I am the youngest, you see. And she kept me with her as long as she could.”

“She knew you would have to leave.”

“She’s been much…tried. She lost her son, my brother, Juan, and he was our only heir. It is so terrible to lose a prince, you cannot imagine how terrible it is to lose a prince. It is not just the loss of him but the loss of everything that might have been. His life has gone, but his reign and his future have gone too. His wife will no longer be queen, everything that he hoped for will not happen. And then the next heir, little Miguel, died at only two years old. He was all we had left of my sister Isabel, his mother, and then it pleased God to take him from us too. Poor María died far away from us in Portugal, she went away to be married and we never saw her again. It was natural that my mother kept me with her for comfort. I was her last child to leave home. And now I don’t know how she will manage without me.”

Arthur put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. “God will comfort her.”

“She will be so lonely,” she said in a little voice.

“Surely she, of all women in the world, feels God’s comfort?”

“I don’t think she always does,” Catalina said. “Her own mother was tormented by sadness, you know. Many of the women of our family can get quite sick with sorrow. I know that my mother fears sinking into sadness just like her mother: a woman who saw things so darkly that she would rather have been blind. I know she fears that she will never be happy again. I know that she liked to have me with her so that I could make her happy. She said that I was a child born for joy, that she could tell that I would always be happy.”