Philippa Gregory - The Constant Princess

“Does your father not comfort her?”

“Yes,” she said uncertainly. “But he is often away from her. And anyway, I should like to be with her. But you must know how I feel. Didn’t you miss your mother when you were first sent away? And your father and your sisters and your brother?”

“I miss my sisters but not my brother,” he said so decidedly that she had to laugh.

“Why not? I thought he was such fun.”

“He is a braggart,” Arthur said irritably. “He is always pushing himself forwards. Look at our wedding—he had to be at the center of the stage all the time. Look at our wedding feast when he had to dance so that all eyes were on him. Pulling Margaret up to dance and making a performance of himself.”

“Oh no! It was just that your father told him to dance, and he was merry. He’s just a boy.”

“He wants to be a man. He tries to be a man, he makes a fool of all of us when he tries. And nobody ever checks him! Did you not see how he looked at you?”

“I saw nothing at all,” she said truthfully. “It was all a blur for me.”

“He fancies himself in love with you, and dreamed that he was walking you up the aisle on his own account.”

She laughed. “Oh! How silly!”

“He’s always been like that,” he said resentfully. “And because he is the favorite of everyone he is allowed to say and do exactly as he wants. I have to learn the law, and languages, and I have to live here and prepare myself for the crown; but Harry stays at Greenwich or Whitehall at the center of court as if he were an ambassador; not an heir who should be trained. He has to have a horse when I have a horse—though I had been kept on a steady palfrey for years. He has a falcon when I have my first falcon—nobody makes him train a kestrel and then a goshawk for year after year, then he has to have my tutor and tries to outstrip me, tries to outshine me whenever he can and always takes the eye.”

Catalina saw he was genuinely irritated. “But he is only a second son,” she observed.

“He is everyone’s favorite,” Arthur said glumly. “He has everything for the asking and everything comes easily to him.”

“He is not the Prince of Wales,” she pointed out. “He may be liked, but he is not important. He only stays at court because he is not important enough to be sent here. He does not have his own Principality. Your father will have plans for him. He will probably be married and sent away. A second son is no more important than a daughter.”

“He is to go into the church,” he said. “He is to be a priest. Who would marry him? So he will be in England forever. I daresay I shall have to endure him as my archbishop, if he does not manage to make himself pope.”

Catalina laughed at the thought of the flushed-faced blond, bright boy as pope. “How grand we shall all be when we are grown up,” she said. “You and me, King and Queen of England, and Harry, archbishop; perhaps even a cardinal.”

“Harry won’t ever grow up,” he insisted. “He will always be a selfish boy. And because my grandmother—and my father—have always given him whatever he wanted, just for the asking, he will be a greedy, difficult boy.”

“Perhaps he will change,” she said. “When my oldest sister, poor Isabel, went away to Portugal the first time, you would have thought her the vainest, most worldly girl you could imagine. But when her husband died and she came home she cared for nothing but to go into a convent. Her heart was quite broken.”

“Nobody will break Harry’s heart,” his older brother asserted. “He hasn’t got one.”

“You’d have thought the same of Isabel,” Catalina argued. “But she fell in love with her husband on her wedding day and she said she would never love again. She had to marry for the second time, of course. But she married unwillingly.”

“And did you?” he asked, his mood suddenly changing.

“Did I what? Marry unwillingly?”

“No! Fall in love with your husband on your wedding day?”

“Certainly not on my wedding day,” she said. “Talk about a boastful boy! Harry is nothing to you! I heard you tell them all the next morning that having a wife was very good sport.”

Arthur had the grace to look abashed. “I may have said something in jest.”

“That you had been in Spain all night?”

“Oh, Catalina. Forgive me. I knew nothing. You are right, I was a boy. But I am a man now, your husband. And you did fall in love with your husband. So don’t deny it.”

“Not for days and days,” she said dampeningly. “It was not love at first sight at all.”

“I know when it was, so you can’t tease me. It was the evening at Burford when you had been crying and I kissed you for the first time properly, and I wiped your tears away with my sleeves. And then that night I came to you, and the house was so quiet that it was as if we were the only people alive in the whole world.”

She snuggled closer into his arms. “And I told you my first story,” she said. “But do you remember what it was?”

“It was the story of the fire at Santa Fe,” he said. “When the luck was against the Spanish for once.”

She nodded. “Normally, it was us who brought fire and the sword. My father has a reputation of being merciless.”

“Your father was merciless? Though it was land he was claiming for his own? How did he hope to bring the people to his will?”

“By fear,” she said simply. “And anyway, it was not his will. It was God’s will, and sometimes God is merciless. This was not an ordinary war, it was a crusade. Crusades are cruel.”

He nodded.

“They had a song about my father’s advance. The Moors had a song.”

She threw back her head and in a haunting low voice translating the words into French, she sang to him:

“Riders gallop through the Elvira gate, up to the Alhambra,

Fearful tidings they bring the king.

Ferdinand himself leads an army, flower of Spain,

Along the banks of the Jenil; with him comes

Isabel, Queen with the heart of a man.”

Arthur was delighted. “Sing it again!”

She laughed and sang again.

“And they really called her that: ‘Queen with the heart of a man’?”

“Father says that when she was in camp it was better than two battalions for strengthening our troops and frightening the Moors. In all the battles they fought, she was never defeated. The army never lost a battle when she was there.”

“To be a king like that! To have them write songs about you.”

“I know,” Catalina said. “To have a legend for a mother! It’s not surprising I miss her. In those days she was never afraid of anything. When the fire would have destroyed us, she was not afraid then. Not of the flames in the night and not of defeat. Even when my father and all the advisors agreed that we would have to pull back to Toledo and rearm, come again next year, my mother said no.”

“Does she argue with him in public?” Arthur asked, fascinated at the thought of a wife who was not a subject.

“She does not exactly argue,” she said thoughtfully. “She would never contradict him or disrespect him. But he knows very well when she doesn’t agree with him. And mostly, they do it her way.”

He shook his head.

“I know what you’re thinking, a wife should obey. She would say so herself. But the difficulty is that she’s always right,” said her daughter. “All the times I can think of, whenever it has been a great question as to whether the army should go on, or whether something can be done. It’s as if God advises her, it really is: she knows best what should be done. Even Father knows that she knows best.”

“She must be an extraordinary woman.”

“She is queen,” Catalina said simply. “Queen in her own right. Not a mere queen by marriage, not a commoner raised to be queen. She was born a princess of Spain like me. Born to be a queen. Saved by God from the most terrible dangers to be Queen of Spain. What else should she do but command her kingdom?”