The Constant Princess

The words were as seductive as the images. “You make yourself sound so strange,” he said reluctantly. “Like a fairy tale.”

“I am only just realizing now how strange we are to each other,” Catalina said. “I thought that your country would be like mine, but it is quite different. I am coming to think that we are more like Persians than like Germans. We are more Arabic than Visigoth. Perhaps you thought that I would be a princess like your sisters, but I am quite, quite different.”

He nodded. “I shall have to learn your ways,” he proposed tentatively. “As you will have to learn mine.”

“I shall be Queen of England, I shall have to become English. But I want you to know what I was, when I was a girl.”

Arthur nodded. “Were you very cold today?” he asked. He could feel a strange new feeling, like a weight in his belly. He realized it was discomfort, at the thought of her being unhappy.

She met his look without concealment. “Yes,” she said. “I was very cold. And then I thought that I had been unkind to you, and I was very unhappy. And then I thought that I was far away from my home and from the heat and the sunshine and my mother, and I was very homesick. It was a horrible day, today. I had a horrible day, today.”

He reached his hand out to her. “Can I comfort you?”

Her fingertips met his. “You did,” she said. “When you brought me in to the fire and told me you were sorry. You do comfort me. I will learn to trust that you always will.”

He drew her to him. The cushions were soft and easy. He laid her beside him and he gently tugged at the silk that was wrapped around her head. It slipped off at once, and the rich red tresses tumbled down. He touched them with his lips, then her sweet slightly trembling mouth, her eyes with the sandy eyelashes, her light eyebrows, the blue veins at her temples, the lobes of her ears. Then he felt his desire rise, and he kissed the hollow at the base of her throat, her thin collarbones, the warm, seductive flesh from neck to shoulder, the hollow of her elbow, the warmth of her palm, the erotically deep-scented armpit, and then he drew her shift over her head and she was naked, in his arms, and she was his wife, and a loving wife, at last, indeed.

I love him. I did not think it possible, but I love him. I have fallen in love with him. I look at myself in the mirror, in wonderment, as if I am changed, as everything else is changed. I am a young woman in love with my husband. I am in love with the Prince of Wales. I, Catalina of Spain, am in love. I wanted this love, I thought it was impossible, and I have it. I am in love with my husband, and we shall be King and Queen of England. Who can doubt now that I am chosen by God for His especial favor? He brought me from the dangers of war to safety and peace in the Alhambra Palace, and now He has given me England and the love of the young man who will be its king.

In a sudden rush of emotion I put my hands together and pray: “Oh, God, let me love him forever, do not take us from each other as Juan was taken from Margot, in their first months of joy. Let us grow old together, let us love each other forever.”

Ludlow Castle, January 1502

THE WINTER SUN WAS LOW AND RED over the rounded hills as they rattled through the great gate that pierced the stone wall around Ludlow. Arthur, who had been riding beside the litter, shouted to Catalina over the noise of the hooves on the cobbles. “This is Ludlow, at last!”

Ahead of them the men-at-arms shouted: “Make way for Arthur! Prince of Wales!” and the doors banged open and people tumbled out of their houses to see the procession go by.

Catalina saw a town as pretty as a tapestry. The timbered second stories of the crowded buildings overhung cobbled streets with prosperous little shops and working yards tucked cozily underneath them on the ground floor. The shopkeepers’ wives jumped up from their stools set outside the shops to wave to her, and Catalina smiled and waved back. From the upper stories the glovers’ girls and shoemakers’ apprentices, the goldsmiths’ boys and the spinsters leaned out and called her name. Catalina laughed and caught her breath as one young lad looked ready to overbalance but was hauled back in by his cheering mates.

They passed a great bull ring with a dark-timbered inn, as the church bells of the half dozen religious houses, college, chapels and hospital of Ludlow started to peal their bells to welcome the prince and his bride home.

Catalina leaned forwards to see her castle and noted the unassailable march of the outer bailey. The gate was flung open, they went in, and found the greatest men of the town—the mayor, the church elders, the leaders of the wealthy trades guilds—assembled to greet them.

Arthur pulled up his horse and listened politely to a long speech in Welsh and then in English.

“When do we eat?” Catalina whispered to him in Latin and saw his mouth quiver as he held back a smile.

“When do we go to bed?” she breathed, and had the satisfaction of seeing his hand tremble with desire on the rein. She gave a little giggle and ducked back into the litter until finally the interminable speeches of welcome were finished and the royal party could ride on through the great gate of the castle to the inner bailey.

It was a neat castle, as sound as any border castle in Spain. The curtain wall marched around the inner bailey high and strong, made in a curious rosy-colored stone that made the powerful walls more warm and domestic.

Catalina’s eye, sharpened by her training, looked from the thick walls to the well in the outer bailey, the well in the inner bailey, took in how one defensible area led to another, thought that a siege could be held off for years. But it was small, it was like a toy castle, something her father would build to protect a river crossing or a vulnerable road. Something a very minor lord of Spain would be proud to have as his home.

“Is this it?” she asked blankly, thinking of the city that was housed inside the walls of her home, of the gardens and the terraces, of the hill and the views, of the teeming life of the town center, all inside defended walls. Of the long hike for the guards: if they went all around the battlements they would be gone for more than an hour. At Ludlow a sentry would complete the circle in minutes. “Is this it?”

At once he was aghast. “Did you expect more? What were you expecting?”

She would have caressed his anxious face if there had not been hundreds of people watching. She made herself keep her hands still. “Oh, I was foolish. I was thinking of Richmond.” Nothing in the world would have made her say that she was thinking of the Alhambra.

He smiled, reassured. “Oh, my love. Richmond is new-built, my father’s great pride and joy. London is one of the greatest cities of Christendom, and the palace matches its size. But Ludlow is only a town, a great town in the Marches for sure, but a town. But it is wealthy, you will see, and the hunting is good and the people are welcoming. You will be happy here.”

“I am sure of it,” said, Catalina smiling at him, putting aside the thought of a palace built for beauty, only for beauty, where the builders had thought firstly where the light would fall and what reflections it would make in still pools of marble.

She looked around her and saw, in the center of the inner bailey, a curious circular building like a squat tower.

“What’s that?” she asked, struggling out of the litter as Arthur held her hand.

He glanced over his shoulder. “It’s our round chapel,” he said negligently.

“A round chapel?”

“Yes, like in Jerusalem.”

At once she recognized with delight the traditional shape of the mosque—designed and built in the round so that no worshipper was better placed than any others, because Allah is praised by the poor man as well as the rich. “It’s lovely.”

Arthur glanced at her in surprise. To him it was only a round tower built with the pretty plum-colored local stone, but he saw that it glowed in the afternoon light and radiated a sense of peace.

“Yes,” he said, hardly noticing it. “Now this”—he indicated the great building facing them, with a handsome flight of steps up to the open door—“this is the great hall. To the left are the council chambers of Wales and, above them, my rooms. To the right are the guest bedrooms and chambers for the warden of the castle and his lady: Sir Richard and Lady Margaret Pole. Your rooms are above, on the top floor.”

He saw her swift reaction. “She is here now?”

“She is away from the castle at the moment.”

She nodded. “There are buildings behind the great hall?”

“No. It is set into the outer wall. This is all of it.”

Catalina schooled herself to keep her face smiling and pleasant.

“We have more guest rooms in the outer bailey,” he said defensively. “And we have a lodge house, as well. It is a busy place, merry. You will like it.”

“I am sure I will.” She smiled. “And which are my rooms?”

He pointed to the highest windows. “See up there? On the right-hand side, matching mine, but on the opposite side of the hall.”

She looked a little daunted. “But how will you get to my rooms?” she asked quietly.

He took her hand and led her, smiling to his right and to his left, towards the grand stone stairs to the double doors of the great hall. There was a ripple of applause, and their companions fell in behind them. “As My Lady the King’s Mother commanded me, four times a month I shall come to your room in a formal procession through the great hall, ”he said. He led her up the steps.

“Oh.” She was dashed.

He smiled down at her. “And all the other nights, I shall come to you along the battlements,” he whispered. “There is a private door that goes from your rooms to the battlements that run all around the castle. My rooms go onto them too. You can walk from your rooms to mine whenever you wish and nobody will know whether we are together or not. They will not even know whose room we are in.”

He loved how her face lit up. “We can be together whenever we want?”

“We will be happy here.”

Yes I will, I will be happy here. I will not mourn like a Persian for the beautiful courts of his home and declare that there is nowhere else fit for life. I will not say that these mountains are a desert without oases, like a Berber longing for his birthright. I will accustom myself to Ludlow, and I will learn to live here, on the border, and later in England. My mother is not just a queen, she is a soldier, and she raised me to know my duty and to do it. It is my duty to learn to be happy here and to live here without complaining.

I may never wear armor as she did, I may never fight for my country, as she did; but there are many ways to serve a kingdom, and to be a merry, honest, constant queen is one of them. If God does not call me to arms, He may call me to serve as a lawgiver, as a bringer of justice. Whether I defend my people by fighting for them against an enemy or by fighting for their freedom in the law, I shall be their queen, heart and soul, Queen of England.

It was nighttime, past midnight. Catalina glowed in the firelight. They were in bed, sleepy, but too desirous of each other for sleep.

“Tell me a story.”

“I have told you dozens of stories.”

“Tell me another. Tell me the one about Boabdil giving up the Alhambra Palace with the golden keys on a silk cushion and going away crying.”

“You know that one. I told it to you last night.”

“Then tell me the story about Yarfa and his horse that gnashed its teeth at Christians.”

“You are a child. And his name was Yarfe.”

“But you saw him killed?”

“I was there, but I didn’t see him actually die.”

“How could you not watch it?”

“Well, partly because I was praying as my mother ordered me to, and because I was a girl and not a bloodthirsty, monstrous boy.”

Arthur tossed an embroidered cushion at her head. She caught it and threw it back at him.

“Well, tell me about your mother pawning her jewels to pay for the crusade.”

She laughed again and shook her head, making her auburn hair swing this way and that. “I shall tell you about my home,” she offered.

“All right.” He gathered the purple blanket around them both and waited.

“When you come through the first door to the Alhambra, it looks like a little room. Your father would not stoop to enter a palace like that.”

“It’s not grand?”

“It’s the size of a little merchant’s hall in the town here. It is a good hall for a small house in Ludlow, nothing more.”

“And then?”

“And then you go into the courtyard and from there into the golden chamber.”

“A little better?”

“It is filled with color, but still it is not much bigger. The walls are bright with colored tiles and gold leaf and there is a high balcony, but it is still only a little space.”

“And then where shall we go today?”

“Today we shall turn right and go into the Court of the Myrtles.”

He closed his eyes, trying to remember her descriptions. “A courtyard in the shape of a rectangle, surrounded by high buildings of gold.”

“With a huge, dark wooden doorway framed with beautiful tiles at the far end.”

“And a lake, a lake of a simple rectangle shape, and on either side of the water, a hedge of sweet-scented myrtle trees.”

“Not a hedge like you have,” she demurred, thinking of the ragged edges of the Welsh fields in their struggle of thorn and weed.

“Like what, then?” he asked, opening his eyes.

“A hedge like a wall,” she said. “Cut straight and square, like a block of green marble, like a living green sweet-scented statue. And the gateway at the end is reflected back in the water, and the arch around it, and the building that it is set in. So that the whole thing is mirrored in ripples at your feet. And the walls are pierced with light screens of stucco, as airy as paper, like white-on-white embroidery. And the birds—”

“The birds?” he asked, surprised, for she had not told him of them before.

She paused while she thought of the word. “Apodes?” she said in Latin.

“Apodes? Swifts?”

She nodded. “They flow like a turbulent river of birds just above your head, round and round the narrow courtyard, screaming as they go, as fast as a cavalry charge. They go like the wind, round and round, as long as the sun shines on the water they go round, all day. And at night—”

“At night?”

She made a little gesture with her hands, like an enchantress. “At night they disappear, you never see them settle or nest. They just disappear—they set with the sun, but at dawn they are there again, like a river, like a flood.” She paused. “It is hard to describe,” she said in a small voice. “But I see it all the time.”

“You miss it,” he said flatly. “However happy I may make you, you will always miss it.”

She made a little gesture. “Of course. It is to be expected. But I never forget who I am. Who I was born to be.”

Arthur waited.

She smiled at him, her face was warmed by her smile, her blue eyes shining. “The Princess of Wales,” she said. “From my childhood I knew it. They always called me the Princess of Wales. And so Queen of England, as destined by God. Catalina, Infanta of Spain, Princess of Wales.”

He smiled in reply and drew her closer to him. They lay back together, his head on her shoulder, her dark red hair a veil across his chest.

“I knew I would marry you almost from the moment I was born,” he said reflectively. “I can’t remember a time when I was not betrothed to you. I can’t remember a time when I was not writing letters to you and taking them to my tutor for correction.”

“Lucky that I please you, now I am here.”

He put his finger under her chin and turned her face up towards him for a kiss. “Even luckier that I please you,” he said.

“I would have been a good wife anyway,” she insisted. “Even without this…”

He pulled her hand down beneath the silky sheets to touch him where he was growing big again.

“Without this, you mean?” he teased.

“Without this…joy,” she said and closed her eyes and lay back, waiting for his touch.

Their servants woke them at dawn and Arthur was ceremonially escorted from her bed. They saw each other again at Mass but they were seated at opposite sides of the round chapel, each with their own household, and could not speak.

The Mass should be the most important moment of my day, and it should bring me comfort—I know that. But I always feel lonely during Mass. I do pray to God and thank Him for His especial care of me, but just being in this chapel—shaped like a tiny mosque—reminds me so much of my mother. The smell of incense is as evocative of her as if it were her perfume, I cannot believe that I am not kneeling beside her as I have done four times a day for almost every day of my life. When I say “Hail Mary, full of grace” it is my mother’s round, smiling, determined face that I see. And when I pray for courage to do my duty in this strange land with these dour, undemonstrative people, it is my mother’s strength that I need.

I should give thanks for Arthur, but I dare not even think of him when I am on my knees to God. I cannot think of him without the sin of desire. The very image of him in my mind is a deep secret, a pagan pleasure. I am certain that this is not the holy joy of matrimony. Such intense pleasure must be a sin. Such dark, deep desire and satisfaction cannot be the pure conception of a little prince that is the whole point and purpose of this marriage. We were put to bed by an archbishop, but our passionate coupling is as animal as a pair of sun-warmed snakes twisted all around in their pleasure. I keep my joy in Arthur a secret from everyone, even from God.

I could not confide in anyone, even if I wanted to. We are expressly forbidden from being together as we wish. His grandmother, My Lady the King’s Mother, has ordered this, as she orders everything, even everything here in the Welsh Marches. She has said that he should come to my room once a week every week, except for the time of my courses, he should arrive before ten of the clock and leave by six. We obey her, of course—everybody obeys her. Once a week, as she has commanded, he comes through the great hall, like a young man reluctantly obedient, and in the morning he leaves me in silence and goes quietly away as a young man who has done his duty, not one that has been awake all night in breathless delight. He never boasts of pleasure; when they come to fetch him from my chamber he says nothing, nobody knows the joy we take in each other’s passion. No one will ever know that we are together every night. We meet on the battlements which run from his rooms to mine at the very top of the castle, gray-blue sky arching above us, and we consort like lovers in secret. Concealed by the night, we go to my room, or to his, and we make a private world together, filled with hidden joy.

Even in this crowded small castle filled with busybodies and the king’s mother’s spies, nobody knows that we are together, and nobody knows how much we are in love.

After Mass the royal pair went to break their fast in their separate rooms, though they would rather have been together. Ludlow Castle was a small reproduction of the formality of the king’s court. The king’s mother had commanded that after breakfast Arthur must work with his tutor at his books or at sports as the weather allowed; and Catalina must work with her tutor, sew, or read, or walk in the garden.

“A garden!” Catalina whispered under her breath in the little patch of green with the sodden turf bench on one side of a thin border, set in the corner of the castle walls. “I wonder if she has ever seen a real garden.”

In the afternoon they might ride out together to hunt in the woods around the castle. It was a rich countryside, the river fast-flowing through a wide valley with old, thick woodlands on the sides of the hills. Catalina thought she would grow to love the pasturelands around the River Teme and, on the horizon, the way the darkness of the hills gave way to the sky. But in the midwinter weather it was a landscape of gray and white, only the frost or the snow bringing brightness to the blackness of the cold woods. The weather was often too bad for the princess to go out at all. She hated the damp fog or when it drizzled with icy sleet. Arthur often rode alone.

