The Constant Princess

I read the short letter through once, and then, almost incredulously, I read it through again.

It is not a letter from a loving mother to her daughter. It is not a letter from a woman to her favorite child, and that child on the very edge of despair. Coldly, powerfully, she has written a letter from a queen to a princess. She writes of nothing but business. We could be a pair of merchants concluding a sale.

She says that I am to stay in whatever house is provided for me until I have had my next course and I know that I am not with child. If that is the case I am to command Dr. de Puebla to demand my jointure as Dowager Princess of Wales and as soon as I have the full money and not before (underlined so there can be no mistake), I am to take ship for Spain.

If, on the other hand, God is gracious, and I am with child, then I am to assure Dr. de Puebla that the money for my dowry will be paid in cash and at once, he is to secure me my allowance as Dowager Princess of Wales, and I am to rest and hope for a boy.

I am to write to her at once and tell her if I think I am with child. I am to write to her as soon as I am certain, one way or the other, and I am to confide also in Dr. de Puebla and to maintain myself under the chaperonage of Doña Elvira.

I fold the letter carefully, matching the edges one to another as if tidiness matters very much. I think that if she knew of the despair that laps at the edges of my mind like a river of darkness, she would have written to me more kindly. If she knew how very alone I am, how grieved I am, how much I miss him, she would not write to me of settlements and jointures and titles. If she knew how much I loved him and how I cannot bear to live without him, she would write and tell me that she loves me, that I am to go home to her at once, without delay.

I tuck the letter into the pocket at my waist, and I stand up, as if reporting for duty. I am not a child anymore. I will not cry for my mother. I see that I am not in the especial care of God since he could let Arthur die. I see that I am not in the especial love of my mother, since she can leave me alone, in a strange land.

She is not only a mother, she is Queen of Spain, and she has to ensure that she has a grandson or, failing a grandson, a watertight treaty. I am not just a young woman who has lost the man she loves. I am a Princess of Spain and I have to produce a grandson or, failing that, a watertight treaty. And, in addition, I am now bound by a promise. I have promised that I will be Princess of Wales again, and Queen of England. I have promised this to the young man to whom I promised everything. I will perform it for him, whatever anyone else wants.

The Spanish ambassador did not report at once to Their Majesties of Spain. Instead, playing his usual double game, he took the chaplain’s opinion first to the King of England.

“Her confessor says that she is with child,” he remarked.

For the first time in days King Henry felt his heart lighten. “Good God, if that were so, it would change everything.”

“Please God it is so. I should be glad of it,” de Puebla agreed. “But I cannot guarantee it. She shows no sign of it.”

“Could be early days,” Henry agreed. “And God knows, and I know, a child in the cradle is not a prince on the throne. It’s a long road to the crown. But it would be a great comfort to me if she was with child—and to the queen,” he added as an afterthought.

“So she must stay here in England until we know for sure,” the ambassador concluded. “And if she is not with child, we shall settle our accounts, you and I, and she shall go home. Her mother asks for her to be sent home at once.”

“We’ll wait and see,” Henry said, conceding nothing. “Her mother will have to wait like the rest of us. And if she is anxious to have her daughter home she had better pay the rest of the dowry.”

“You would not delay the return of the princess to her mother over a matter of money,” the ambassador suggested.

“The sooner everything is settled the better,” the king said smoothly. “If she is with child then she is our daughter and the mother of our heir; nothing would be too good for her. If she is not, then she can go home to her mother as soon as her dowry is paid.”

I know that there is no Mary growing in my womb, there is no Arthur; but I shall say nothing until I know what to do. I dare say nothing until I am sure what I should do. My mother and father will be planning for the good of Spain, King Henry will be planning for the good of England. Alone, I will have to find a way to fulfill my promise. Nobody will help me. Nobody can even know what I am doing. Only Arthur in heaven will understand what I am doing, and I feel far, far away from him. It is so painful, a pain I could not imagine. I have never needed him more than now: now that he is dead, and only he can advise me how to fulfill my promise to him.

