Philippa Gregory: The Constant Princess

At his father’s side, Prince Arthur swallowed. She was far more beautiful than he had imagined, and a million times more haughty. She was dressed in a gown of dark black velvet, slashed to show an undergown of carnation silk, the neck cut square and low over her plump breasts, hung with ropes of pearls. Her auburn hair, freed from the plait, tumbled down her back in a great wave of red-gold. On her head was a black lace mantilla flung determinedly back. She swept a deep curtsey and came up with her head held high, graceful as a dancer.

“I beg your pardon for not being ready to greet you,” she said in French. “If I had known you were coming, I would have been prepared.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t hear the racket,” the king said. “I was arguing at your door for a good ten minutes.”

“I thought it was a pair of porters brawling,” she said coolly.

Arthur suppressed a gasp of horror at her impertinence, but his father was eyeing her with a smile as if a new filly were showing promising spirit.

“No. It was me, threatening your lady-in-waiting. I am sorry that I had to march in on you.”

She inclined her head. “That was my duenna, Doña Elvira. I am sorry if she displeased you. Her English is not good. She cannot have understood what you wanted.”

“I wanted to see my daughter-in-law, and my son wanted to see his bride, and I expect an English princess to behave like an English princess, and not like some damned sequestered girl in a harem. I thought your parents had beaten the Moors. I didn’t expect to find them set up as your models.”

Catalina ignored the insult with a slight turn of her head. “I am sure that you will teach me good English manners,” she said. “Who better to advise me?” She turned to Prince Arthur and swept him a royal curtsey. “My lord.”

He faltered in his bow in return, amazed at the serenity that she could muster in this most embarrassing of moments. He reached into his jacket for her present, fumbled with the little purse of jewels, dropped them, picked them up again, and finally thrust them towards her, feeling like a fool.

She took them and inclined her head in thanks but did not open them. “Have you dined, Your Grace?”

“We’ll eat here,” he said bluntly. “I ordered dinner already.”

“Then can I offer you a drink? Or somewhere to wash and change your clothes before you dine?” She examined the long, lean length of him consideringly, from the mud spattering his pale, lined face to his dusty boots. The English were a prodigiously dirty nation: not even a great house such as this one had an adequate hammam or even piped water. “Or perhaps you don’t like to wash?”

A harsh chuckle was forced from the king. “You can order me a cup of ale and have them send fresh clothes and hot water to the best bedroom and I’ll change before dinner.” He raised a hand. “You needn’t take it as a compliment to you. I always wash before dinner.”

Arthur saw her nip her lower lip with little white teeth as if to refrain from some sarcastic reply. “Yes, Your Grace,” she said pleasantly. “As you wish.” She summoned her lady-in-waiting to her side and gave her low-voiced orders in rapid Spanish. The woman curtseyed and led the king from the room.

The princess turned to Prince Arthur.

“Et tu?” she asked in Latin. “And you?”

“I? What?” he stammered.

He felt that she was trying not to sigh with impatience.

“Would you like to wash and change your coat also?”

“I’ve washed,” he said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he could have bitten off his own tongue. He sounded like a child being scolded by a nurse, he thought. “I’ve washed,” indeed. What was he going to do next? Hold out his hands palms upwards so that she could see he was a good boy?

“Then will you take a glass of wine? Or ale?”

Catalina turned to the table where the servants were hastily laying cups and flagons.

“Wine.”

She raised a glass and a flagon and the two chinked together, and then chink-chink-chinked again. In amazement, he saw that her hands were trembling.

She poured the wine quickly and held it to him. His gaze went from her hand and the slightly rippled surface of the wine to her pale face.

She was not laughing at him, he saw. She was not at all at ease with him. His father’s rudeness had brought out the pride in her, but alone with him she was just a girl, some months older than he, but still just a girl. The daughter of the two most formidable monarchs in Europe but still just a girl with shaking hands.

“You need not be frightened,” he said very quietly. “I am sorry about all this.”

He meant—your failed attempt to avoid this meeting, my father’s brusque informality, my own inability to stop him or soften him, and, more than anything else, the misery that this business must be for you: coming far from your home among strangers and meeting your new husband, dragged from your bed under protest.

She looked down. He stared at the flawless pallor of her skin, at the fair eyelashes and pale eyebrows.

Then she looked up at him. “It’s all right,” she said. “I have seen far worse than this, I have been in far worse places than this, and I have known worse men than your father. You need not fear for me. I am afraid of nothing.”

No one will ever know what it cost me to smile, what it cost me to stand before your father and not tremble. I am not yet sixteen, I am far from my mother, I am in a strange country, I cannot speak the language, and I know nobody here. I have no friends but the party of companions and servants that I have brought with me, and they look to me to protect them. They do not think to help me.

I know what I have to do. I have to be a Spanish princess for the English and an English princess for the Spanish. I have to seem at ease where I am not and assume confidence when I am afraid. You may be my husband, but I can hardly see you, I have no sense of you yet. I have no time to consider you. I am absorbed in being the princess that your father has bought, the princess that my mother has delivered, the princess that will fulfill the bargain and secure a treaty between England and Spain.

No one will ever know that I have to pretend to ease, pretend to confidence, pretend to grace. Of course I am afraid. But I will never, never show it. And, when they call my name I will always step forwards.

The king, having washed and taken a couple of glasses of wine before he came to his dinner, was affable with the young princess, determined to overlook their introduction. Once or twice she caught him glancing at her sideways, as if to get the measure of her, and she turned to look at him, full on, one sandy eyebrow slightly raised as if to interrogate him.

“Yes?” he demanded.

“I beg your pardon,” she said equably. “I thought Your Grace needed something. You glanced at me.”

“I was thinking you’re not much like your portrait,” he said.

She flushed a little. Portraits were designed to flatter the sitter, and when the sitter was a royal princess on the marriage market, even more so.

“Better-looking,” Henry said begrudgingly, to reassure her. “Younger, softer, prettier.”

She did not warm to the praise as he expected her to do. She merely nodded as if it were an interesting observation.

“You had a bad voyage,” Henry remarked.

“Very bad,” she said. She turned to Prince Arthur. “We were driven back as we set out from Coruña in August, and we had to wait for the storms to pass. When we finally set sail, it was still terribly rough, and then we were forced into Plymouth. We couldn’t get to Southampton at all. We were all quite sure we would be drowned.”