“Even if I stayed behind I would not be allowed to be with you,” he said mournfully. “My grandmother would have set me something else to do.”

“So go!” she said, smiling, though it seemed a long, long time until dinner and she had nothing to do but to wait for the hunt to come home.

They went out into the town once a week, to go to St. Laurence’s Church for Mass or to visit the little chapel by the castle wall, to attend a dinner organized by one of the great guilds or to see a cockfight, a bull baiting, or players. Catalina was impressed by the neat prettiness of the town; the place had escaped the violence of the wars between York and Lancaster that had finally been ended by Henry Tudor.

“Peace is everything to a kingdom,” she observed to Arthur.

“The only thing that can threaten us now is the Scots,” he said. “The Yorkist line are my forebears, the Lancasters too, so the rivalry ends with me. All we have to do is keep the north safe.”

“And your father thinks he has done that with Princess Margaret’s marriage?”

“Pray God he is right, but they are a faithless lot. When I am king, I shall keep the border strong. You shall advise me. We’ll go out together and make sure the border castles are repaired.”

“I shall like that,” she said.

“Of course, you spent your childhood with an army fighting for borderlands; you would know better than I what to look for.”

She smiled. “I am glad it is a skill of mine that you can use. My father always complained that my mother was making Amazons, not princesses.”

They dined together at dusk, and, thankfully, dusk came very early on those cold winter nights. At last they could be close, seated side by side at the high table looking down the hall of the castle, the great hearth heaped with logs on the side wall. Arthur always put Catalina on his left, closest to the fire, and she wore a cloak lined with fur and had layer upon layer of linen shifts under her ornate gown. Even so, she was still cold when she came down the icy stairs from her warm rooms to the smoky hall. Her Spanish ladies—María de Salinas; her duenna, Doña Elvira; and a few others—were seated at one table, the English ladies who were supposed to be her companions at another, and her retinue of Spanish servants were seated at another. The great lords of Arthur’s council—his chamberlain, Sir Richard Pole; warden of the castle, Bishop William Smith of Lincoln; his physician, Dr. Bereworth; his treasurer, Sir Henry Vernon; the steward of his household, Sir Richard Croft; his groom of the privy chamber, Sir William Thomas of Carmarthen—and all the leading men of the principality were seated in the body of the hall. At the back and in the gallery every nosy parker, every busybody in Wales could pile in to see the Spanish princess take her dinner and speculate if she pleased the young prince or no.

There was no way to tell. Most of them thought that he had failed to bed her. For see! The Infanta sat like a stiff little doll and leaned towards her young husband. The Prince of Wales spoke to her as if by rote, every ten minutes. They were little patterns of good behavior, and they scarcely even looked at each other. The gossips said that he went to her rooms as ordered, but only once a week and never of his own choice. Perhaps the young couple did not please each other. They were young, perhaps too young for marriage.

No one could tell that Catalina’s hands were gripped tight in her lap to stop herself from touching her husband, nor that every half hour or so he glanced at her, apparently indifferent, and whispered so low that only she could hear: “I want you right now.”

After dinner there would be dancing and perhaps mummers or a storyteller, a Welsh bard or strolling players to watch. Sometimes the poets would come in from the high hills and tell old, strange tales in their own tongue that Arthur could follow only with difficulty, but which he would try to translate for Catalina.

“When the long yellow summer comes and victory comes to us,

And the spreading of the sails of Brittany,

And when the heat comes and when the fever is kindled,

There are portents that victory will be given to us.”

“What is that about?” she asked him.

“The long yellow summer is when my father decided to invade from Brittany. His road took him to Bosworth and victory.”

She nodded.

“It was hot, that year, and the troops came with the Sweat, a new disease, which now curses England as it does Europe with the heat of every summer.”

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.”

Arthur hid a grin at the romantic rhythm of the story. “You do this awfully well,” he said. “I hope it ends happily.”

Catalina raised her hand like a troubadour calling for silence. “Her greatest friend and lady-in-waiting Beatriz had taken up a knife and sworn that she would kill Don Pedro before he laid hands on Isabella; but my mother kneeled before her prie-dieu for three days and three nights and prayed without ceasing to be spared this rape.

“He was on his journey towards her, he would arrive the very next day. He ate well and drank well, telling his companions that tomorrow he would be in the bed of the highest-born virgin of Castile.

“But that very night he died.” Catalina’s voice dropped to an awed whisper. “Died before he had finished his wine from dinner. Dropped dead as surely as if God had reached down from the heavens and pinched the life out of him as a good gardener pinches out a greenfly.”

“Poison?” asked Arthur, who knew something of the ways of determined monarchs and who thought Isabella of Castile quite capable of murder.

“God’s will,” Catalina answered seriously. “Don Pedro found, as everyone else has found, that God’s will and my mother’s desires always run together. And if you knew God and my mother as I know them, you would know that their will is always done.”

He raised his glass and drank a toast to her. “Now that is a good story,” he said. “I wish you could tell it in the hall.”

“And it is all true,” she reminded him. “I know it is. My mother told me it herself.”

“So she fought for her throne too,” he said thoughtfully.

“First for her throne, and then to make the kingdom of Spain.”

He smiled. “For all that they tell us that we are of royal blood, we both come from a line of fighters. We have our thrones by conquest.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I come from royal blood,” she said. “My mother has her throne by right.”

“Oh yes. But if your mother had not fought for her place in the world, she would have been Doña whatever his name was—”

“Girón.”

“Girón. And you would have been born a nobody.”

Catalina shook her head. The idea was quite impossible for her to grasp. “I should have been the daughter of the sister of the king whatever happened. I should always have had royal blood in my veins.”

“You would have been a nobody,” he said bluntly. “A nobody with royal blood. And so would I if my father had not fought for his throne. We are both from families who claim their own.”

“Yes,” she conceded reluctantly.

“We are both the children of parents who claim what rightfully belongs to others.” He went further.

Her head came up at once. “They do not! At least my mother did not. She was the rightful heir.”

Arthur disagreed. “Her brother made his daughter his heir, he recognized her. Your mother had the throne by conquest. Just as my father won his.”

Her color rose. “She did not,” she insisted. “She is the rightful heir to the throne. All she did was defend her right from a pretender.”

“Don’t you see?” he said. “We are all pretenders until we win. When we win, we can rewrite the history and rewrite the family trees, and execute our rivals, or imprison them, until we can argue that there was always only one true heir: ourselves. But before then, we are one of many claimants. And not even always the best claimant with the strongest claim.”

She frowned. “What are you saying?” she demanded. “Are you saying that I am not the true princess? That you are not the true heir to England?”

He took her hand. “No, no. Don’t be angry with me,” he soothed her. “I am saying that we have and we hold what we claim. I am saying that we make our own inheritance. We claim what we want, we say that we are Prince of Wales, Queen of England. That we decide the name and the title we go by. Just like everyone else does.”

“You are wrong,” she said. “I was born Infanta of Spain and I will die Queen of England. It is not a matter of choice, it is my destiny.”

He took her hand and kissed it. He saw there was no point pursuing his belief that a man or a woman could make their own destiny with their own conviction. He might have his doubts; but with her the task was already done. She had complete conviction: her destiny was made. He had no doubt that she would indeed defend it to death. Her title, her pride, her sense of self were all one. “Katherine, Queen of England,” he said, kissing her fingers, and saw her smile return.

I love him so deeply, I did not know that I could ever love anyone like this. I can feel myself growing in patience and wisdom, just through my love for him. I step back from irritability and impatience, I even bear my homesickness without complaint. I can feel myself becoming a better woman, a better wife, as I seek to please him and make him proud of me. I want him always to be glad that he married me. I want us always to be as happy as we are today. There are no words to describe him…there are no words.

A messenger came from the king’s court bringing the newlyweds some gifts: a pair of deer from the Windsor forest, a parcel of books for Catalina, letters from Elizabeth the queen, and orders from My Lady the King’s Mother who had heard, though no one could imagine how, that the prince’s hunt had broken down some hedges, and who commanded Arthur to make sure that they were restored and the landowner compensated.

He brought the letter to Catalina’s room when he came at night. “How can she know everything?” he demanded.

“The man will have written to her,” she said ruefully.

“Why not come direct to me?”

“Because he knows her? Is he her liege man?”

“Could be,” he said. “She has a network of alliances like spider threads across the country.”

“You should go to see him,” Catalina decided. “We could both go. We could take him a present, some meat or something, and pay what we owe.”

Arthur shook his head at the power of his grandmother. “Oh yes, we can do that. But how can she know everything?”

“It’s how you rule,” she said. “Isn’t it? You make sure that you know everything and that anyone with a trouble comes to you. Then they take the habit of obedience and you take the habit of command.”

He chuckled. “I can see I have married another Margaret Beaufort,” he said. “God help me with another one in the family.”

Catalina smiled. “You should be warned,” she admitted. “I am the daughter of a strong woman. Even my father does as he is bid by her.”

He put down the letter and gathered her to him. “I have longed for you all day,” he said into the warm crook of her neck.

She opened the front of his nightshirt so she could lay her cheek against his sweet-smelling skin. “Oh, my love.”

With one accord they moved to the bed. “Oh, my love.”

“Tell me a story.”

“What shall I tell you tonight?”

“Tell me about how your father and mother were married. Was it arranged for them, as it was for us?”

“Oh no,” she exclaimed. “Not at all. She was quite alone in the world, and though God had saved her from Don Pedro she was still not safe. She knew that her brother would marry her to anyone who would guarantee to keep her from inheriting his throne.

“They were dark years for her—she said that when she appealed to her mother it was like talking to the dead. My grandmother was lost in a world of her own sorrow, she could do nothing to help her own daughter.

“My mother’s cousin, her only hope, was the heir to the neighboring kingdom: Ferdinand of Aragon. He came to her in disguise. Without any servants, without any soldiers, he rode through the night and came to the castle where she was struggling to survive. He had himself brought in, and threw off his hat and cape so she saw him, and knew him at once.”

Arthur was rapt. “Really?”

Catalina smiled. “Isn’t it like a romance? She told me that she loved him at once, fell in love on sight like a princess in a poem. He proposed marriage to her then and there and she accepted him then and there. He fell in love with her that night, at first sight, which is something that no princess can expect. My mother, my father, were blessed by God. He moved them to love and their hearts followed their interests.”

“God looks after the kings of Spain,” Arthur remarked, half joking.

She nodded. “Your father was right to seek our friendship. We are making our kingdom from al Andalus, the lands of the Moorish princes. We have Castile and Aragon, now we have Granada and we will have more. My father’s heart is set on Navarre, and he will not stop there. I know he is determined to have Naples. I don’t think he will be satisfied until all the south and western regions of France are ours. You will see. He has not made the borders he wants for Spain yet.”

“They married in secret?” he asked, still amazed at this royal couple who had taken their lives into their own hands and made their own destiny.

She looked slightly sheepish. “He told her he had a dispensation, but it was not properly signed. I am afraid that he tricked her.”

He frowned. “Your wonderful father lied to his saintly wife?”

She gave a little rueful smile. “Indeed, he will do anything to get his own way. You quickly learn it when you have dealings with him. He always thinks ahead, two, perhaps three, steps ahead. He knew my mother was devout and would not marry without the dispensation and olé!—there is a dispensation in her hand.”

“But they put it right later?”

“Yes, and though his father and her brother were angry, it was the right thing to do.”

“How could it be the right thing to do? To defy your family? To disobey your own father? That’s a sin. It breaks a commandment. It is a cardinal sin. No pope could bless such a marriage.”

“It was God’s will,” she said confidently. “None of them knew that it was God’s will. But my mother knew. She always knows what God wills.”

“How can she be so sure? How could she be so sure then, when she was only a girl?”

She chuckled. “God and my mother have always thought alike.”

He laughed and tweaked a lock of her hair. “She certainly did the right thing in sending you to me.”

“She did,” Catalina said. “And we shall do the right thing by the country.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have such plans for us when we come to the throne.”

“What shall we do?”

Arthur hesitated. “You will think me a child, my head filled with stories from books.”

“No I shan’t, tell me!”

“I should like to make a council, like the first Arthur did. Not like my father’s council, which is just filled with his friends who fought for him, but a proper council of all the kingdom. A council of knights, one for each county. Not chosen by me because I like their company, but chosen by their own county—as the best of men to represent them. And I should like them to come to the table and each of them should know what is happening in their own county, they should report. And so if a crop is going to fail and there is going to be hunger we should know in time and send food.”

Catalina sat up, interested. “They would be our advisors. Our eyes and ears.”

“Yes. And I should like each of them to be responsible for building defenses, especially the ones in the north and on the coasts.”

“And for mustering troops once a year, so we are always ready for attack,” she added. “They will come, you know.”

“The Moors?”

She nodded. “They are defeated in Spain for now, but they are as strong as ever in Africa, in the Holy Lands, in Turkey and the lands beyond. When they need more land they will move again into Christendom. Once a year in the spring, the Ottoman sultan goes to war, like other men plow the fields. They will come against us. We cannot know when they will come, but we can be very certain that they will do so.”

“I want defenses all along the south coast against France, and against the Moors,” Arthur said. “A string of castles, and beacons behind them, so that when we come under attack in—say—Kent, we can know about it in London, and everyone can be warned.”

“You will need to build ships,” she said. “My mother commissioned fighting ships from the dockyard in Venice.”

“We have our own dockyards,” he said. “We can build our own ships.”

“How shall we raise the money for all these castles and ships?” Isabella’s daughter asked the practical question.

“Partly from taxing the people,” he said. “Partly from taxing the merchants and the people who use the ports. It is for their safety, they should pay. I know people hate the taxes but that is because they don’t see what is done with the money.”

“We will need honest tax collectors,” Catalina said. “My father says that if you can collect the taxes that are due and not lose half of them along the way it is better than a regiment of cavalry.”

“Yes, but how d’you find men that you can trust?” Arthur thought aloud. “At the moment, any man who wants to make a fortune gets himself a post of collecting taxes. They should work for us, not for themselves. They should be paid a wage and not collect on their own account.”

“That has never been achieved by anyone but the Moors,” she said. “The Moors in al Andalus set up schools and even universities for the sons of poor men, so that they had clerks that they could trust. And their great offices of court are always done by the young scholars, sometimes the young sons of their king.”

“Shall I take a hundred wives to get a thousand clerks for the throne?” he teased her.

“Not another single one.”

“But we have to find good men,” he said thoughtfully. “You need loyal servants to the crown, those who owe their salary to the crown and their obedience to the crown. Otherwise they work for themselves and they take bribes and all their families become overmighty.”

“The church could teach them,” Catalina suggested. “Just as the imam teaches the boys for the Moors. If every parish church was as learned as a mosque with a school attached to it, if every priest knew he had to teach reading and writing, then we could found new colleges at the universities, so that boys could go on and learn more.”

“Is it possible?” he asked. “Not just a dream?”

She nodded. “It could be real. To make a country is the most real thing anyone can do. We will make a kingdom that we can be proud of, just as my mother and father did in Spain. We can decide how it is to be, and we can make it happen.”

“Camelot,” he said simply.

“Camelot,” she repeated.

SPRING 1502

It snowed for a sennight in February, and then came a thaw and the snow turned to slush and now it is raining again. I cannot walk in the garden, nor go out on a horse, nor even ride out into the town by mule. I have never seen such rain in my life before. It is not like our rain that falls on the hot earth and yields a rich, warm smell as the dust is laid and the plants drink up the water. But this is cold rain on cold earth, and there is no perfume and only standing pools of water with dark ice on it like a cold skin.

I miss my home with an ache of longing in these cold dark days. When I tell Arthur about Spain and the Alhambra it makes me yearn that he should see it for himself, and meet my mother and father. I want them to see him, and know our happiness. I keep wondering if his father would not allow him out of England…but I know I am dreaming. No king would ever let his precious son and heir out of his lands.

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.”

“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?”

That night I dream I am a bird, a volucris, a swift, flying high and fearless over the kingdom of New Castile, south from Toledo, over Córdoba, south to the kingdom of Granada, the ground below me laid out like a tawny carpet, woven from the gold-fleeced sheep of the Berbers, the brass earth pierced by bronze cliffs, the hills so high that not even olive trees can cling to their steep slopes. On I fly, my little bird heart thudding until I see the rosy walls of the Alcázar, the great fort which encloses the palace of the Alhambra, and flying low and fast, I skim the brutal squareness of the watchtower where the flag of the sickle moon once waved, to plunge down towards the Court of Myrtles to fly round and around in the warm air, enclosed by dainty buildings of stucco and tile, looking down on the mirror of water and seeing at last the one I am looking for: my mother, Isabella of Spain, walking in the warm evening air, and thinking of her daughter in faraway England.