Catalina had spent less than a month of seclusion at Croydon Palace when the king’s chamberlain came to tell her that Durham House in the Strand had been prepared for her and she could go there at her convenience.

“Is this where a Princess of Wales would stay?” Catalina demanded urgently of de Puebla, who had been immediately summoned to her privy chamber. “Is Durham House where a princess would be housed? Why am I not to live in Baynard’s Castle again?”

“Durham House is perfectly adequate,” he stammered, taken aback by her fervor. “And your household is not diminished at all. The king has not asked you to dismiss anyone. You are to have an adequate court. And he will pay you an allowance.”

“My jointure as the prince’s widow?”

He avoided her gaze. “An allowance at this stage. He has not been paid your dowry from your parents, remember, so he will not pay your jointure. But he will give you a good sum, one that will allow you to keep your state.”

“I should have my jointure.”

He shook his head. “He will not pay it until he has the full dowry. But it is a good allowance, you will keep a good state.”

He saw that she was immensely relieved. “Princess, there is no question but that the king is respectful of your position,” he said carefully. “You need have no fears of that. Of course, if he could be assured as to your health…”

Again the shuttered look closed down Catalina’s face. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said shortly. “I am well. You can tell him that I am well. Nothing more.”

I am buying time, letting them think that I am with child. It is such agony, knowing that my time of the month has come and gone, that I am ready for Arthur’s seed, but he is cold and gone and he will never come to my bed again, and we will never make his daughter Mary and his son Arthur.

I cannot bear to tell them the truth: I am barren, without a baby to raise for him. And while I say nothing, they have to wait too. They will not send me home to Spain while they hope that I might still be My Lady the Mother of the Prince of Wales. They have to wait.

And while they wait, I can plan what I shall say and what I shall do. I have to be wise as my mother would be and cunning as the fox, my father. I have to be determined like her and secretive like him. I have to think how and when I shall start to tell this lie, Prince Arthur’s great lie. If I can tell it so that it convinces everyone, if I can place myself so that I fulfill my destiny, then Arthur, beloved Arthur, can do as he wished. He can rule England through me, I can marry his brother and become queen. Arthur can live through the child I conceive with his brother. We can make the England we swore that we would make, despite misfortune, despite his brother’s folly, despite my own despair.

I shall not give myself to heartbreak, I shall give myself to England. I shall keep my promise. I shall be constant to my husband and to my destiny. And I shall plan and plot and consider how I shall conquer this misfortune and be what I was born to be. How I shall be the pretender who becomes the queen.

London,

June 1502

THE LITTLE COURT MOVED TO DURHAM HOUSE in late June and the remainder of Catalina’s court straggled in from Ludlow Castle, speaking of a town in silence and a castle in mourning. Catalina did not seem particularly pleased at the change of scene, though Durham House was a pretty palace with lovely gardens running down to the river, with its own stairs and a pier for boats. The ambassador came to visit her and found her in the gallery at the front of the house, which overlooked the front courtyard below and Ivy Lane beyond.

She let him stand before her.

“Her Grace, the queen your mother, is sending an emissary to escort you home as soon as your widow’s jointure is paid. Since you have not told us that you are with child she is preparing for your journey.”

De Puebla saw her press her lips together as if to curb a hasty reply. “How much does the king have to pay me, as his son’s widow?”

“He has to pay you a third of the revenues of Wales, Cornwall and Chester,” he said. “And your parents are now asking, in addition, that King Henry return all of your dowry.”

Catalina looked aghast. “He never will,” she said flatly. “No emissary will be able to convince him. King Henry will never pay such sums to me. He didn’t even pay my allowance when his son was alive. Why should he repay the dowry and pay a jointure when he has nothing to gain from it?”

The ambassador shrugged his shoulders. “It is in the contract.”

“So too was my allowance, and you failed to make him pay that,” she said sharply.

“You should have handed over your plate as soon as you arrived.”

“And eat off what?” she blazed out.

Insolently, he stood before her. He knew, as she did not yet understand, that she had no power. Every day that she failed to announce that she was with child her importance diminished. He was certain that she was barren. He thought her a fool now: she had bought herself a little time by her discretion—but for what? Her disapproval of him mattered very little; she would soon be gone. She might rage but nothing would change.

