Philippa Gregory - The Constant Princess

It is an experience more painful than I thought I could have with him. We have been married for nearly a year, a year next month and always he has looked at me directly, with all his youth and honesty in his gaze. I have never heard anything but truth in his voice: boastfulness, certainly, the arrogance of a young man, but never this uncertain deceitful quaver. He is lying to me, and I would almost rather have a barefaced confession of infidelity than to see him look at me, blue-eyed and sweet as a boy, with a parcel of lies in his mouth.

I stop him, I truly cannot bear to hear it. “Enough,” I say. “I know enough at least to realize that this is not true. She was your lover, wasn’t she? And Compton was your friend and shield?”

His face is aghast. “Katherine…”

“Just tell me the truth.”

His mouth is trembling. He cannot bear to admit what he has done. “I didn’t mean to…”

“I know that you did not,” I say. “I am sure you were sorely tempted.”

“You were away for so long…”

“I know.”

A dreadful silence falls. I had thought that he would lie to me and I would track him down and then confront him with his lies and with his adultery and I would be a warrior queen in my righteous anger. But this is sadness and a taste of defeat. If Henry cannot remain faithful when I am in confinement with our child, our dearly needed child, then how shall he be faithful till death? How shall he obey his vow to forsake all others when he can be distracted so easily? What am I to do, what can any woman do, when her husband is such a fool as to desire a woman for a moment, rather than the woman he is pledged to for eternity?

“Dear husband, this is very wrong,” I say sadly.

“It was because I had such doubts. I thought for a moment that we were not married,” he confesses.

“You forgot we were married?” I ask incredulously.

“No!” His head comes up, his blue eyes are filled with unshed tears. His face shines with contrition. “I thought that since our marriage was not valid, I need not abide by it.”

I am quite amazed by him. “Our marriage? Why would it not be valid?”

He shakes his head. He is too ashamed to speak. I press him. “Why not?”

He kneels beside my bed and hides his face in the sheets. “I liked her and I desired her and she said some things which made me feel…”

“Feel what?”

“Made me think…”

“Think what?”

“What if you were not a virgin when I married you?”

At once I am alert, like a villain near the scene of a crime, like a murderer when the corpse bleeds at the sight of him. “What do you mean?”

“She was a virgin…”

“Anne?”

“Yes. Sir George is impotent. Everyone knows that.”

“Do they?”

“Yes. So she was a virgin. And she was not…” He rubs his face against the sheet of our bed. “She was not like you. She…” He stumbles for words. “She cried out in pain. She bled, I was afraid when I saw how much blood, really a lot…” He breaks off again. “She could not go on, the first time. I had to stop. She cried, I held her. She was a virgin. That is what it is like to lie with a virgin, the first time. I was her first love. I could tell. Her first love.”

There is a long, cold silence.

“She fooled you,” I say cruelly, throwing away her reputation, and his tenderness for her, with one sweep, making her a whore and him a fool, for the greater good.

He looks up, shocked. “She did?”

“She was not that badly hurt, she was pretending.” I shake my head at the sinfulness of young women. “It is an old trick. She will have had a bladder of blood in her hand and broke it to give you a show of blood. She will have cried out. I expect she whimpered and said she could not bear the pain from the very beginning.”

Henry is amazed. “She did.”

“She thought to make you feel sorry for her.”

“But I was!”

“Of course. She thought to make you feel that you had taken her virginity, her maidenhead, and that you owe her your protection.”

“That is what she said!”

“She tried to entrap you,” I say. “She was not a virgin, she was acting the part of one. I was a virgin when I came to your bed and the first night that we were lovers was very simple and sweet. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” he says.

“There was no crying and wailing like players on a stage. It was quiet and loving. Take that as your benchmark,” I say. “I was a true virgin. You and I were each other’s first love. We had no need for playacting and exaggeration. Hold to that truth of our love, Henry. You have been fooled by a counterfeit.”

“She said…” he begins.

“She said what?” I am not afraid. I am filled with utter determination that Anne Stafford will not put asunder what God and my mother have joined together.

“She said that you must have been Arthur’s lover.” He stumbles before the white fierceness of my face. “That you had lain with him, and that—”

“Not true.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It is not true.”

“Oh, yes.”

“My marriage with Arthur was not consummated. I came to you a virgin. You were my first love. Does anyone dare say different to me?”

“No,” he says rapidly. “No. No one shall say different to you.”

“Nor to you.”

“Nor to me.”

“Would anyone dare to say to my face that I am not your first love, a virgin untouched, your true wedded wife, and Queen of England?”

“No,” he says again.

“Not even you.”

“No.”

“It is to dishonor me,” I say furiously. “And where will scandal stop? Shall they suggest that you have no claim to the throne because your mother was no virgin on her wedding day?”

He is stunned with shock. “My mother? What of my mother?”

“They say that she lay with her uncle, Richard the usurper,” I say flatly. “Think of that! And they say that she lay with your father before they were married, before they were even betrothed. They say that she was far from a virgin on her wedding day when she wore her hair loose and went in white. They say she was dishonored twice over, little more than a harlot for the throne. Do we allow people to say such things of a queen? Are you to be disinherited by such gossip? Am I? Is our son?”

Henry is gasping with shock. He loved his mother and he had never thought of her as a sexual being before. “She would never have…she was a most…how can…”

“You see? This is what happens if we allow people to gossip about their betters.” I lay down the law which will protect me. “If you allow someone to dishonor me, there is no stopping the scandal. It insults me, but it threatens you. Who knows where scandal will stop once it takes hold? Scandal against the queen rocks the throne itself. Be warned, Henry.”

“She said it!” he exclaims. “Anne said that it was no sin for me to lie with her because I was not truly married!”

“She lied to you,” I say. “She pretended to her virgin state and she traduced me.”

His face flushes red with anger. It is a relief to him to turn to rage. “What a whore!” he exclaims crudely. “What a whore to trick me into thinking…what a jade’s trick!”