MARCH 1502

“I want to ask you to meet a lady who is a good friend of mine and is ready to be a friend of yours,” Arthur said, choosing his words with care.

Catalina’s ladies-in-waiting, bored on a cold afternoon with no entertainment, craned forwards to listen while trying to appear engaged in their needlework.

At once she blanched as white as the linen she was embroidering. “My lord?” she asked anxiously. He had said nothing of this in the early hours of the morning when they had woken and made love. She had not expected to see him until dinner. His arrival in her rooms signaled that something had happened. She was wary, waiting to know what was going on.

“A lady? Who is she?”

“You may have heard of her from others, but I beg you to remember that she is eager to be your friend, and she has always been a good friend to me.”

Catalina’s head flew up, she took a breath. For a moment, for a dreadful moment she thought that he was introducing a former mistress into her court, begging a place among ladies-in-waiting for some woman who had been his lover, so that they might continue their affair.

If this is what he is doing, I know what part I must play. I have seen my mother haunted by the pretty girls that my father, God forgive him, cannot resist. Again and again we would see him pay attention to some new face at court. Each time my mother behaved as if she had noticed nothing, dowered the girl handsomely, married her off to an eligible courtier, and encouraged him to take his new bride far, far away. It was such a common occurrence that it became a joke: that if a girl wanted to marry well with the queen’s blessing, and travel to some remote province, all she had to do was to catch the eye of the king, and in no time she would find herself riding away from the Alhambra on a fine new horse with a set of new clothes.

I know that a sensible woman looks the other way and tries to bear her hurt and humiliation when her husband chooses to take another woman to his bed. What she must not do, what she absolutely must never do, is behave like my sister Juana, who shames herself and all of us by giving way to screaming fits, hysterical tears, and threats of revenge.

“It does no good,” my mother once told me when one of the ambassadors relayed to us some awful scene at Philip’s court in the Netherlands: Juana threatening to cut off the woman’s hair, attacking her with a pair of scissors, and then swearing she would stab herself.

“It only makes it worse to complain. If a husband goes astray you will have to take him back into your life and into your bed, whatever he has done; there is no escape from marriage. If you are queen and he is king you have to deal together. If he forgets his duty to you, that is no reason to forget yours to him. However painful, you are always his queen and he is always your husband.”

“Whatever he does?” I asked her. “However he behaves? He is free though you are bound?”

She shrugged. “Whatever he does cannot break the marriage bond. You are married in the sight of God: he is always your husband, you are always queen. Those whom God has joined together, no man can put asunder. Whatever pain your husband brings you, he is still your husband. He may be a bad husband; but he is still your husband.”

“What if he wants another?” I asked, sharp in my young girl’s curiosity.

“If he wants another he can have her or she can refuse him, that is between them. That is for her and her conscience,” my mother had said steadily. “What must not change is you. Whatever he says, whatever she wants: you are still his wife and his queen.”

Catalina summoned this bleak counsel and faced her young husband. “I am always glad to meet a friend of yours, my lord,” she said levelly, hoping that her voice did not quaver at all. “But, as you know, I have only a small household. Your father was very clear that I am not allowed any more companions than I have at present. As you know, he does not pay me any allowance. I have no money to pay another lady for her service. In short, I cannot add any lady, even a special friend of yours, to my court.”

Arthur flinched at the reminder of his father’s mean haggling over her train. “Oh no, you mistake me. It is not a friend who wants a place. She would not be one of your ladies-in-waiting,” he said hastily. “It is Lady Margaret Pole, who is waiting to meet you. She has come home here at last.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us. This is worse than if it was his mistress. I knew I would have to face her one day. This is her home, but she was away when we got here and I thought she had deliberately snubbed me by being away and staying away. I thought she was avoiding me out of hatred, as I would avoid her from shame. Lady Margaret Pole is sister to that poor boy, the Duke of Warwick, beheaded to make the succession safe for me, and for my line. I have been dreading the moment when I would have to meet her. I have been praying to the saints that she would stay away, hating me, blaming me, but keeping her distance.

Arthur saw her quick gesture of rejection, but he had known of no way to prepare her for this. “Please,” he said hurriedly. “She has been away caring for her children or she would have been here with her husband to welcome you to the castle when we first arrived. I told you she would return. She wants to greet you now. We all have to live together here. Sir Richard is a trusted friend of my father, the lord of my council, and the warden of this castle. We will all have to live together.”

Catalina put out a shaking hand to him and at once he came closer, ignoring the fascinated attention of her ladies.

“I cannot meet her,” she whispered. “Truly, I can’t. I know that her brother was put to death for my sake. I know my parents insisted on it, before they would send me to England. I know he was innocent, innocent as a flower, kept in the Tower by your father so that men should not gather round him and claim the throne in his name. He could have lived there in safety all his life but for my parents’ demanding his death. She must hate me.”

“She doesn’t hate you,” he said truthfully. “Believe me, Catalina, I would not expose you to anyone’s unkindness. She does not hate you, she doesn’t hate me, she doesn’t even hate my father who ordered the execution. She knows that these things happen. She is a princess, she knows as well as you do that it is not choice but policy that governs us. It was not your choice, nor mine. She knows that your father and mother had to be sure that there were no rival princes to claim the throne, that my father would clear my way, whatever it cost him. She is resigned.”

“Resigned?” she gasped incredulously. “How can a woman be resigned to the murder of her brother, the heir of the family? How can she greet me with friendship when he died for my convenience? When we lost my brother our world ended, our hopes died with him. Our future was buried with him. My mother, who is a living saint, still cannot bear it. She has not been happy since the day of his death. It is unbearable to her. If he had been executed for some stranger I swear she would have taken a life in return. How could Lady Margaret lose her brother and bear it? How can she bear me?”

“She has resignation,” he said simply. “She is a most spiritual woman and if she looked for reward, she has one in that she is married to Sir Richard Pole, a man most trusted by my father, and she lives here in the highest regard and she is my friend and I hope will be yours.”

He took her hand and felt it tremble. “Come, Catalina. This isn’t like you. Be brave, my love. She won’t blame you.”

“She must blame me,” she said in an anguished whisper. “My parents insisted that there should be no doubt over your inheritance. I know they did. Your own father promised that there would be no rival princes. They knew what he meant to do. They did not tell him to leave an innocent man with his life. They let him do it. They wanted him to do it. Edward Plantagenet’s blood is on my head. Our marriage is under the curse of his death.”

Arthur recoiled; he had never before seen her so distressed. “My God, Catalina, you cannot call us accursed.”

She nodded miserably.

“You have never spoken of this.”

“I could not bear to say it.”

“But you have thought it?”

“From the moment they told me that he was put to death for my sake.”

“My love, you cannot really think that we are accursed?”

“In this one thing.”

He tried to laugh off her intensity. “No. You must know we are blessed.” He drew closer and said very quietly, so that no one else could hear, “Every morning when you wake in my arms, do you feel accursed then?”

“No,” she said unwillingly. “No, I don’t.”

“Every night when I come to your rooms, do you feel the shadow of sin upon you?”

“No,” she conceded.

“We are not cursed,” he said firmly. “We are blessed with God’s favor. Catalina, my love, trust me. She has forgiven my father, she certainly would never blame you. I swear to you, she is a woman with a heart as big as a cathedral. She wants to meet you. Come with me and let me present her to you.”

“Alone, then,” she said, still fearing some terrible scene.

“Alone. She is in the castle warden’s rooms now. If you come at once, we can leave them all here and go quietly by ourselves and see her.”

She rose from her seat and put her hand on the crook of his arm. “I am walking alone with the princess,” Arthur said to her ladies. “You can all stay here.”

They looked surprised to be excluded, and some of them were openly disappointed. Catalina went past them without looking up.

Once out of the door he preceded her down the tight spiral staircase, one hand on the central stone post, one on the wall. Catalina followed him, lingering at every deep-set arrow-slit window, looking down into the valley where the Teme had burst its banks and was like a silver lake over the water meadows. It was cold, even for March in the Borders, and Catalina shivered as if a stranger were walking on her grave.

“My love,” he said, looking back up the narrow stairs towards her. “Courage. Your mother would have courage.”

“She ordered this thing,” she said crossly. “She thought it was for my benefit. But a man died for her ambition, and now I have to face his sister.”

“She did it for you,” he reminded her. “And nobody blames you.” They came to the floor below the princess’s suite of rooms, and without hesitation Arthur tapped on the thick wooden door of the warden’s apartments and went in.

The square room overlooking the valley was the match of Catalina’s presence chamber upstairs, paneled with wood and hung with bright tapestries. There was a lady waiting for them, seated by the fireside, and when the door opened she rose. She was dressed in a pale gray gown with a gray hood on her hair. She was about thirty years of age; she looked at Catalina with friendly interest, and then she sank into a deep, respectful curtsey.

Disobeying the nip of his bride’s fingers, Arthur withdrew his arm and stepped back as far as the doorway. Catalina looked back at him reproachfully and then bobbed a small curtsey to the older woman. They rose up together.

“I am so pleased to meet you,” Lady Pole said sweetly. “And I am sorry not to have been here to greet you. But one of my children was ill and I went to make sure that he was well nursed.”

“Your husband has been very kind,” Catalina managed to say.

“I hope so, for I left him a long list of commandments; I so wanted your rooms to be warm and comfortable. You must tell me if there is anything you would like. I don’t know Spain, so I didn’t know what things would give you pleasure.”

“No! It is all…absolutely.”

The older woman looked at the princess. “Then I hope you will be very happy here with us,” she said.

“I hope to…” Catalina breathed. “But I…I…”

“Yes?”

“I was very sorry to hear of the death of your brother.” Catalina dived in. Her face, which had been white with discomfort, now flushed scarlet. She could feel her ears burning, and to her horror she heard her voice tremble. “Indeed, I was very sorry. Very…”

“It was a great loss to me, and to mine,” the woman said steadily. “But it is the way of the world.”

“I am afraid that my coming…”

“I never thought that it was any choice or any fault of yours, Princess. When our dear Prince Arthur was to be married his father was bound to make sure that his inheritance was secured. I know that my brother would never have threatened the peace of the Tudors, but they were not to know that. And he was ill-advised by a mischievous young man, drawn into some foolish plot…” She broke off as her voice shook; but rapidly she recovered herself. “Forgive me. It still grieves me. He was an innocent, my brother. His silly plotting was proof of his innocence, not of his guilt. There is no doubt in my mind that he is in God’s keeping now, with all innocents.”

She smiled at the princess. “In this world, we women often find that we have no power over what men do. I am sure you would have wished my brother no harm, and indeed, I am sure that he would not have stood against you or against our dearest prince here—but it is the way of the world that harsh measures are sometimes taken. My father made some bad choices in his life, and God knows he paid for them in full. His son, though innocent, went the way of his father. A turn of the coin and it could all have been different. I think a woman has to learn to live with the turn of the coin even when it falls against her.”

Catalina was listening intently. “I know my mother and father wanted to be sure that the Tudor line was without challenge,” she breathed. “I know that they told the king.” She felt as if she had to make sure that this woman knew the depth of her guilt.

“As I might have done if I had been them,” Lady Margaret said simply. “Princess, I do not blame you, nor your mother or father. I do not blame our great king. Were I any one of them, I might have behaved just as they have done, and explained myself only to God. All I have to do, since I am not one of these great people but merely the humble wife to a fine man, is to take care how I behave and how I will explain myself to God.”

“I felt that I came to this country with his death on my conscience,” Catalina admitted in a sudden rush.

The older woman shook her head. “His death is not on your conscience,” she said firmly. “And it is wrong to blame yourself for another’s doing. Indeed, I would think your confessor would tell you: it is a form of pride. Let that be the sin that you confess, you need not take the blame for the sins of others.”

Catalina looked up for the first time and met the steady eyes of Lady Pole and saw her smile. Cautiously she smiled back, and the older woman stretched out her hand, as a man would offer to shake on a bargain. “You see,” she said pleasantly. “I was a princess royal myself once. I was the last Plantagenet princess, raised by King Richard in his nursery with his son. Of all the women in the world, I should know that there is more to life than a woman can ever control. There is the will of your husband, and of your parents, and of your king, and of your God. Nobody could blame a princess for the doings of a king. How could one ever challenge it? Or make any difference? Our way has to be obedience.”

Catalina, her hand in the warm, firm grasp, felt wonderfully reassured. “I am afraid I am not always very obedient,” she confessed.

The older woman laughed. “Oh yes, for one would be a fool not to think for oneself,” she allowed. “True obedience can only happen when you secretly think you know better, and you choose to bow your head. Anything short of that is just agreement, and any ninny-in-waiting can agree. Don’t you think?”

And Catalina, giggling with an Englishwoman for the first time, laughed aloud and said: “I never wanted to be a ninny-in-waiting.”

“Neither did I,” gleamed Margaret Pole, who had been a Plantagenet, a princess royal and was now a mere wife buried in the fastness of the Tudor Borders. “I always know that I am myself, in my heart, whatever title I am given.”

I am so surprised to find that the woman whose presence I have dreaded is making the castle at Ludlow feel like a home for me. Lady Margaret Pole is a companion and friend to comfort me for the loss of my mother and sisters. I realize now that I have always lived in a world dominated by women: the queen my mother, my sisters, our ladies- and maids-in-waiting, and all the women servants of the seraglio. In the Alhambra we lived almost withdrawn from men, in rooms built for the pleasure and comfort of women. We lived almost in seclusion, in the privacy of the cool rooms, and ran through the courtyards and leaned on the balconies secure in the knowledge that half the palace was exclusively in the ownership of us women.

We would attend the court with my father—we were not hidden from sight—but the natural desire of women for privacy was served and emphasized by the design of the Alhambra where the prettiest rooms and the best gardens were reserved for us.

It is strange to come to England and find the world dominated by men. Of course I have my rooms and my ladies, but any man can come and ask for admittance at any time. Sir Richard Pole or any other of Arthur’s gentlemen can come to my rooms without notice and think that they are paying me a compliment. The English seem to think it right and normal that men and women should mix. I have not yet seen a house with rooms that are exclusive to women, and no woman goes veiled as we sometimes did in Spain, not even when traveling, not even among strangers.

Even the royal family is open to all. Men, even strangers, can stroll through the royal palaces as long as they are smart enough for the guards to admit them. They can wait around in the queen’s presence chamber and see her anytime she walks by, staring at her as if they were family. The great hall, the chapel, the queen’s public rooms are open to anyone who can find a good hat and a cape and pass as gentry. The English treat women as if they are boys or servants, they can go anywhere, they can be looked at by anyone. For a while I thought this was a great freedom, and for a while I reveled in it; then I realized the Englishwomen may show their faces but they are not bold like men, they are not free like boys; they still have to remain silent and obey.

Now with Lady Margaret Pole returned to the warden’s rooms it feels as if this castle has come under the rule of women. The evenings in the hall are less hearty, even the food at dinner has changed. The troubadours sing of love and less of battles, there is more French spoken and less Welsh.

My rooms are above, and hers are on the floor below, and we go up and down stairs all day to see each other. When Arthur and Sir Richard are out hunting, the castle’s mistress is still at home and the place does not feel empty anymore. Somehow, she makes it a lady’s castle, just by being here. When Arthur is away, the life of the castle is not silent, waiting for his return. It is a warm, happy place, busy in its own day’s work.

I have missed having an older woman to be my friend. María de Salinas is a girl as young and silly as I am, she is a companion, not a mentor. Doña Elvira was nominated by my mother the queen to stand in a mother’s place for me; but she is not a woman I can warm to, though I have tried to love her. She is strict with me, jealous of her influence over me, ambitious to run the whole court. She and her husband, who commands my household, want to dominate my life. Since that first evening at Dogmersfield when she contradicted the king himself, I have doubted her judgment. Even now she continually cautions me against becoming too close with Arthur, as if it were wrong to love a husband, as if I could resist him! She wants to make a little Spain in England, she wants me to still be the Infanta. But I am certain that my way ahead in England is to become English.