“Why did you ever agree to such a contract? You must have known he would not honor it.”

He shrugged. The conversation was meaningless. “How should we think there would ever be such a tragic occurrence? Who could have imagined that the prince would die, just as he entered into adult life? It is so very sad.”

“Yes, yes,” said Catalina. She had promised herself she would never cry for Arthur in front of anyone. The tears must stay back. “But now, thanks to this contract, the king is deep in debt to me. He has to return the dowry that he has been paid, he cannot have my plate, and he owes me this jointure. Ambassador, you must know that he will never pay this much. And clearly he will never give me the rents of—where?—Wales and, and Cornwall?—forever.”

“Only until you remarry,” he observed. “He has to pay your jointure until you remarry. And we must assume that you will remarry soon. Their Majesties will want you to return home in order to arrange a new marriage for you. I imagine that the emissary is coming to fetch you home just for that. They probably have a marriage contract drawn up for you already. Perhaps you are already betrothed.”

For one moment de Puebla saw the shock in her face, then she turned abruptly from him to stare out of the window on the courtyard before the palace and the open gates to the busy streets outside.

He watched the tightly stretched shoulders and the tense turn of her neck, surprised that his shot at her second marriage had hit her so hard. Why should she be so shocked at the mention of marriage? Surely she must know that she would go home only to be married again?

Catalina let the silence grow as she watched the street beyond the Durham House gate. It was so unlike her home. There were no dark men in beautiful gowns, there were no veiled women. There were no street sellers with rich piles of spices, no flower sellers staggering under small mountains of blooms. There were no herbalists, physicians, or astronomers, plying their trade as if knowledge could be freely available to anyone. There was no silent movement to the mosque for prayer five times a day, there was no constant splash of fountains. Instead there was the bustle of one of the greatest cities in the world, the relentless, unstoppable buzz of prosperity and commerce and the ringing of the bells of hundreds of churches. This was a city bursting with confidence, rich on its own trade, exuberantly wealthy.

“This is my home now,” she said. Resolutely she put aside the pictures in her mind of a warmer city, of a smaller community, of an easier, more exotic world. “The king should not think that I will go home and remarry as if none of this has happened. My parents should not think that they can change my destiny. I was brought up to be Princess of Wales and Queen of England. I shall not be cast off like a bad debt.”

The ambassador, from a race who had known disappointment, so much older and wiser than the girl who stood at the window, smiled at her unseeing back. “Of course it shall be as you wish,” he lied easily. “I shall write to your father and mother and say that you prefer to wait here, in England, while your future is decided.”

Catalina rounded on him. “No, I shall decide my future.”

He had to bite the inside of his cheeks to hide his smile. “Of course you will, Infanta.”

“Dowager Princess.”

“Dowager Princess.”

She took a breath; but when it came, her voice was quite steady. “You may tell my father and mother, and you shall tell the king, that I am not with child.”

“Indeed,” he breathed. “Thank you for informing us. That makes everything much clearer.”

“How so?”

“The king will release you. You can go home. He would have no claim on you, no interest in you. There can be no reason for you to stay. I shall have to make arrangements but your jointure can follow you. You can leave at once.”

“No,” she said flatly.

De Puebla was surprised. “Dowager Princess, you can be released from this failure. You can go home. You are free to go.”

“You mean the English think they have no use for me?”

He gave the smallest of shrugs, as if to ask: what was she good for, since she was neither maid nor mother?

“What else can you do here? Your time here is over.”

She was not yet ready to show him her full plan. “I shall write to my mother,” was all she would reply. “But you are not to make arrangements for me to leave. It may be that I shall stay in England for a little while longer. If I am to be remarried, I could be remarried in England.”

“To whom?” he demanded.

She looked away from him. “How should I know? My parents and the king should decide.”

I have to find a way to put my marriage to Harry into the mind of the king. Now that he knows I am not with child surely it will occur to him that the resolution for all our difficulties is to marry me to Harry?

If I trusted Dr. de Puebla more, I should ask him to hint to the king that I could be betrothed to Harry. But I do not trust him. He muddled my first marriage contract, I don’t want him muddling this one.

If I could get a letter to my mother without de Puebla seeing it, then I could tell her of my plan, of Arthur’s plan.

But I cannot. I am alone in this. I do feel so fearfully alone.

“They are going to name Prince Harry as the new Prince of Wales,” Doña Elvira said quietly to the princess as she was brushing her hair in the last week of June. “He is to be Prince Harry, Prince of Wales.”

She expected the girl to break down at this last severing of her links with the past, but Catalina did nothing but look around the room. “Leave us,” she said shortly to the maids who were laying out her nightgown and turning down the bed.

They went out quietly and closed the door behind them. Catalina tossed back her hair and met Doña Elvira’s eyes in the mirror. She handed her the hairbrush again and nodded for her to continue.

“I want you to write to my parents and tell them that my marriage with Prince Arthur was not consummated,” she said smoothly. “I am a virgin as I was when I left Spain.”

Doña Elvira was stunned, the hairbrush suspended in midair, her mouth open. “You were bedded in the sight of the whole court,” she said.

“He was impotent,” Catalina said, her face as hard as a diamond.

“You were together once a week.”

“With no effect,” she said, unwavering. “It was a great sadness to him, and to me.”

“Infanta, you never said anything. Why did you not tell me?”

Catalina’s eyes were veiled. “What should I say? We were newly wed. He was very young. I thought it would come right in time.”

Doña Elvira did not even pretend to believe her. “Princess, there is no need for you to say this. Just because you have been a wife need not damage your future. Being a widow is no obstacle to a good marriage. They will find someone for you. They will find a good match for you, you do not have to pretend…”

“I don’t want ‘someone,’ ” Catalina said fiercely. “You should know that as well as I. I was born to be Princess of Wales and Queen of England. It was Arthur’s greatest wish that I should be Queen of England.” She pulled herself back from thinking of him, or saying more. She bit her lip; she should not have tried to say his name. She forced down the tears and took a breath. “I am a virgin untouched, now as I was in Spain. You shall tell them that.”

“But we need say nothing, we can go back to Spain, anyway,” the older woman pointed out.

“They will marry me to some lord, perhaps an archduke,” Catalina said. “I don’t want to be sent away again. Do you want to run my household in some little Spanish castle? Or Austria? Or worse? You will have to come with me, remember. Do you want to end up in the Netherlands or Germany?”

Doña Elvira’s eyes darted away; she was thinking furiously. “No one would believe us if we say you are a virgin.”

“They would. You have to tell them. No one would dare to ask me. You can tell them. It has to be you to tell them. They will believe you because you are close to me, as close as a mother.”

“I have said nothing so far.”

“And that was right. But you will speak now. Doña Elvira, if you don’t seem to know, or if you say one thing and I say another, then everyone will know that you are not in my confidence, that you have not cared for me as you should. They will think you are negligent of my interests, that you have lost my favor. I should think that my mother would recall you in disgrace if she thought that I was a virgin and you did not even know. You would never serve in a royal court again if they thought you had neglected me.”

“Everyone saw that he was in love with you.”

“No they didn’t. Everyone saw that we were together, as a prince and princess. Everyone saw that he came to my bedroom only as he had been ordered. No more. No one can say what went on behind the bedroom door. No one but me. And I say that he was impotent. Who are you to deny that? Do you dare to call me a liar?”

The older woman bowed her head to gain time. “If you say so,” she said carefully. “Whatever you say, Infanta.”

“Princess.”

“Princess,” the woman repeated.

“And I do say it. It is my way ahead. Actually, it is your way ahead too. We can say this one, simple thing and stay in England, or we can return to Spain in mourning and become next to nobody.”

“Of course, I can tell them what you wish. If you wish to say your husband was impotent and you are still a maid, then I can say that. But how will this make you queen?”

“Since the marriage was not consummated, there can be no objection to me marrying Prince Arthur’s brother Harry,” Catalina said in a hard, determined voice.

Doña Elvira gasped with shock at this next stage.