Doña Elvira will not learn English. She affects not to be able to understand French when it is spoken with an English accent. The Welsh she treats with absolute contempt as barbarians on the very edge of civilization, which is not very comfortable when we are visiting the townspeople of Ludlow. To be honest, sometimes she behaves more grandly than any woman I have ever known, she is prouder than my mother herself. She is certainly grander than me. I have to admire her, but I cannot truly love her.

But Margaret Pole was educated as the niece of a king and is as fluent in Latin as I am. We speak French easily together, she is teaching me English, and when we come across a word we don’t know in any of our shared languages, we compose great mimes that set us wailing with giggles. I made her cry with laughing when I tried to demonstrate indigestion, and the guards came running, thinking we were under attack when she used all the ladies of the court and their maidservants to demonstrate to me the correct protocol for an English hunt in the field.

With Margaret, Catalina thought she could raise the question of her future, and her father-in-law of whom she was frankly nervous.

“He was displeased before we came away,” she said. “It is the question of the dowry.”

“Oh, yes?” Margaret replied. The two women were seated in a window, waiting for the men to come back from hunting. It was bitterly cold and damp outside, neither of them had wanted to go out. Margaret thought it better to volunteer nothing about the vexed question of Catalina’s dowry; she had already heard from her husband that the Spanish king had perfected the art of double-dealing. He had agreed a substantial dowry for the Infanta, but then sent her to England with only half the money. The rest, he suggested, could be made up with the plate and treasure that she brought as her household goods. Outraged, King Henry had demanded the full amount. Sweetly Ferdinand of Spain replied that the Infanta’s household had been supplied with the very best, Henry could take his pick.

It was a bad way to start a marriage that was, in any case, founded only on greed and ambition, and a shared fear of France. Catalina was caught between the determination of two coldhearted men. Margaret guessed that one of the reasons that Catalina had been sent to Ludlow Castle with her husband was to force her to use her own household goods and so diminish their value. If King Henry had kept her at court in Windsor or Greenwich or Westminster, she would have eaten off his plates and her father could have argued that the Spanish plate was as good as new, and must be taken as the dowry. But now, every night they ate from Catalina’s gold plates and every scrape of a careless knife knocked a little off the value. When it was time to pay the second half of the dowry, the King of Spain would find he would have to pay cash. King Ferdinand might be a hard man and a cunning negotiator but he had met his match in Henry Tudor of England.

“He said that I should be a daughter to him,” Catalina started carefully. “But I cannot obey him as a daughter should, if I am to obey my own father. My father tells me not to use my plate and to give it to the king. But he won’t accept it. And since the dowry is unpaid, the king sends me away with no provision; he doesn’t even pay my allowance.”

“Does the Spanish ambassador not advise you?”

Catalina made a little face. “He is the king’s own man,” she said. “No help to me. I don’t like him. He is a Jew, but converted. An adaptable man. A Spaniard, but he has lived here for years. He is become a man for the Tudors, not for Aragon. I shall tell my father that he is poorly served by Dr. de Puebla, but in the meantime, I have no good advice, and in my household Doña Elvira and my treasurer never stop quarreling. She says that my goods and my treasure must be loaned to the goldsmiths to raise money; he says he will not let them out of his sight until they are paid to the king.”

“And have you not asked the prince what you should do?”

Catalina hesitated. “It is a matter between his father and my father,” she said cautiously. “I didn’t want to let it disturb us. He has paid for all my traveling expenses here. He is going to have to pay for my ladies’ wages at midsummer, and soon I will need new gowns. I don’t want to ask him for money. I don’t want him to think me greedy.”

“You love him, don’t you?” Margaret asked, smiling, and watched the younger woman’s face light up.

“Oh yes,” the girl breathed. “I do love him so.”

The older woman smiled. “You are blessed,” she said gently. “To be a princess and to find love with the husband you are ordered to marry. You are blessed, Catalina.”

“I know. I do think it is a sign of God’s especial favor to me.”

The older woman paused at the grandness of the claim, but did not correct her. The confidence of youth would wear away soon enough without any need for warnings. “And do you have any signs?”

Catalina looked puzzled.

“Of a child coming? You do know what to look for?”

The young woman blushed. “I do know. My mother told me. There are no signs yet.”

“It’s early days,” Lady Margaret said comfortingly. “But if you had a child on the way I think there would be no difficulty with a dowry. I think nothing would be too good for you if you were carrying the next Tudor prince.”

“I ought to be paid my allowance whether I have a child or not,” Catalina observed. “I am Princess of Wales, I should have an allowance to keep my state.”

“Yes,” said Margaret drily. “But who is going to tell the king that?”

“Tell me a story.”

They were bathed in the dappled gold of candlelight and firelight. It was midnight and the castle was silent but for their low voices, all the lights were out but for the blaze of Catalina’s chambers where the two young lovers were resisting sleep.

“What shall I tell you about?”

“Tell me a story about the Moors.”

She thought for a moment, throwing a shawl around her bare shoulders against the cold. Arthur was sprawled across the bed but when she moved he gathered her to him so her head rested on his naked chest. He ran his hand through her rich red hair and gathered it into his fist.

“I will tell you a story about one of the sultanas,” she said. “It is not a story. It is true. She was in the harem—you know that the women live apart from the men in their own rooms?”

He nodded, watching the candlelight flicker on her neck, on the hollow at her collarbone.

“She looked out of the window and the tidal river beneath her window was at low ebb. The poor children of the town were playing in the water. They were on the slipway for the boats and they had spread mud all around and they were slipping and sliding, skating in the mud. She laughed while she watched them and she said to her ladies how she wished that she could play like that.”

“But she couldn’t go out?”

“No, she could never go out. Her ladies told the eunuchs who guarded the harem and they told the grand vizier and he told the sultan, and when she left the window and went to her presence chamber, guess what?”

He shook his head, smiling. “What?”

“Her presence chamber was a great marble hall. The floor was made of rose-veined marble. The sultan had ordered them to bring great flasks of perfumed oils and pour them on the floor. All the perfumiers in the town had been ordered to bring oil of roses to the palace. They had brought rose petals and sweet-smelling herbs and they had made a thick paste of oil of roses and rose petals and herbs and spread it, one foot thick, all across the floor of her presence chamber. The sultana and her ladies stripped to their chemises and slid and played in the mud, threw rose water and petals and all the afternoon played like the mud larks.”

He was entranced. “How glorious.”

She smiled up at him. “Now it is your turn. You tell me a story.”

“I have no stories like that. It is all fighting and winning.”

“Those are the stories you like best when I tell them,” she pointed out.

“I do. And now your father is going to war again.”

“He is?”

“Did you not know?”

Catalina shook her head. “The Spanish ambassador sometimes sends me a note with the news, but he has told me nothing. Is it a crusade?”

“You are a bloodthirsty soldier of Christ. I should think the infidels shake in their sandals. No, it is not a crusade. It is a far less heroic cause. Your father, rather surprisingly to us, has made an alliance with King Louis of France. Apparently they plan to invade Italy together and share the spoils.”

“King Louis?” she asked in surprise. “Never! I had thought they would be enemies until death.”

“Well, it seems that the French king does not care who he allies with. First the Turks and now your father.”

“Well, better that King Louis makes alliance with my father than with the Turks,” she said stoutly. “Anything is better than they are invited in.”

“But why would your father join with our enemy?”

“He has always wanted Naples,” she confided to him. “Naples and Navarre. One way or another he will have them. King Louis may think he has an ally but there will be a high price to pay. I know him. He plays a long game but he usually gets his own way. Who sent you the news?”

“My father. I think he is vexed not to be in their counsel. He fears the French worse only than the Scots. It is a disappointment for us that your father would ally with them on anything.”

“On the contrary, your father should be pleased that my father is keeping the French busy in the south. My father is doing him a service.”

He laughed at her. “You are a great help.”

“Will your father not join with them?”

Arthur shook his head. “Perhaps, but his one great desire is to keep England at peace. War is a terrible thing for a country. You are a soldier’s daughter and you should know. My father says it is a terrible thing to see a country at war.”

“Your father only fought one big battle,” she said. “Sometimes you have to fight. Sometimes you have to beat your enemy.”

“I wouldn’t fight to gain land,” he said. “But I would fight to defend our borders. And I think we will have to fight against the Scots unless my sister can change their very nature.”

“And is your father prepared for war?”

“He has the Howard family to keep the north for him,” he said. “And he has the trust of every northern landlord. He has reinforced the castles and he keeps the Great North Road open so that he can get his soldiers up there if needs be.”

Catalina looked thoughtful. “If he has to fight he would do better to invade them,” she said. “Then he can choose the time and the place to fight and not be forced into defense.”

“Is that the better way?”

She nodded. “My father would say so. It is everything to have your army moving forwards and confident. You have the wealth of the country ahead of you, for your supplies; you have the movement forwards: soldiers like to feel that they are making progress. There is nothing worse than being forced to turn and fight.”

“You are a tactician,” he said. “I wish to God I had your childhood and knew the things you know.”

“You do have,” she said sweetly. “For everything I know is yours, and everything I am is yours. And if you and our country ever need me to fight for you, then I will be there.”

It has become colder and colder and the long week of rain has turned into showers of hail and now snow. Even so, it is not bright, cold wintry weather but a low, damp mist with swirling cloud and flurries of slush which clings in clumps to trees and turrets and sits in the river like old sherbet.

When Arthur comes to my room he slips along the battlements like a skater and this morning, as he went back to his room, we were certain we would be discovered because he slid on fresh ice and fell and cursed so loudly that the sentry on next tower put his head out and shouted, “Who goes there?” and I had to call back that it was only me, feeding the winter birds. So Arthur whistled at me and told me it was the call of a robin and we both laughed so much that we could barely stand. I am certain that the sentry knew anyway, but it was so cold he did not come out.

Now today Arthur has gone out riding with his council, who want to look at a site for a new corn mill while the river is in spate and partly blocked by snow and ice, and Lady Margaret and I are staying at home and playing cards.

It is cold and gray, it is wet all the time—even the walls of the castle weep with icy moisture—but I am happy. I love him, I would live with him anywhere, and spring will come and then summer. I know we will be happy then too.

The tap on the door came late at night. She threw it open.

“Ah love, my love! Where have you been?”

He stepped into the room and kissed her. She could taste the wine on his breath. “They would not leave,” he said. “I have been trying to get away to be with you for three hours at the very least.”

He picked her up off her feet and carried her to the bed.

“But, Arthur, don’t you want…?”

“I want you.”

“Tell me a story.”

“Are you not sleepy now?”

“No. I want you to sing me the song about the Moors losing the Battle of Málaga.”

Catalina laughed. “It was the Battle of Alhama. I shall sing you some of the verses; but it goes on and on.”

“Sing me all of them.”

“We would need all night,” she protested.

“We have all night, thank God,” he said, his joy in his voice. “We have all night and we have every night for the rest of our lives, thank God for it.”

“It is a forbidden song,” she said. “Forbidden by my mother herself.”

“So how did you learn it?” Arthur demanded, instantly diverted.

“Servants,” she said carelessly. “I had a nursemaid who was a Morisco and she would forget who I was, and who she was, and sing to me.”

“What’s a Morisco? And why was the song banned?” he asked curiously.

“A Morisco means ‘little Moor’ in Spanish,” she explained. “It’s what we call the Moors who live in Spain. They are not really Moors like those in Africa. So we call them little Moors, or Moros. As I left, they were starting to call themselves Mudajjan—‘one allowed to remain.’ ”

“One allowed to remain?” he asked. “In their own land?”

“It’s not their land,” she said instantly. “It’s ours. Spanish land.”

“They had it for seven hundred years,” he pointed out. “When you Spanish were doing nothing but herding goats in the mountains, they were building roads and castles and universities. You told me so yourself.”

“Well, it’s ours now,” she said flatly.

He clapped his hands like a sultan. “Sing the song, Scheherazade. And sing it in French, you barbarian, so I can understand it.”

Catalina put her hands together like a woman about to pray and bowed low to him.

“Now that is good,” Arthur said, reveling in her. “Did you learn that in the harem?”

She smiled at him and tipped up her head and sang.

“An old man cries to the king: Why comes this sudden

calling?—Alas! Alhama!

Alas my friends, Christians have won Alhama—Alas! Alhama!

A white-bearded imam answers: This has thou merited, O

King!—Alas! Alhama!

In an evil hour thou slewest the Abencerrages, flower

of Granada—Alas! Alhama!

Not Granada, not kingdom, not thy life shall long remain—

Alas! Alhama!”

She fell silent. “And it was true,” she said. “Poor Boabdil came out of the Alhambra Palace, out of the red fort that they said would never fall, with the keys on a silk cushion, bowed low and gave them to my mother and my father and rode away. They say that at the mountain pass he looked back at his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom, and wept, and his mother told him to weep like a woman for what he could not hold as a man.”

Arthur let out a boyish crack of laughter. “She said what?”

Catalina looked up, her face grave. “It was very tragic.”

“It is just the sort of thing my grandmother would say,” he said delightedly. “Thank God my father won his crown. My grandmother would be just as sweet in defeat as Boabdil’s mother. Good God: “weep like a woman for what you cannot hold as a man.” What a thing to say to a man as he walks away in defeat!”

Catalina laughed too. “I never thought of it like that,” she said. “It isn’t very comforting.”

“Imagine going into exile with your mother, and she so angry with you!”

“Imagine losing the Alhambra, never going back there!”

He pulled her to him and kissed her face. “No regrets!” he commanded.

At once she smiled for him. “Then divert me,” she ordered. “Tell me about your mother and father.”

He thought for a moment. “My father was born an heir to the Tudors, but there were dozens in line for the throne before him,” he said. “His father wanted him called Owen, Owen Tudor, a good Welsh name, but his father died before his birth, in the war. My grandmother was only a child of twelve when he was born, but she had her way and called him Henry—a royal name. You can see what she was thinking even then, even though she was little more than a child herself, and her husband was dead.

“My father’s fortunes soared up and down with every battle of the civil war. One time he was a son of the ruling family, the next they were on the run. His uncle Jasper Tudor—you remember him—kept faith with my father and with the Tudor cause, but there was a final battle and our cause was lost, and our king executed. Edward came to the throne and my father was the last of the line. He was in such danger that Uncle Jasper broke out of the castle where they were being held and fled with him out of the country to Brittany.”

“To safety?”

“Of a sort. He told me once that he woke every morning expecting to be handed over to Edward. And once King Edward said that he should come home and there would be a kind welcome and a wedding arranged for him. My father pretended to be ill on the road and escaped. He would have come home to his death.”

Catalina blinked. “So he was a pretender too, in his time.”

He grinned at her. “As I said. That is why he fears them so much. He knows what a pretender can do if the luck is with him. If they had caught him, they would have brought him home to his death in the Tower. Just like he did to Warwick. My father would have been put to death the moment King Edward had him. But he pretended to be ill and got away, over the border into France.”

“They didn’t hand him back?”

Arthur laughed. “They supported him. He was the greatest challenge to the peace of England—of course they encouraged him. It suited the French to support him then: when he was not king but pretender.”

She nodded. She was a child of a prince praised by Machiavelli himself. Any daughter of Ferdinand was born to double-dealing. “And then?”

“Edward died young, in his prime, with only a young son to inherit. His brother Richard first held the throne in trust and then claimed it for himself and put his own nephews, Edward’s sons, the little princes, in the Tower of London.”

She nodded. This was a history she had been taught in Spain, and the greater story—of deadly rivalry for a throne—was a common theme for both young people.

“They went into the Tower and never came out again,” Arthur said bleakly. “God bless their souls, poor boys, no one knows what happened to them. The people turned against Richard and summoned my father from France.”

“Yes?”

“My grandmother organized the great lords one after another, she was an archplotter. She and the Duke of Buckingham put their heads together and had the nobles of the kingdom in readiness. That’s why my father honors her so highly: he owes her his throne. And he waited until he could get a message to my mother to tell her that he would marry her if he won the throne.”

“Because he loved her?” Catalina asked hopefully. “She is so beautiful.”

“Not he. He hadn’t even seen her. He had been in exile for most of his life, remember. It was a marriage cobbled together because his mother knew that if she could get those two married, then everyone would see that the heir of York had married the heir of Lancaster and the war could be over. And her mother saw it as her only way out to safety. The two mothers brokered the deal together like a pair of crones over a cauldron. They’re both women you wouldn’t want to cross.”

“He didn’t love her?” She was disappointed.

Arthur smiled. “No. It’s not a romance. And she didn’t love him. But they knew what they had to do. When my father marched in and beat Richard and picked the crown of England out of the bodies and the wreckage of the battlefield, he knew that he would marry the princess, take the throne, and found a new line.”

“But wasn’t she next heir to the throne anyway?” she asked, puzzled. “Since it was her father who had been King Edward? And her uncle who had died in the battle, and her brothers were dead?”

He nodded. “She was the oldest princess.”

“So why didn’t she claim the throne for herself?”

“Aha, you are a rebel!” he said. He took a handful of her hair and pulled her face towards him. He kissed her mouth, tasting of wine and sweetmeats. “A Yorkist rebel, which is worse.”

“I just thought she should have claimed the throne for herself.”

“Not in this country,” Arthur ruled. “We don’t have reigning queens in England. Girls don’t inherit. They cannot take the throne.”

“But if a king had only a daughter?”

He shrugged. “Then it would be a tragedy for the country. You have to give me a boy, my love. Nothing else will do.”

“But if we only had a girl?”

“She would marry a prince and make him King Consort of England, and he would rule alongside her. England has to have a king. Like your mother did. She reigns alongside her husband.”

“In Aragon she does, but in Castile he rules alongside her. Castile is her country and Aragon his.”

“We’d never stand for it in England,” Arthur said.

She drew away from him in indignation. She was only half pretending. “I tell you this: if we have only one child and she is a girl then she will rule as queen and she will be a queen as good as any man can be king.”

“Well, she will be a novelty,” he said. “We don’t believe a woman can defend the country as a king needs to do.”

“A woman can fight,” she said instantly. “You should see my mother in armor. Even I could defend the country. I have seen warfare, which is more than you have done. I could be as good a king as any man.”

He smiled at her, shaking his head. “Not if the country was invaded. You couldn’t command an army.”

“I could command an army. Why not?”

“No English army would be commanded by a woman. They wouldn’t take orders from a woman.”

“They would take orders from their commander,” she flashed out. “And if they don’t then they are no good as soldiers and they have to be trained.”

He laughed. “No Englishman would obey a woman,” he said. He saw by her stubborn face that she was not convinced.

“All that matters is that you win the battle,” she said. “All that matters is that the country is defended. It doesn’t matter who leads the army as long as they follow.”

“Well, at any rate, my mother had no thought of claiming the throne for herself. She would not have dreamed of it. She married my father and became Queen of England through marriage. And because she was the York princess and he was the Lancaster heir, my grandmother’s plan succeeded. My father may have won the throne by conquest and acclaim; but we will have it by inheritance.”

Catalina nodded. “My mother said there was nothing wrong with a man who is new-come to the throne. What matters is not the winning but the keeping of it.”

“We shall keep it,” he said with certainty. “We shall make a great country here, you and me. We shall build roads and markets, churches and schools. We shall put a ring of forts around the coastline and build ships.”

“We shall create courts of justice as my mother and father have done in Spain,” she said, settling back into the pleasure of planning a future on which they could agree. “So that no man can be cruelly treated by another. So that every man knows that he can go to the court and have his case heard.”

He raised his glass to her. “We should start writing this down,” he said. “And we should start planning how it is to be done.”

“It will be years before we come to our thrones.”

“You never know. I don’t wish it—God knows, I honor my father and my mother and I would want nothing before God’s own time. But you never know. I am Prince of Wales, you are Princess. But we will be King and Queen of England. We should know who we will have at our court, we should know what advisors we will choose, we should know how we are going to make this country truly great. If it is a dream, then we can talk of it together at nighttime, as we do. But if it is a plan, we should write it in the daytime, take advice on it, think how we might do the things we want.”

Her face lit up. “When we have finished our lessons for the day, perhaps we could do it then. Perhaps your tutor would help us, and my confessor.”

“And my advisors,” he said. “And we could start here. In Wales. I can do what I want, within reason. We could make a college here, and build some schools. We could even commission a ship to be built here. There are shipwrights in Wales, we could build the first of our defensive ships.”

She clapped her hands like the girl she was. “We could start our reign!” she said.

“Hail Queen Katherine! Queen of England!” Arthur said playfully, but at the ring of the words he stopped and looked at her more seriously. “You know, you will hear them say that, my love. Vivat! Vivat Catalina Regina, Queen Katherine, Queen of England.”

It is like an adventure, wondering what sort of country we can make, what sort of king and queen we will be. It is natural we should think of Camelot. It was my favorite book in my mother’s library and I found Arthur’s own well-thumbed copy in his father’s library.

I know that Camelot is a story, an ideal, as unreal as the love of a troubadour, or a fairy-tale castle or legends about thieves and treasure and genies. But there is something about the idea of ruling a kingdom with justice, with the consent of the people, which is more than a fairy tale.

Arthur and I will inherit great power, his father has seen to that. I think we will inherit a strong throne and a great treasure. We will inherit with the goodwill of the people; the king is not loved but he is respected, and nobody wants a return to endless battles. These English have a horror of civil war. If we come to the throne with this power, this wealth, and this goodwill, there is no doubt in my mind that we can make a great country here.

And it shall be a great country in alliance with Spain. My parents’ heir is Juana’s son, Charles. He will be Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. He will be my nephew and we will have the friendship of kinsmen. What a powerful alliance this will be: the great Holy Roman Empire and England. Nobody will be able to stand against us, we might divide France, we might divide most of Europe. Then we will stand, the empire and England against the Moors, then we will win and the whole of the East, Persia, the Ottomans, the Indies, even China will be laid open to us.

The routine of the castle changed. In the days which were starting to become warmer and brighter the young Prince and Princess of Wales set up their office in her rooms, dragged a big table over to the window for the afternoon light, and pinned up maps of the principality on the linenfold paneling.

“You look as if you are planning a campaign,” Lady Margaret Pole said pleasantly.

“The princess should be resting,” Doña Elvira remarked resentfully to no one in particular.

“Are you unwell?” Lady Margaret asked quickly.

Catalina smiled and shook her head. She was becoming accustomed to the obsessive interest in her health. Until she could say that she was carrying England’s heir, she would have no peace from people asking her how she did.

“I don’t need to rest,” she said. “And tomorrow, if you will take me, I should like to go out and see the fields.”

“The fields?” asked Lady Margaret, rather taken aback. “In March? They won’t plow for another week or so, there is almost nothing to see.”

“I have to learn,” Catalina said. “Where I live, it is so dry in summer that we have to build little ditches in every field, to the foot of every tree, to channel water to the plants to make sure that they can drink and live. When we first rode through this country and I saw the ditches in your fields, I was so ignorant I thought they were bringing water in.” She laughed aloud at the memory. “And then the prince told me they were drains to take the water away. I could not believe it! So we had better ride out and you must tell me everything.”

“A queen does not need to know about fields,” Doña Elvira said in muted disapproval from the corner. “Why should she know what the farmers grow?”

“Of course a queen needs to know,” Catalina replied, irritated. “She should know everything about her country. How else can she rule?”

“I am sure you will be a very fine queen of England,” Lady Margaret said, making the peace.

Catalina glowed. “I shall be the best queen of England that I can be,” she said. “I shall care for the poor and assist the church, and if we are ever at war I shall ride out and fight for England just as my mother did for Spain.”

Planning for the future with Arthur, I forget my homesickness for Spain. Every day we think of some improvement we could make, of some law that should be changed. We read together books of philosophy and politics. We talk about whether people can be trusted with their freedom, of whether a king should be a good tyrant or should step back from power. We talk about my home: of my parents’ belief that you make a country by one church, one language, and one law. Or whether it could be possible to do as the Moors did: to make a country with one law but with many faiths and many languages, and assume that people are wise enough to choose the best.

We argue, we talk. Sometimes we break up in laughter, sometimes we disagree. Arthur is my lover always, my husband, undeniably. And now he is becoming my friend.

Catalina was in the little garden of Ludlow Castle, which was set along the east wall, in earnest conversation with one of the castle gardeners. In neat beds around her were the herbs that the cooks used, and some herbs and flowers with medicinal properties grown by Lady Margaret. Arthur, seeing Catalina as he walked back from confession in the round chapel, glanced up to the great hall to check that no one would prevent him, and slipped off to be with her. As he drew up she was gesturing, trying to describe something. Arthur smiled.

“Princess,” he said formally in greeting.

She swept him a low curtsey, but her eyes were warm with pleasure at the sight of him. “Sire.”

The gardener had dropped to his knees in the mud at the arrival of the prince. “You can get up,” Arthur said pleasantly. “I don’t think you will find many pretty flowers at this time of year, Princess.”

“I was trying to talk to him about growing salad vegetables,” she said. “But he speaks Welsh and English and I have tried Latin and French and we don’t understand each other at all.”

“I think I am with him. I don’t understand either. What is salad?”

She thought for a moment. “Acetaria.”

“Acetaria?” he queried.

“Yes, salad.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“It is vegetables that grow in the ground and you eat them without cooking them,” she explained. “I was asking if he could plant some for me.”

“You eat them raw? Without boiling?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Because you will be dreadfully ill, eating uncooked food in this country.”

“Like fruit, like apples. You eat them raw.”

He was unconvinced. “More often cooked, or preserved or dried. And anyway, that is a fruit and not leaves. But what sorts of vegetables do you want?”

“Lactuca,” she said.

“Lactuca?” he repeated. “I have never heard of it.”

She sighed. “I know. You none of you seem to know anything of vegetables. Lactuca is like…” She searched her mind for the truly terrible vegetable that she had been forced to eat, boiled into a pulp at one dinner at Greenwich. “Samphire,” she said. “The closest thing you have to lactuca is probably samphire. But you eat lactuca without cooking and it is crisp and sweet.”

“Vegetables? Crisp?”

“Yes,” she said patiently.

“And you eat this in Spain?”

She nearly laughed at his appalled expression. “Yes. You would like it.”

“And can we grow it here?”

“I think he is telling me: no. He has never heard of such a thing. He has no seeds. He does not know where we would find such seeds. He does not think it would grow here.” She looked up at the blue sky with the scudding rain clouds. “Perhaps he is right,” she said, a little weariness in her voice. “I am sure that it needs much sunshine.”

Arthur turned to the gardener. “Ever heard of a plant called lactuca?”

“No, Your Grace,” the man said, his head bowed. “I’m sorry, Your Grace. Perhaps it is a Spanish plant. It sounds very barbaric. Is Her Royal Highness saying they eat grass there? Like sheep?”

Arthur’s lip quivered. “No, it is a herb, I think. I will ask her.”

He turned to Catalina and took her hand and tucked it in the crook of his arm. “You know, sometimes in summer, it is very sunny and very hot here. Truly. You would find the midday sun was too hot. You would have to sit in the shade.”

She looked disbelievingly from the cold mud to the thickening clouds.

“Not now, I know; but in summer. I have leaned against this wall and found it warm to the touch. You know, we grow strawberries and raspberries and peaches. All the fruit that you grow in Spain.”

“Oranges?”

“Well, perhaps not oranges,” he conceded.

“Lemons? Olives?”

He bridled. “Yes, indeed.”

She looked suspiciously at him. “Dates?”

“In Cornwall,” he asserted, straight-faced. “Of course it is warmer in Cornwall.”

“Sugarcane? Rice? Pineapples?”

He tried to say yes, but he could not repress the giggles and she crowed with laughter, and fell on him.

When they were steady again he glanced around the inner bailey and said, “Come on, nobody will miss us for a while,” and led her down the steps to the little sally port and let them out of the hidden door.

A small path led them to the hillside which fell away steeply from the castle down to the river. A few lambs scampered off as they approached, a lad wandering after them. Arthur slid his arm around her waist and she let herself fall into pace with him.

“We do grow peaches,” he assured her. “Not the other things, of course. But I am sure we can grow your lactuca, whatever it is. All we need is a gardener who can bring the seeds and who has already grown the things you want. Why don’t you write to the gardener at the Alhambra and ask him to send you someone?”

“Could I send for a gardener?” she asked incredulously.

“My love, you are going to be Queen of England. You can send for a regiment of gardeners.”

“Really?”

Arthur laughed at the delight dawning on her face. “At once. Did you not realize it?”

“No! But where should he garden? There is no room against the castle wall, and if we are to grow fruit as well as vegetables…”

“You are Princess of Wales! You can plant your garden wherever you please. You shall have all of Kent if you want it, my darling.”

“Kent?”

“We grow apples and hops there, I think we might have a try at lactuca.”

Catalina laughed with him. “I didn’t think. I didn’t dream of sending for a gardener. If only I had brought one in the first place. I have all these useless ladies-in-waiting and I need a gardener.”

“You could swap him for Doña Elvira.”

She gurgled with laughter.

“Ah, God, we are blessed,” he said simply. “In each other and in our lives. You shall have anything you want, always. I swear it. Do you want to write to your mother? She can send you a couple of good men and I will get some land turned over at once.”

“I will write to Juana,” she decided. “In the Netherlands. She is in the north of Christendom like me. She must know what will grow in this weather. I shall write to her and see what she has done.”

“And we shall eat lactuca!” he said, kissing her fingers. “All day. We shall eat nothing but lactuca, like sheep grazing grass, whatever it is.”

“Tell me a story.”

“No, you tell me something.”

“If you will tell me about the fall of Granada again.”

“I will tell you. But you have to explain something to me.”

Arthur stretched out and pulled her so that she was lying across the bed, her head on his shoulder. She could feel the rise and fall of his smooth chest as he breathed and hear the gentle thud of his heartbeat, constant as love.

“I shall explain everything.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “I am extraordinarily wise today. You should have heard me after dinner tonight dispensing justice.”

“You are very fair,” she conceded. “I do love it when you give a judgment.”

“I am a Solomon,” he said. “They will call me Arthur the Good.”

“Arthur the Wise,” she suggested.

“Arthur the Magnificent.”

Catalina giggled. “But I want you to explain to me something that I heard about your mother.”

“Oh yes?”

“One of the English ladies-in-waiting told me that she had been betrothed to the tyrant Richard. I thought I must have misunderstood her. We were speaking French and I thought I must have had it wrong.”

“Oh, that story,” he said with a little turn of the head.

“Is it not true? I hope I have not offended you?”

“No, not at all. It’s a tale often told.”

“It cannot be true?”

“Who knows? Only my mother and Richard the tyrant can know what took place. And one of them is dead and the other is silent as the grave.”

“Will you tell me?” she asked tentatively. “Or should we not speak of it at all?”

He shrugged. “There are two stories. The well-known one and its shadow. The story that everyone knows is that my mother fled into sanctuary with her mother and sisters, they were hiding in a church all together. They knew if they left they would be arrested by Richard the Usurper and would disappear into the Tower like her young brothers. No one knew if the princes were alive or dead, but nobody had seen them, everyone feared they were dead. My mother wrote to my father—well, she was ordered to by her mother—she told him that if he would come to England, a Tudor from the Lancaster line, then she, a York princess, would marry him, and the old feud between the two families would be over forever. She told him to come and save her, and know her love. He received the letter, he raised an army, he came to find the princess, he married her and brought peace to England.”

“That is what you told me before. It is a very good story.”

Arthur nodded.

“And the story you don’t tell?”

Despite himself he giggled. “It’s rather scandalous. They say that she was not in sanctuary at all. They say that she left the sanctuary and her mother and sisters. She went to court. King Richard’s wife was dead and he was looking for another. She accepted the proposal of King Richard. She would have married her uncle, the tyrant, the man who murdered her brothers.”

Catalina’s hand stole over her mouth to cover her gasp of shock, her eyes were wide. “No!”

“So they say.”

“The queen, your mother?”

“Herself,” he said. “Actually, they say worse. That she and Richard were betrothed as his wife lay dying. That is why there is always such enmity between her and my grandmother. My grandmother does not trust her, but she will never say why.”

“How could she?” she demanded.

“How could she not?” he returned. “If you look at it from her point of view, she was a princess of York, her father was dead, her mother was the enemy of the king trapped in sanctuary, as much in prison as if she were in the Tower. If she wanted to live, she would have to find some way into the favor of the king. If she wanted to be acknowledged as a princess at all, she would have to have his recognition. If she wanted to be Queen of England she would have to marry him.”

“But surely, she could have…” she began and then she fell silent.

“No.” He shook his head. “You see? She was a princess, she had very little choice. If she wanted to live she would have to obey the king. If she wanted to be queen she would have to marry him.”

“She could have raised an army on her own account.”