Catalina pressed on. “When this new emissary comes from Spain, you may inform him that it is God’s will and my desire that I be Princess of Wales again, as I always have been. He shall speak to the king. He shall negotiate, not my widow’s jointure but my next wedding.”

Doña Elvira gaped. “You cannot make your own marriage!”

“I can,” Catalina said fiercely. “I will, and you will help me.”

“You cannot think that they will let you marry Prince Harry?”

“Why should they not? The marriage with his brother was not consummated. I am a virgin. The dowry to the king is half paid. He can keep the half he already has, and we can give him the rest of it. He need not pay my jointure. The contract has been signed and sealed; they need only change the names, and here I am in England already. It is the best solution for everyone. Without it I become nothing; you certainly are nobody. Your ambition, your husband’s ambition, will all come to nothing. But if we can win this then you will be the mistress of a royal household, and I will be as I should be: Princess of Wales and Queen of England.”

“They will not let us!” Doña Elvira gasped, appalled at her charge’s ambition.

“They will let us,” Catalina said fiercely. “We have to fight for it. We have to be what we should be, nothing less.”

Princess-in-Waiting

Winter 1503

KING HENRY AND HIS QUEEN, driven by the loss of their son, were expecting another child, and Catalina, hoping for their favor, was sewing an exquisite layette of baby clothes before a small fire in the smallest room of Durham Palace in the early days of February 1503. Her ladies, hemming seams according to their abilities, were seated at a distance, Doña Elvira could speak privately.

“This should be your baby’s layette,” the duenna said resentfully under her breath. “A widow for a year, and no progress made. What is going to become of you?”

Catalina looked up from her delicate black-thread work. “Peace, Doña Elvira,” she said quietly. “It will be as God and my parents and the king decide.”

“Seventeen, now,” Doña Elvira said, stubbornly pursuing her theme, her head down. “How long are we to stay in this godforsaken country, neither a bride nor a wife? Neither at court nor elsewhere? With bills mounting up and the jointure still not paid?”

“Doña Elvira, if you knew how much your words grieve me, I don’t think you would say them,” Catalina said clearly. “Just because you mutter them into your sewing like a cursing Egyptian doesn’t mean I don’t hear them. If I knew what was to happen, I would tell you myself at once. You will not learn any more by whispering your fears.”

The woman looked up and met Catalina’s clear gaze.

“I think of you,” she said bluntly. “Even if no one else does. Even if that fool ambassador and that idiot the emissary does not. If the king does not order your marriage to the prince, then what is to become of you? If he will not let you go, if your parents do not insist on your return then what is going to happen? Is he just going to keep you forever? Are you a princess or a prisoner? It is nearly a year. Are you a hostage for the alliance with Spain? How long can you wait? You are seventeen—how long can you wait?”

“I am waiting,” Catalina said calmly. “Patiently. Until it is resolved.”

The duenna said nothing more, Catalina did not have the energy to argue. She knew that during this year of mourning for Arthur, she had been steadily pushed more and more to the margins of court life. Her claim to be a virgin had not produced a new betrothal as she had thought it would; it had made her yet more irrelevant. She was only summoned to court on the great occasions, and then she was dependent on the kindness of Queen Elizabeth.

The king’s mother, Lady Margaret, had no interest in the impoverished Spanish princess. She had not proved readily fertile, she now said she had never even been bedded, she was widowed and brought no more money into the royal treasury. She was of no use to the house of Tudor except as a bargaining counter in the continuing struggle with Spain. She might as well stay at her house in the Strand, as be summoned to court. Besides, My Lady the King’s Mother did not like the way that the new Prince of Wales looked at his widowed sister-in-law.

Whenever Prince Harry met her, he fixed his eyes on her with puppylike devotion. My Lady the King’s Mother had privately decided that she would keep them apart. She thought that the girl smiled on the young prince too warmly, she thought she encouraged his boyish adoration to serve her own foreign vanity. My Lady the King’s Mother was resentful of anyone’s influence on the only surviving son and heir. Also, she mistrusted Catalina. Why would the young widow encourage a brother-in-law who was nearly six years her junior? What did she hope to gain from his friendship? Surely she knew that he was kept as close as a child: bedded in his father’s rooms, chaperoned night and day, constantly supervised? What did the Spanish widow hope to achieve by sending him books, teaching him Spanish, laughing at his accent and watching him ride at the quintain, as if he were in training as her knight errant?