“Not in England,” he reminded her. “She would have to marry the King of England to be its queen. It was her only way.”

Catalina was silent for a moment. “Thank God that for me to be queen I had to marry you, that my destiny brought me so easily here.”

He smiled. “Thank God we are happy with our destiny. For we would have married, and you would have been Queen of England, whether you had liked me or not. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “There is never a choice for a princess.”

He nodded.

“But your grandmother, My Lady the King’s Mother, must have planned your mother’s wedding to your father. Why does she not forgive her? She was part of the plan.”

“Those two powerful women, my father’s mother and my mother’s mother, brokered the deal between them like a pair of washerwomen selling stolen linen.”

She gave a little squeak of shock.

Arthur chuckled. He found that he dearly loved surprising her. “Dreadful, isn’t it?” he replied calmly. “My mother’s mother was probably the most hated woman in England at one time.”

“And where is she now?”

He shrugged. “She was at court for a while, but My Lady the King’s Mother disliked her so much she got rid of her. She was famously beautiful, you know, and a schemer. My grandmother accused her of plotting against my father and he chose to believe her.”

“She is never dead? They never executed her!”

“No. He put her into a convent and she never comes to court.”

She was aghast. “Your grandmother had the queen’s own mother confined in a convent?”

He nodded, his face grave. “Truly. You be warned by this, beloved. My grandmother welcomes no one to court that might distract from her own power. Make sure you never cross her.”

Catalina shook her head. “I never would. I am absolutely terrified of her.”

“So am I!” he laughed. “But I know her, and I warn you. She will stop at nothing to maintain the power of her son, and of her family. Nothing will distract her from this. She loves no one but him. Not me, not her husbands, no one but him.”

“Not you?”

He shook his head. “She does not even love him, as you would understand it. He is the boy that she decided was born to be king. She sent him away when he was little more than a baby for his safety. She saw him survive his boyhood. Then she ordered him into the face of terrible danger to claim the throne. She could only love a king.”

She nodded. “He is her pretender.”

“Exactly. She claimed the throne for him. She made him king. He is king.”

He saw her grave face. “Now, enough of this. You have to sing me your song.”

“Which one?”

“Is there another one about the fall of Granada?”

“Dozens, I should think.”

“Sing me one,” he commanded. He piled a couple of extra cushions behind his head, and she kneeled up before him, tossed back her mane of red hair and began to sing in a low sweet voice:

“There was crying in Granada when the sun was going down

Some calling on the Trinity, some calling on Mahoun,

Here passed away the Koran and therein the Cross was borne,

And here was heard the Christian bell and there the Moorish

horn.

Te Deum Laudamus! Was up the Alcala sung:

Down from the Alhambra minarets were all the crescents flung,

The arms thereon of Aragon, they with Castile display.

One king comes in in triumph, one weeping goes away.”

He was silent for long minutes. She stretched out again beside him on her back, looking, without seeing, the embroidered tester of the bed over their heads.

“It’s always like that, isn’t it?” he remarked. “The rise of one is the fall of another. I shall be king but only at my father’s death. And at my death, my son will reign.”

“Shall we call him Arthur?” she asked. “Or Henry for your father?”

“Arthur is a good name,” he said. “A good name for a new royal family in Britain. Arthur for Camelot, and Arthur for me. We don’t want another Henry; my brother is enough for anyone. Let’s call him Arthur, and his older sister will be called Mary.”

“Mary? I wanted to call her Isabella, for my mother.”

“You can call the next girl Isabella. But I want our firstborn to be called Mary.”

“Arthur must be first.”

He shook his head. “First we will have Mary so that we learn how to do it all with a girl.”

“How to do it all?”

He gestured. “The christening, the confinement, the birthing, the whole fuss and worry, the wet nurse, the rockers, the nursemaids. My grandmother has written a great book to rule how it shall be done. It is dreadfully complicated. But if we have our Mary first then our nursery is all ready, and in your next confinement we shall put our son and heir into the cradle.”

She rose up and turned on him in mock indignation. “You would practice being a father on my daughter!” she exclaimed.

“You wouldn’t want to start with my son,” he protested. “This will be the rose of the rose of England. That’s what they call me, remember: ‘the rose of England.’ I think you should deal with my little rosebud, my little blossom, with great respect.”

“She is to be Isabella, then,” Catalina stipulated. “If she comes first, she shall be Isabella.”

“Mary, for the queen of heaven.”

“Isabella, for the Queen of Spain.”

“Mary, to give thanks for you coming to me. The sweetest gift that heaven could have given me.”

Catalina melted into his arms. “Isabella,” she said as he kissed her.

“Mary,” he whispered into her ear. “And let us make her now.”

It is morning. I lie awake. It is dawn and I can hear the birds slowly starting to sing. The sun is coming up and through the lattice window I can see a glimpse of blue sky. Perhaps it will be a warm day, perhaps the summer is coming at last.

Beside me, Arthur is breathing quietly and steadily. I can feel my heart swell with love for him, I put my hand on the fair curls of his head and wonder if any woman has ever loved a man as I love him.

I stir and put my other hand on the warm roundness of my belly. Can it be possible that last night we made a child? Is there already, safe in my belly, a baby who will be called Mary, Princess Mary, who will be the rose of the rose of England?

I hear the footsteps of the maid moving about in my presence chamber, bringing wood for the fire, raking up the embers. Still Arthur does not stir. I put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” I say, my voice warm with love. “The servants are outside, you must go.”

He is damp with sweat, the skin of his shoulder is cold and clammy.

“My love?” I ask. “Are you well?”

He opens his eyes and smiles at me. “Don’t tell me it’s morning already. I am so weary I could sleep for another day.”

“It is.”

“Oh, why didn’t you wake me earlier? I love you so much in the morning and now I can’t have you till tonight.”

I put my face against his chest. “Don’t. I slept late too. We keep late hours. And you will have to go now.”

Arthur holds me close, as if he cannot bear to let me go; but I can hear the groom of the chamber open the outside door to bring hot water. I draw myself away from him. It is like tearing off a layer of my own skin. I cannot bear to move away from him.

Suddenly, I am struck by the warmth of his body, the tangled heat of the sheets around us. “You are so hot!”

“It is desire,” he says, smiling. “I shall have to go to Mass to cool down.”

He gets out of bed and throws his gown around his shoulders. He gives a little stagger.

“Beloved, are you all right?” I ask.

“A little dizzy, nothing more,” he says. “Blind with desire, and it is all your fault. See you in chapel. Pray for me, sweetheart.”

I get up from bed and unbolt the battlements door to let him out. He sways a little as he goes up the stone steps, then I see him straighten his shoulders to breathe in the fresh air. I close the door behind him, and then go back to my bed. I glance round the room, nobody could know that he has been here. In a moment, Doña Elvira taps on my door and comes in with the maid-in-waiting and behind them a couple of maids with the jug of hot water, and my dress for the day.

“You slept late, you must be overtired,” Doña Elvira says disapprovingly; but I am so peaceful and so happy that I cannot even be troubled to reply.

In the chapel they could do no more than exchange hidden smiles. After Mass, Arthur went riding and Catalina went to break her fast. After breakfast was her time to study with her chaplain and Catalina sat at the table in the window with him, their books before them, and studied the letters of St. Paul.

Margaret Pole came in as Catalina was closing her book. “The prince begs your attendance in his rooms,” she said.

Catalina rose to her feet. “Has something happened?”

“I think he is unwell. He has sent away everyone but the grooms of the body and his servers.”

Catalina left at once, followed by Doña Elvira and Lady Margaret. The prince’s rooms were crowded by the usual hangers-on of the little court: men seeking favor or attention, petitioners asking for justice, the curious come to stare, and the host of lesser servants and functionaries. Catalina went through them all to the double doors of Arthur’s private chamber, and went in.

He was seated in a chair by the fire, his face very pale. Doña Elvira and Lady Margaret waited at the door as Catalina went quickly towards him.

“Are you ill, my love?” she asked quickly.

He managed a smile but she saw it was an effort. “I have taken some kind of chill, I think,” he said. “Come no closer. I don’t want to pass it to you.”

“Are you hot?” she asked fearfully, thinking of the Sweat which came on like a fever and left a corpse.

“No, I feel cold.”

“Well, it is not surprising in this country where it either snows or rains all the time.”

He managed another smile.

Catalina looked around and saw Lady Margaret. “Lady Margaret, we must call the prince’s physician.”

“I sent my servants to find him already,” she said, coming forwards.

“I don’t want a fuss made,” Arthur said irritably. “I just wanted to tell you, Princess, that I cannot come to dinner.”

Her eyes went to his. “How shall we be alone?” was the unspoken question.

“May I dine in your rooms?” she asked. “Can we dine alone, privately, since you are ill?”

“Yes, let’s,” he ruled.

“See the doctor first,” Lady Margaret advised. “If Your Grace permits. He can advise what you should eat and if it is safe for the princess to be with you.”

“He has no disease,” Catalina insisted. “He says he just feels tired. It is just the cold air here, or the damp. It was cold yesterday and he was riding half the day.”

There was a tap on the door and a voice called out. “Dr. Bereworth is here, Your Grace.”

Arthur raised his hand in permission, Doña Elvira opened the door and the man came into the room.

“The prince feels cold and tired.” Catalina went to him at once, speaking rapidly in French. “Is he ill? I don’t think he’s ill. What do you think?”

The doctor bowed low to her and to the prince. He bowed to Lady Margaret and Doña Elvira.

“I am sorry, I don’t understand,” he said uncomfortably in English to Lady Margaret. “What is the princess saying?”

Catalina clapped her hands together in frustration. “The prince…” she began in English.

Margaret Pole came to her side. “His Grace is unwell,” she said.

“May I speak with him alone?” he asked.

Arthur nodded. He tried to rise from the chair but he almost staggered. The doctor was at once at his side, supporting him, and led him into his bedchamber.

“He cannot be ill.” Catalina turned to Doña Elvira and spoke to her in Spanish. “He was well last night. Just this morning he felt hot. But he said he was only tired. But now he can hardly stand. He cannot beill.”

“Who knows what illness a man might take in this rain and fog?” the duenna replied dourly. “It’s a wonder that you are not sick yourself. It is a wonder that any of us can bear it.”

“He is not sick,” Catalina said. “He is just overtired. He rode for a long time yesterday. And it was cold, there was a very cold wind. I noticed it myself.”

“A wind like this can kill a man,” Doña Elvira said gloomily. “It blows so cold and so damp.”

“Stop it!” Catalina said, clapping her hands to her ears. “I won’t hear another word. He is just tired, overtired. And perhaps he has taken a chill. There is no need to speak of killing winds and damp.”

Lady Margaret stepped forwards and gently took Catalina’s hands. “Be patient, Princess,” she counseled. “Dr. Bereworth is a very good doctor, and he has known the prince from childhood. The prince is a strong young man and his health is good. It is probably nothing to worry about at all. If Dr. Bereworth is concerned we will send for the king’s own physician from London. We will soon have him well again.”

Catalina nodded, and turned to sit by the window and look out. The sky had clouded over, the sun was quite gone. It was raining again, the raindrops chasing down the small panes of glass. Catalina watched them. She tried to keep her mind from the death of her brother who had loved his wife so much, who had been looking forward to the birth of their son. Juan had died within days of taking sick, and no one had ever known what was wrong with him.

“I shan’t think of him, not of poor Juan,” Catalina whispered to herself. “The cases are not alike at all. Juan was always slight, little; but Arthur is strong.”

The physician seemed to take a long time and when he came out of the bedchamber, Arthur was not with him. Catalina who had risen from her seat as soon as the door opened, peeped around him to see Arthur lying on the bed, half undressed, half asleep.

“I think his grooms of the body should prepare him for bed,” the doctor said. “He is very weary. He would be better for rest. If they take care, they can get him into bed without waking him.”

“Is he ill?” Catalina demanded, speaking slowly in Latin. “Aegrotat? Is he very ill?”

The doctor spread his hands. “He has a fever,” he said cautiously in slow French. “I can give him a draft to bring down his fever.”

“Do you know what it is?” Lady Margaret asked, her voice very low. “It’s not the Sweat, is it?”

“Please God it is not. And there are no other cases in the town, as far as I know. But he should be kept quiet and allowed to rest. I shall go and make up this draft and I will come back.”

The low-voiced English was incomprehensible to Catalina. “What does he say? What did he say?” she demanded of Lady Margaret.

“Nothing more than you heard,” the older woman assured her. “He has a fever and needs rest. Let me get his men to undress him and put him properly to bed. If he is better tonight, you can dine with him. I know he would like that.”

“Where is he going?” Catalina cried out as the doctor bowed and went to the door. “He must stay and watch the prince!”

“He is going to make a draft to bring down his fever. He will be back at once. The prince will have the best of care, Your Grace. We love him as you do. We will not neglect him.”

“I know you would not…it is only…Will the doctor be long?”

“He will be as quick as he can. And see, the prince is asleep. Sleep will be his best medicine. He can rest and grow strong and dine with you tonight.”

“You think he will be better tonight?”

“If it is just a little fever and fatigue, then he will be better in a few days,” Lady Margaret said firmly.

“I will watch over his sleep,” Catalina said.

Lady Margaret opened the door and beckoned to the prince’s chief gentlemen. She gave them their orders and then she drew the princess through the crowd to her own rooms. “Come, Your Grace,” she said. “Come for a walk in the inner bailey with me and then I shall go back to his rooms and see that everything is comfortable for him.”

“I shall go back now,” Catalina insisted. “I shall watch over his sleep.”

Margaret glanced at Doña Elvira. “You should stay away from his rooms in case he does have a fever,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly in French, so that the duenna could understand her. “Your health is most important, Princess. I would not forgive myself if anything happened to either of you.”

Doña Elvira stepped forwards and narrowed her lips. Lady Margaret knew she could be relied on to keep the princess from danger.

“But you said he only had a slight fever. I can go to him?”

“Let us wait to see what the doctor has to say.” Lady Margaret lowered her voice. “If you should be with child, dear Princess, we would not want you to take his fever.”

“But I will dine with him.”

“If he is well enough.”

“But he will want to see me!”

“Depend upon it.” Lady Margaret smiled. “When his fever has broken and he is better this evening and sitting up and eating his dinner, he will want to see you. You have to be patient.”

Catalina nodded. “If I go now, do you swear that you will stay with him all the time?”

“I will go back now, if you will walk outside and then go to your room and read or study or sew.”

“I’ll go!” said Catalina, instantly obedient. “I’ll go to my rooms if you will stay with him.”

“At once,” Lady Margaret promised.

This small garden is like a prison yard. I walk round and round in the herb garden, and the rain drizzles over everything like tears. My rooms are no better, my privy chamber is like a cell, I cannot bear to have anyone with me, and yet I cannot bear to be alone. I have made the ladies sit in the presence chamber, their unending chatter makes me want to scream with irritation. But when I am alone in my room I long for company. I want someone to hold my hand and tell me that everything will be all right.

I go down the narrow stone stairs and across the cobbles to the round chapel. A cross and a stone altar are set in the rounded wall, a light burning before it. It is a place of perfect peace; but I can find no peace. I fold my cold hands inside my sleeves and hug myself and I walk around the circular wall—it is thirty-six steps to the door—and then I walk the circle again, like a donkey on a treadmill. I am praying; but I have no faith that I am heard.

“I am Catalina, Princess of Spain and of Wales,” I remind myself. “I am Catalina, beloved of God, especially favored by God. Nothing can go wrong for me. Nothing as bad as this could ever go wrong for me. It is God’s will that I should marry Arthur and unite the kingdoms of Spain and England. God will not let anything happen to Arthur nor to me. I know that He favors my mother and me above all others. This fear must be sent to try me. But I will not be afraid, because I know that nothing will ever go wrong for me.”

Catalina waited in her rooms, sending her women every hour to ask how her husband did. The first few hours they said he was still sleeping, the doctor had made his draft and was standing by his bed, waiting for him to wake. Then, at three in the afternoon, they said that he had wakened but was very hot and feverish. He had taken the draft and they were waiting to see his fever cool. At four he was worse, not better, and the doctor was making up a different prescription.

He would take no dinner. He would just drink some cool ale and the doctor’s cures for fever.

“Go and ask him if he will see me?” Catalina ordered one of her Englishwomen. “Make sure you speak to Lady Margaret. She promised me that I should dine with him. Remind her.”