Nothing would come of it. Nothing could come of it. But My Lady the King’s Mother would allow no one to be intimate with Harry but herself, and she ruled that Catalina’s visits to court were to be rare and brief.

The king himself was kind enough to Catalina when he saw her, but she felt him eye her as if she were some sort of treasure that he had purloined. She always felt with him as if she were some sort of trophy—not a young woman of seventeen years old, wholly dependent on his honor, his daughter by marriage.

If she could have brought herself to speak of Arthur to her mother-in-law or to the king then perhaps they would have sought her out to share their grief. But she could not use his name to curry favor with them. Even a year since his death, she could not think of him without a tightness in her chest which was so great that she thought it could stop her breathing for very grief. She still could not say his name out loud. She certainly could not play on her grief to help her at court.

“But what will happen?” Doña Elvira continued.

Catalina turned her head away. “I don’t know,” she said shortly.

“Perhaps if the queen has another son with this baby, the king will send us back to Spain,” the duenna pursued.

Catalina nodded. “Perhaps.”

The duenna knew her well enough to recognize Catalina’s silent determination. “Your trouble is that you still don’t want to go,” she whispered. “The king may keep you as a hostage against the dowry money, your parents may let you stay; but if you insisted you could get home. You still think you can make them marry you to Harry; but if that was going to happen you would be betrothed by now. You have to give up. We have been here a year now and you make no progress. You will trap us all here while you are defeated.”

Catalina’s sandy eyelashes swept down to veil her eyes. “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t think that.”

There was a sharp rap at the door. “Urgent message for the Dowager Princess of Wales!” the voice called out.

Catalina dropped her sewing and rose to her feet. Her ladies sprang up too. It was so unusual for anything to happen in the quiet court of Durham House that they were thrown into a flutter.

“Well, let him in!” Catalina exclaimed.

María de Salinas flung open the door, and one of the royal grooms of the chamber came in and kneeled before the princess. “Grave news,” he said shortly. “A son, a prince, has been born of the queen and has died. Her Grace the Queen has died too. God pray for His Grace in his kingly grief.”

“What?” demanded Doña Elvira, trying to take in the astounding rush of events.

“God save her soul,” Catalina replied correctly. “God save the King.”

“Heavenly Father, take Your daughter Elizabeth into Your keeping. You must love her, she was a woman of great gentleness and grace.”

I sit back on my heels and abandon the prayer. I think the queen’s life, ended so tragically, was one of sorrow. If Arthur’s version of the scandal were true, then she had been prepared to marry King Richard, however despicable a tyrant. She had wanted to marry him and be his queen. Her mother and My Lady the King’s Mother and the victory of Bosworth had forced her to take King Henry. She had been born to be Queen of England, and she had married the man who could give her the throne.

I thought that if I had been able to tell her of my promise, then she would have known the pain that seeps through me like ice every time I think of Arthur and know that I promised him I would marry Harry. I thought that she might have understood if you are born to be Queen of England you have to be Queen of England, whoever is king. Whoever your husband will have to be.

Without her quiet presence at court I feel that I am more at risk, further from my goal. She was kind to me, she was a loving woman. I was waiting out my year of mourning and trusting that she would help me into marriage with Harry, because he would be a refuge for me and because I would be a good wife to him. I was trusting that she knew one could marry a man for whom one feels nothing but indifference and still be a good wife.

But now the court will be ruled by My Lady the King’s Mother, and she is a formidable woman, no friend to anyone but her own cause, no affection for anyone but her son Henry and his son, Prince Harry.

She will help no one, but she will serve the interests of her own family first. She will consider me as only one candidate among many for his hand in marriage. God forgive her, she might even look to a French bride for him, and then I will have failed not only Arthur but my own mother and father too, who need me to maintain the alliance between England and Spain and the enmity between England and France.