The woman went and came back with a grave face. “Princess, they are all very anxious,” she said. “They have sent for a physician from London. Dr. Bereworth, who has been watching over him, does not know why the fever does not cool down. Lady Margaret is there and Sir Richard Pole, Sir William Thomas, Sir Henry Vernon, Sir Richard Croft—they are all waiting outside his chamber and you cannot be admitted to see him. They say he is wandering in his mind.”

“I must go to the chapel. I must pray,” Catalina said instantly.

She threw a veil over her head and went back to the round chapel. To her dismay, Prince Arthur’s confessor was at the altar, his head bowed low in supplication. Some of the greatest men of the town and castle were seated around the wall, their heads bowed. Catalina slipped into the room and fell to her knees. She rested her chin on her hands and scrutinized the hunched shoulders of the priest for any sign that his prayers were being heard. There was no way of telling. She closed her eyes.

Dearest God, spare Arthur, spare my darling husband, Arthur. He is only a boy, I am only a girl, we have had no time together, no time at all. You know what a kingdom we will make if he is spared. You know what plans we have for this country, what a holy castle we will make from this land, how we shall hammer the Moors, how we shall defend this kingdom from the Scots. Dear God, in Your mercy spare Arthur and let him come back to me. We want to have our children: Mary, who is to be the rose of the rose, and our son Arthur, who will be the third Holy Roman Catholic Tudor king for England. Let us do as we have promised. Oh, dear Lord, be merciful and spare him. Dear Lady, intercede for us and spare him. Sweet Jesus, spare him. It is I, Catalina, who asks this, and I ask in the name of my mother, Queen Isabella, who has worked all her life in your service, who is the most Christian queen, who has served on your crusades. She is beloved of You, I am beloved of You. Do not, I beg You, disappoint me.

It grew dark as Catalina prayed but she did not notice. It was late when Doña Elvira touched her gently on the shoulder and said, “Infanta, you should have some dinner and go to bed.”

Catalina turned a white face to her duenna. “What word?” she asked.

“They say he is worse.”

Sweet Jesus, spare him, sweet Jesus, spare me, sweet Jesus, spare England. Say that Arthur is no worse.

In the morning they said that he had passed a good night, but the gossip among the servers of the body was that he was sinking. The fever had reached such a height that he was wandering in his mind, sometimes he thought he was in his nursery with his sisters and his brother, sometimes he thought he was at his wedding, dressed in brilliant white satin, and sometimes, most oddly, he thought he was in a fantastic palace. He spoke of a courtyard of myrtles, a rectangle of water like a mirror reflecting a building of gold, and a circular sweep of flocks of swifts who went round and round all the sunny day long.

“I shall see him,” Catalina announced to Lady Margaret at noon.

“Princess, it may be the Sweat,” her ladyship said bluntly. “I cannot allow you to go close to him. I cannot allow you to take any infection. I should be failing in my duty if I let you go too close to him.”

“Your duty is to me!” Catalina snapped.

The woman, a princess herself, never wavered. “My duty is to England,” she said. “And if you are carrying a Tudor heir then my duty is to that child, as well as to you. Do not quarrel with me, please, Princess. I cannot allow you to go closer than the foot of his bed.”

“Let me go there, then,” Catalina said, like a little girl. “Please just let me see him.”

Lady Margaret bowed her head and led the way to the royal chambers. The crowds in the presence chamber had swollen in numbers as the word had gone around the town that their prince was fighting for his life; but they were silent, silent as a crowd in mourning. They were waiting and praying for the rose of England. A few men saw Catalina, her face veiled in her lace mantilla, and called out a blessing on her, then one man stepped forwards and dropped to his knee. “God bless you, Princess of Wales,” he said. “And may the prince rise from his bed and be merry with you again.”

“Amen,” Catalina said through cold lips, and went on.

The double doors to the inner chamber were thrown open and Catalina went in. A makeshift apothecary’s room had been set up in the prince’s privy chamber—a trestle table with large glass jars of ingredients, a pestle and mortar, a chopping board—and half a dozen men in the gabardine gowns of physicians were gathered together. Catalina paused, looking for Dr. Bereworth.

“Doctor?”

He came towards her at once and dropped to his knee. His face was grave. “Princess.”

“What news of my husband?” she said, speaking slowly and clearly for him in French.

“I am sorry, he is no better.”

“But he is not worse,” she suggested. “He is getting better.”

He shook his head. “Il est très malade,” he said simply.

Catalina heard the words but it was as if she had forgotten the language. She could not translate them. She turned to Lady Margaret. “He says that he is better?” she asked.

Lady Margaret shook her head. “He says that he is worse,” she said honestly.

“But they will have something to give him?” She turned to the doctor. “Vous avez un médicament?”

He gestured at the table behind him, at the apothecary.

“Oh, if only we had a Moorish doctor!” Catalina cried out. “They have the greatest skill, there is no one like them. They had the best universities for medicines before…Ifonly I had brought a doctor with me! Arab medicine is the finest in the world!”

“We are doing everything we can,” the doctor said stiffly.

Catalina tried to smile. “I am sure,” she said. “I just so wish…Well! Can I see him?”

A quick glance between Lady Margaret and the doctor showed that this had been a matter of some anxious discussion.

“I will see if he is awake,” he said, and went through the door.

Catalina waited. She could not believe that only yesterday morning Arthur had slipped from her bed complaining that she had not woken him early enough to make love. Now he was so ill that she could not even touch his hand.

The doctor opened the door. “You can come to the threshold, Princess,” he said. “But for the sake of your own health, and for the health of any child you could be carrying, you should come no closer.”

Catalina stepped up quickly to the door. Lady Margaret pressed a pomander stuffed with cloves and herbs in her hand. Catalina held it to her nose. The acrid smell made her eyes water as she peered into the darkened room.

Arthur was sprawled on the bed, his nightgown pulled down for modesty, his face flushed with fever. His blond hair was dark with sweat, his face gaunt. He looked much older than his fifteen years. His eyes were sunk deep into his face, the skin beneath his eyes stained brown.

“Your wife is here,” the doctor said quietly to him.

Arthur’s eyes fluttered open and she saw them narrow as he tried to focus on the bright doorway and Catalina, standing before him, her face white with shock.

“My love,” he said. “Amo te.”

“Amo te,” she whispered. “They say I cannot come closer.”

“Don’t come closer,” he said, his voice a thread. “I love you.”

“I love you too!” She could hear that her voice was strained with tears. “You will be well?”

He shook his head, too weary to speak.

“Arthur?” she said demandingly. “You will get better?”

He rested his head back on his hot pillow, gathering his strength. “I will try, beloved. I will try so hard. For you. For us.”

“Is there anything you want?” she asked. “Anything I can get for you?” She glanced around. There was nothing that she could do for him. There was nothing that would help. If she had brought a Moorish doctor with her, if her parents had not destroyed the learning of the Arab universities, if the church had allowed the study of medicine, and not called knowledge heresy…

“All I want is to live with you,” he said, his voice a thin thread.

She gave a little sob. “And I you.”

“The prince should rest now, and you should not linger here.” The doctor stepped forwards.

“Please, let me stay!” she cried in a whisper. “Please allow me. I beg you. Please let me be with him.”

Lady Margaret put a hand around her waist and drew her back. “You shall come again, if you leave now,” she promised. “The prince needs to rest.”

“I shall come back,” Catalina called to him, and saw the little gesture of his hand which told her that he had heard her. “I shall not fail you.”

Catalina went to the chapel to pray for him, but she could not pray. All she could do was think of him, his white face on the white pillows. All she could do was feel the throb of desire for him. They had been married only one hundred and forty days, they had been passionate lovers for only ninety-four nights. They had promised that they would have a lifetime together, she could not believe that she was on her knees now, praying for his life.

This cannot be happening, he was well only yesterday. This is some terrible dream and in a moment I will wake up and he will kiss me and call me foolish. Nobody can take sick so quickly, nobody can go from strength and beauty to being so desperately ill in such a short time. In a moment I will wake up. This cannot be happening. I cannot pray, but it does not matter that I cannot pray because it is not really happening. A dream prayer would mean nothing. A dream illness means nothing. I am not a superstitious heathen to fear dreams. I shall wake up in a moment and we will laugh at my fears.

At dinnertime she rose up, dipped her finger in the holy water, crossed herself, and with the water still wet on her forehead went back to his chambers, with Doña Elvira following, close behind.

The crowds in the halls outside the rooms and in the presence chamber were thicker than ever, women as well as men, silent with inarticulate grief. They made way for the princess without a word but a quiet murmur of blessings. Catalina went through them, looking neither to left nor right, through the presence chamber, past the apothecary bench, to the very door of his bedchamber.

The guard stepped to one side. Catalina tapped lightly on the door and pushed it open.

They were bending over him on the bed. Catalina heard him cough, a thick cough as though his throat were bubbling with water.

“Madre de Dios,” she said softly. “Holy Mother of God, keep Arthur safe.”

The doctor turned at her whisper. His face was pale. “Keep back!” he said urgently. “It is the Sweat.”

At that most feared word Doña Elvira stepped back and laid hold of Catalina’s gown as if she would drag her from danger.

“Loose me!” Catalina snapped and tugged her gown from the duenna’s hands. “I will come no closer, but I have to speak with him,” she said steadily.

The doctor heard the resolution in her voice. “Princess, he is too weak.”

“Leave us,” she said.

“Princess.”

“I have to speak to him. This is the business of the kingdom.”

One glance at her determined face told him that she would not be denied. He went past her with his head low, his assistants following behind him. Catalina made a little gesture with her hand and Doña Elvira retreated. Catalina stepped over the threshold and pushed the door shut on them.

She saw Arthur stir in protest.

“I won’t come any closer,” she assured him. “I swear it. But I have to be with you. I cannot bear—” she broke off.

His face when he turned it to her was shiny with sweat, his hair as wet as when he came in from hunting in the rain. His young, round face was strained as the disease leached the life out of him.

“Amo te,” he said through lips that were cracked and dark with fever.

“Amo te,” she replied.

“I am dying,” he said bleakly.

Catalina did not interrupt nor deny him. He saw her straighten a little, as if she had staggered beneath a mortal blow.

He took a rasping breath. “But you must still be Queen of England.”

“What?”

He took a shaky breath. “Love—obey me. You have sworn to obey me.”

“I will do anything.”

“Marry Harry. Be queen. Have our children.”

“What?” She was dizzy with shock. She could hardly make out what he was saying.

“England needs a great queen,” he said. “Especially with him. He’s not fit to rule. You must teach him. Build my forts. Build my navy. Defend against the Scots. Have my daughter Mary. Have my son Arthur. Let me live through you.”

“My love—”

“Let me do it,” he whispered longingly. “Let me keep England safe through you. Let me live through you.”

“I am your wife,” she said fiercely. “Not his.”

He nodded. “Tell them you are not.”

She staggered at that and felt for the door to support her.

“Tell them I could not do it.” A hint of a smile came to his drained face. “Tell them I was unmanned. Then marry Harry.”

“You hate Harry!” she burst out. “You cannot want me to marry him. He is a child! And I love you.”

“He will be king,” he said desperately. “So you will be queen. Marry him. Please. Beloved. For me.”

The door behind her opened a crack and Lady Margaret said quietly, “You must not exhaust him, Princess.”

“I have to go,” Catalina said desperately to the still figure in the bed.

“Promise me…”

“I will come back. You will get better.”

“Please.”

Lady Margaret opened the door wider and took Catalina’s hand. “For his own good,” she said quietly. “You have to leave him.”

Catalina turned away from the room; she looked back over her shoulder. Arthur lifted a hand a few inches from the rich coverlet. “Promise,” he said. “Please. For my sake. Promise. Promise me now, beloved.”

“I promise,” burst out of her.

His hand fell; she heard him give a little sigh of relief.

They were the last words they said to each other.

2ND APRIL 1502

At six o’clock, vespers, Arthur’s confessor, Dr. Eldenham, administered extreme unction and Arthur died soon after. Catalina kneeled on the threshold as the priest anointed her husband with the oil and bowed her head for the blessing. She did not rise from her knees until they told her that her boy husband was dead and she was a widow of sixteen years old.

Lady Margaret on one side and Doña Elvira on the other half carried and half dragged Catalina to her bedchamber. Catalina slipped between the cold sheets of her bed and knew that however long she waited there, she would not hear Arthur’s quiet footstep on the battlements outside her room and his tap on the door. She would never again open her door and step into his arms. She would never again be snatched up and carried to her bed, having wanted all day to be in his arms.

“I cannot believe it,” she said brokenly.

“Drink this,” Lady Margaret said. “The physician left it for you. It is a sleeping draft. I will wake you at noon.”

“I cannot believe it.”

“Princess, drink.”

Catalina drank it down, ignoring the bitter taste. More than anything else she wanted to be asleep and never wake again.

That night I dreamed I was on the top of the great gateway of the red fort that guards and encircles the Alhambra Palace. Above my head the standards of Castile and Aragon were flapping like the sails on Cristóbal Colón’s ships. Shading my eyes from the autumn sun, looking out over the great plain of Granada, I saw the simple, familiar beauty of the land, the tawny soil intersected by a thousand little ditches carrying water from one field to another. Below me was the white-walled town of Granada, even now, ten years on from our conquest, still, unmistakably a Moorish town: the houses all arranged around shady courtyards, a fountain splashing seductively in the center, the gardens rich with the perfume of late-flowering roses, and the boughs of the trees heavy with fruit.

Someone was calling for me: “Where is the Infanta?”

And in my dream I answered: “I am Katherine, Queen of England. That is my name now.”

They buried Arthur, Prince of Wales, on St. George’s Day, this first prince of all England, after a nightmare journey from Ludlow to Worcester when the rain lashed down so hard that they could barely make way. The lanes were awash, the water meadows knee-high in floodwater and the Teme had burst its banks and they could not get through the fords. They had to use bullock carts for the funeral procession—horses could not have made their way through the mire on the lanes—and all the plumage and black cloth was sodden by the time they finally straggled into Worcester.

Hundreds turned out to see the miserable cortege go through the streets to the cathedral. Hundreds wept for the loss of the rose of England. After they lowered his coffin into the vault beneath the choir, the servants of his household broke their staves of office and threw them into the grave with their lost master. It was over for them. Everything they had hoped for, in the service of such a young and promising prince was finished. It was over for Arthur. It felt as if everything were over and could never be set right again.

No, no, no.

For the first month of mourning Catalina stayed in her rooms. Lady Margaret and Doña Elvira gave out that she was ill, but not in danger. In truth they feared for her reason. She did not rave or cry, she did not rail against fate or weep for her mother’s comfort. She lay in utter silence, her face turned towards the wall. Her family tendency to despair tempted her like a sin. She knew she must not give way to weeping and madness, for if she once let go she would never be able to stop. For the long month of seclusion Catalina gritted her teeth and it took all her willpower and all her strength to stop herself from screaming out in grief.

When they woke her in the morning she said she was tired. They did not know that she hardly dared to move for fear that she would moan aloud. After they had dressed her, she would sit on her chair like a stone. As soon as they allowed it, she would go back to bed, lie on her back, and look up at the brightly colored tester that she had seen with eyes half closed by love, and know that Arthur would never pull her into the crook of his arm again.

They summoned the physician, Dr. Bereworth, but when she saw him, her mouth trembled and her eyes filled with tears. She turned her head away from him and she went swiftly into her bedchamber and closed the door on them all. She could not bear to see him, the doctor who had let Arthur die, the friends who had watched it happen. She could not bear to speak to him. She felt a murderous rage at the sight of the doctor who had failed to save the boy. She wished him dead, and not Arthur.

“I am afraid her mind is affected,” Lady Margaret said to the doctor as they heard the latch click on the privy-chamber door. “She does not speak, she does not even weep for him.”

“Will she eat?”

“If food is put before her and if she is reminded to eat.”

“Get someone, someone familiar—her confessor, perhaps—to read to her. Encouraging words.”

“She will see no one.”

“Might she be with child?” he whispered. It was the only question that now mattered.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “She has said nothing.”

“She is mourning him,” he said. “She is mourning like a young woman, for the young husband she has lost. We should let her be. Let her grieve. She will have to rise up soon enough. Is she to go back to court?”

“The king commands it,” Lady Margaret said. “The queen is sending her own litter.”

“Well, when it comes, she will have to change her ways then,” he said comfortably. “She is only young. She will recover. The young have strong hearts. And it will help her to leave here, where she has such sad memories. If you need any advice, please call me. But I will not force myself into her presence, poor child.”

No, no, no.

But Catalina did not look like a poor child, Lady Margaret thought. She looked like a statue, like a stone princess carved from grief. Doña Elvira had dressed her in her new dark clothes of mourning and persuaded her to sit in the window where she could see the green trees and the hedges creamy with may blossom, the sun on the fields, and hear the singing of the birds. The summer had come as Arthur had promised her that it would, it was warm as he had sworn it would be; but she was not walking by the river with him, greeting the swifts as they flew in from Spain. She was not planting salad vegetables in the gardens of the castle and persuading him to try them. The summer was here, the sun was here, Catalina was here, but Arthur was cold in the dark vault of Worcester Cathedral.

Catalina sat still, her hands folded on the black silk of her gown, her eyes looking out of the window but seeing nothing, her mouth folded tight over her gritted teeth as if she were biting back a storm of words.

“Princess,” Lady Margaret started tentatively.

Slowly, the head under the heavy black hood turned towards her. “Yes, Lady Margaret?” Her voice was hoarse.

“I would speak with you.”

Catalina inclined her head.

Doña Elvira stepped back and went quietly out of the room.

“I have to ask you about your journey to London. The royal litter has arrived and you will have to leave here.”

There was no flicker of animation in Catalina’s deep blue eyes. She nodded again, as if they were discussing the transport of a parcel.

“I don’t know if you are strong enough to travel.”

“Can I not stay here?” Catalina asked.

“I understand the king has sent for you. I am sorry for it. They write that you may stay here until you are well enough to travel.”

“Why, what is to become of me?” Catalina asked, as if it were a matter of absolute indifference. “When I get to London?”

“I don’t know.” The former princess did not pretend for one moment that a girl of a royal family could choose her future. “I am sorry. I do not know what is planned. My husband has been told nothing except to prepare for your journey to London.”

“What do you think might happen? When my sister’s husband died, they sent her back to us from Portugal. She came home to Spain again.”

“I would expect that they will send you home,” Lady Margaret said.

Catalina turned her head away once more. She looked out of the window but her eyes saw nothing. Lady Margaret waited; she wondered if the princess would say anything more.

“Does a Princess of Wales have a house in London as well as here?” she asked. “Shall I go back to Baynard’s Castle?”

“You are not the Princess of Wales,” Lady Margaret started. She was going to explain, but the look that Catalina turned on her was so darkly angry that she hesitated. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I thought perhaps you did not understand…”

“Understand what?” Catalina’s white face was slowly flushing pink with temper.

“Princess?”

“Princess of what?” Catalina snapped.

Lady Margaret dropped into a curtsey, and stayed low.

“Princess of what?” Catalina shouted loudly, and the door opened behind them and Doña Elvira came quickly into the room and then checked as she saw Catalina on her feet, her cheeks burning with temper, and Lady Margaret on her knees. She went out again without a word.

“Princess of Spain,” Lady Margaret said very quietly.

There was intense silence.

“I am the Princess of Wales,” Catalina said slowly. “I have been the Princess of Wales all my life.”

Lady Margaret rose up and faced her. “Now you are the dowager princess.”

Catalina clapped a hand over her mouth to hold back a cry of pain.

“I am sorry, Princess.”

Catalina shook her head, beyond words, her fist at her mouth muffling her whimpers of pain. Lady Margaret’s face was grim. “They will call you Dowager Princess.”

“I will never answer to it.”

“It is a title of respect. It is only the English word for widow.”

Catalina gritted her teeth and turned away from her friend to look out of the window. “You can get up,” she said through her teeth. “There is no need for you to kneel to me.”

The older woman rose to her feet and hesitated. “The queen writes to me. They want to know of your health. Not only if you feel well and strong enough to travel; they really need to know if you might be with child.”

Catalina clenched her hands together, turned away her face so that Lady Margaret should not see her cold rage.

“If you are with child and that child is a boy, then he will be the Prince of Wales, and then King of England, and you would be My Lady the King’s Mother,” Lady Margaret reminded her quietly.

“And if I am not with child?”

“Then you are the dowager princess, and Prince Harry is Prince of Wales.”

“And when the king dies?”

“Then Prince Harry becomes king.”

“And I?”

Lady Margaret shrugged in silence. “Next to nothing,” said the gesture. Aloud she said, “You are the Infanta still.” Lady Margaret tried to smile. “As you will always be.”

“And the next Queen of England?”

“Will be the wife of Prince Harry.”

The anger went out of Catalina. She walked to the fireplace, took hold of the high mantelpiece and steadied herself with it. The little fire burning in the grate threw out no heat that she could feel through the thick black skirt of her mourning gown. She stared at the flames as if she would understand what had happened to her.

“I am become again what I was, when I was a child of three,” she said slowly. “The Infanta of Spain, not the Princess of Wales. A baby. Of no importance.”

Lady Margaret, whose own royal blood had been carefully diluted by a lowly marriage so that she could pose no threat to the Tudor throne of England, nodded. “Princess, you take the position of your husband. It is always thus for all women. If you have no husband and no son, then you have no position. You have only what you were born to.”

“If I go home to Spain as a widow, and they marry me to an archduke, I will be Archduchess Catalina, and not a princess at all. Not Princess of Wales, and never Queen of England.”

Lady Margaret nodded. “Like me,” she said.

Catalina turned her head. “You?”

“I was a Plantagenet princess, King Edward’s niece, sister to Edward of Warwick, the heir to King Richard’s throne. If King Henry had lost the battle at Bosworth Field it would have been King Richard on the throne now, my brother as his heir and Prince of Wales, and I should be Princess Margaret, as I was born to be.”

“Instead you are Lady Margaret, wife to the warden of a little castle, not even his own, on the edge of England.”

The older woman nodded her assent to the bleak description of her status.

“Why did you not refuse?” Catalina asked rudely.

Lady Margaret glanced behind her to see that the door to the presence chamber was shut and none of Catalina’s women could hear.

“How could I refuse?” she asked simply. “My brother was in the Tower of London, simply for being born a prince. If I had refused to marry Sir Richard, I should have joined him. My brother put his dear head down on the block for nothing more than bearing his name. As a girl, I had the chance to change my name. So I did.”

“You had the chance to be Queen of England!” Catalina protested.

Lady Margaret turned away from the younger woman’s energy. “It is as God wills,” she said simply. “My chance, such as it was, has gone. Your chance has gone too. You will have to find a way to live the rest of your life without regrets, Infanta.”

Catalina said nothing, but the face that she showed to her friend was closed and cold. “I will find a way to fulfill my destiny,” she said. “Ar—” She broke off, she could not name him, even to her friend. “I once had a conversation about claiming one’s own,” she said. “I understand it now. I shall have to be a pretender to myself. I shall insist on what is mine. I know what is my duty and what I have to do. I shall do as God wills, whatever the difficulties for me.”

The older woman nodded. “Perhaps God wills that you accept your fate. Perhaps it is God’s will that you be resigned,” she suggested.

“He does not,” Catalina said firmly.

I will tell no one what I promised. I will tell no one that in my heart I am still Princess of Wales, I will always be Princess of Wales until I see the wedding of my son and see my daughter-in-law crowned. I will tell no one that I understand now what Arthur told me: that even a princess born may have to claim her title.

I have told no one whether or not I am with child. But I know, well enough. I had my course in April; there is no baby. There is no Princess Mary, there is no Prince Arthur. My love, my only love, is dead and there is nothing left of him for me, not even his unborn child.

I will say nothing, though people constantly pry and want to know. I have to consider what I am to do and how I am to claim the throne that Arthur wanted for me. I have to think how to keep my promise to him, how to tell the lie that he wanted me to tell. How I can make it convincing, how I can fool the king himself, and his sharp-witted, hard-eyed mother.

But I have made a promise. I do not retract my word. He begged me for a promise and he dictated the lie I must tell, and I said yes. I will not fail him. It is the last thing he asked of me, and I will do it. I will do it for him, and I will do it for our love.

Oh, my love, if you knew how much I long to see you.

Catalina traveled to London with the black-trimmed curtains of the litter closed against the beauty of the countryside, as it came into full bloom. She did not see the people doff their caps or curtsey as the procession wound through the little English villages. She did not hear the men and women call “God bless you, Princess! ”as the litter jolted slowly down the village streets. She did not know that every young woman in the land crossed herself and prayed that she should not have the bad luck of the pretty Spanish princess who had come so far for love and then lost her man after only five months.

She was dully aware of the lush green of the countryside, of the fertile swelling of the crops in the fields and the fat cattle in the water meadows. When their way wound through the thick forests she noticed the coolness of the green shade and the thick interleaving of the canopy of boughs over the road. Herds of deer vanished into the dappled shade and she could hear the calling of a cuckoo and the rattle of a woodpecker. It was a beautiful land, a wealthy land, a great inheritance for a young couple. She thought of Arthur’s desire to protect this land of his against the Scots, against the Moors. Of his will to reign here better and more justly than it had ever been done before.

She did not speak to her hosts on the road who attributed her silence to grief, and pitied her for it. She did not speak to her ladies, not even to María who was at her side in silent sympathy, nor to Doña Elvira who, at this crisis in Spanish affairs, was everywhere; her husband organizing the houses on the road, she herself ordering the princess’s food, her bedding, her companions, her diet. Catalina said nothing and let them do as they wished with her.

Some of her hosts thought her sunk so deep in grief that she was beyond speech, and prayed that she should recover her wits again and go back to Spain and make a new marriage that would bring her a new husband to replace the old. What they did not know was that Catalina was holding her grief for her husband in some hidden place deep inside her. Deliberately, she delayed her mourning until she had the safety to indulge in it. While she jolted along in the litter she was not weeping for him, she was racking her brains how to fulfill his dream. She was wondering how to obey him, as he had demanded. She was thinking how she should fulfill her deathbed promise to the only young man she had ever loved.

I shall have to be clever. I shall have to be more cunning than King Henry Tudor, more determined than his mother. Faced with those two, I don’t know that I can get away with it. But I have to get away with it. I have given my promise, I will tell my lie. England shall be ruled as Arthur wanted. The rose will live again. I shall make the England that he wanted.

I wish I could have brought Lady Margaret with me to advise me, I miss her friendship, I miss her hard-won wisdom. I wish I could see her steady gaze and hear her counsel to be resigned, to bow to my destiny, to give myself to God’s will. I would not follow her advice—but I wish I could hear it.

Summer 1502

CROYDON, MAY 1502

The princess and her party arrived at Croydon Palace and Doña Elvira led Catalina to her private rooms. For once, the girl did not go to her bedchamber and close the door behind her. She stood in the sumptuous presence chamber, looking around her. “A chamber fit for a princess,” she said.

“But it is not your own,” Doña Elvira said, anxious for her charge’s status. “It has not been given to you. It is just for your use.”

The young woman nodded. “It is fitting,” she said.

“The Spanish ambassador is in attendance,” Doña Elvira told her. “Shall I tell him that you will not see him?”

“I will see him,” Catalina said quietly. “Tell him to come in.”

“You don’t have to…”

“He may have word from my mother,” she said. “I should like her advice.”

The duenna bowed and went to find the ambassador. He was deep in conversation in the gallery outside the presence chamber with Father Alessandro Geraldini, the princess’s chaplain. Doña Elvira regarded them both with dislike. The chaplain was a tall, handsome man, his dark good looks in stark contrast to those of his companion. The ambassador. Dr. de Puebla was tiny beside him, leaning against a chair to support his misshapen spine, his damaged leg tucked behind the other, his bright little face alight with excitement.

“She could be with child?” the ambassador confirmed in a whisper. “You are certain?”

“Pray God it is so. She is certainly in hopes of it,” the confessor confirmed.

“Dr. de Puebla!” the duenna snapped, disliking the confidential air between the two men. “I shall take you to the princess now.”

De Puebla turned and smiled at the irritable woman. “Certainly, Doña Elvira,” he said equably. “At once.”

Dr. de Puebla limped into the room, his richly trimmed black hat already in his hand, his small face wreathed in an unconvincing smile. He bowed low with a flourish, and came up to inspect the princess.

At once he was struck by how much she had changed in such a short time. She had come to England a girl, with a girl’s optimism. He had thought her a spoilt child, one who had been protected from the harshness of the real world. In the fairy-tale palace of the Alhambra this had been the petted youngest daughter of the most powerful monarchs in Christendom. Her journey to England had been the first real discomfort she had been forced to endure, and she had complained about it bitterly, as if he could help the weather. On her wedding day, standing beside Arthur and hearing the cheers for him had been the first time she had taken second place to anyone but her heroic parents.

But before him now was a girl who had been hammered by unhappiness into a fine maturity. This Catalina was thinner, and paler, but with a new spiritual beauty, honed by hardship. He drew his breath. This Catalina was a young woman with a queenly presence. She had become through grief not only Arthur’s widow but her mother’s daughter. This was a princess from the line that had defeated the most powerful enemy of Christendom. This was the very bone of the bone and blood of the blood of Isabella of Castile. She was cool, she was hard. He hoped very much that she was not going to be difficult.

De Puebla gave her a smile that he meant to be reassuring and saw her scrutinize him with no answering warmth in her face. She gave him her hand and then she sat in a straight-backed wooden chair before the fire. “You may sit,” she said graciously, gesturing him to a lower chair, farther away.

He bowed again, and sat.

“Do you have any messages for me?”

“Of sympathy, from the king and Queen Elizabeth and from My Lady the King’s Mother, and from myself, of course. They will invite you to court when you have recovered from your journey and are out of mourning.”

“How long am I to be in mourning?” Catalina inquired.

“My Lady the King’s Mother has said that you should be in seclusion for a month after the burial. But since you were not at court during that time, she has ruled that you will stay here until she commands you to return to London. She is concerned for your health….”

He paused, hoping that she would volunteer whether or not she was with child, but she let the silence stretch.

He thought he would ask her directly. “Infanta—”

“You should call me princess,” she interrupted. “I am the Princess of Wales.”

He hesitated, thrown off course. “Dowager Princess,” he corrected her quietly.

Catalina nodded. “Of course. It is understood. Do you have any letters from Spain?”

He bowed and gave her the letter he was carrying in the hidden pocket in his sleeve. She did not snatch it from him like a child and open it, then and there. She nodded her head in thanks and held it.

“Do you not want to open it now? Do you not want to reply?”

“When I have written my reply, I will send for you,” she said simply, asserting her power over him. “I shall send for you when I want you.”

“Certainly, Your Grace.” He smoothed the velvet nap of his black breeches to hide his irritation but inwardly he thought it an impertinence that the Infanta, now a widow, should command where before the Princess of Wales had politely requested. He thought he perhaps did not like this new, finer Catalina, after all.

“And have you heard from Their Majesties in Spain?” she asked. “Have they advised you as to their wishes?”

“Yes,” he said, wondering how much he should tell her. “Of course, Queen Isabella is anxious that you are not unwell. She asked me to inquire after your health and to report to her.”

A secretive shadow crossed Catalina’s face. “I shall write to the queen my mother and tell her my news,” she said.

“She was anxious to know…” he began, probing for the answer to the greatest question: Was there an heir? Was the princess with child?

“I shall confide in no one but my mother.”

“We cannot proceed to the settlement of your jointure and your arrangements until we know,” he said bluntly. “It makes a difference to everything.”

She did not flare up as he had thought she would do. She inclined her head, she had herself under tight control. “I shall write to my mother,” she repeated, as if his advice did not much matter.

He saw he would get nothing more from her. But at least the chaplain had told him she could be with child, and he should know. The king would be glad to know that there was at least a possibility of an heir. At any rate she had not denied it. There might be capital to make from her silence. “Then I will leave you to read your letter.” He bowed.

She made a casual gesture of dismissal and turned to look at the flames of the little summertime fire. He bowed again and, since she was not looking at him, scrutinized her figure. She had no bloom of early pregnancy, but some women took it badly in the first months. Her pallor could be caused by morning sickness. It was impossible for a man to tell. He would have to rely on the confessor’s opinion and pass it on with a caution.

I open my mother’s letter with hands that are trembling so much that I can hardly break the seals. The first thing I see is the shortness of the letter, only one page.

“Oh, Madre,” I breathe. “No more?”

Perhaps she was in haste, but I am bitterly hurt to see that she has written so briefly! If she knew how much I want to hear her voice she would have written at twice the length. As God is my witness, I don’t think I can do this without her; I am only sixteen and a half, I need my mother.