This year has been hard for me. I had expected a year of mourning and then a new betrothal; I have been growing more and more anxious since no one seems to be planning such a thing. And now I am afraid that it will get worse. What if King Henry decides to surrender the second part of the dowry and sends me home? What if they betroth Harry, that foolish boy, to someone else? What if they just forget me? Hold me as a hostage to the good behavior of Spain but neglect me? Leave me at Durham House, a shadow princess over a shadow court, while the real world goes on elsewhere?

I hate this time of year in England, the way the winter lingers on and on in cold mists and gray skies. In the Alhambra the water in the canals will be released from frost and starting to flow again, icy cold, rushing deep with meltwater from the snows of the sierra. The earth will be starting to warm in the gardens, the men will be planting flowers and young saplings, the sun will be warm in the mornings and the thick hangings will be taken down from the windows so the warm breezes can blow through the palace again.

The birds of summer will come back to the high hills and the olive trees will shimmer their leaves of green and gray. Everywhere the farmers will be turning over the red soil, and there will be the scent of life and growth.

I long to be home, but I will not leave my post. I am not a soldier who forgets his duty, I am a sentry who wakes all night. I will not fail my love. I said, “I promise,” and I do not forget it. I will be constant to him. The garden that is immortal life, al-Yanna, will wait for me, the rose will wait for me in al-Yanna, Arthur will wait for me there. I will be Queen of England as I was born to be, as I promised him I would be. The rose will bloom in England as well as in heaven.

There was a great state funeral for Queen Elizabeth, and Catalina was in mourning black again. Through the dark lace of her mantilla she watched the orders of precedence, the arrangements for the service, she saw how everything was commanded by the great book of the king’s mother. Even her own place was laid down, behind the princesses but before all the other ladies of the court.

Lady Margaret, the king’s mother, had written down all the procedures to be followed at the Tudor court, from birth chambers to lying in state, so that her son and the generations which she prayed would come after him would be prepared for every occasion, so that each occasion would match another, and so that every occasion, however distant in the future, would be commanded by her.

Now her first great funeral, for her unloved daughter-in-law, went off with the order and grace of a well-planned masque at court, and as the great manager of everything, she stepped up visibly, unquestionably, to her place as the greatest lady at court.

2ND APRIL 1503

It was a year to the day that Arthur had died, and Catalina spent the day alone in the chapel of Durham House. Father Geraldini held a memorial Mass for the young prince at dawn and Catalina stayed in the little church, without breaking her fast, without taking so much as a cup of small ale, all the day.

Some of the time she kneeled before the altar, her lips moving in silent prayer, struggling with the loss of him with a grief which was as sharp and as raw as the day that she had stood on the threshold of his room and learned that they could not save him, that he would die, that she would have to live without him.

For some of the long hours, she prowled around the empty chapel, pausing to look at the devotional pictures on the walls or the exquisite carving of the pew ends and the rood screen. Her horror was that she was forgetting him. There were mornings when she woke and tried to see his face and found that she could see nothing beneath her closed eyelids or, worse, all she could see was some rough sketch of him, a poor likeness: the simulacrum and no longer the real thing. Those mornings she would sit up quickly, clench her knees up to her belly, and hold herself tight so that she did not give way to her agonizing sense of loss.

Then, later in the day, she would be talking to her ladies, or sewing, or walking by the river, and someone would say something, or she would see the sun on the water and suddenly he would be there before her, as vivid as if he were alive, lighting up the afternoon. She would stand quite still for a moment, silently drinking him in, and then she would go on with the conversation or continue her walk, knowing that she would never forget him. Her eyes had the print of him on their lids, her body had the touch of him on her skin. She was his, heart and soul, till death: not—as it turned out—till his death; but till her death. Only when the two of them were gone from this life would their marriage in this life be over.

But on this, the anniversary of his death, Catalina had promised herself that she should be alone, she would allow herself the indulgence of mourning, of railing at God for taking him.

“You know, I shall never understand Your purpose,” I say to the statue of the crucified Christ, hanging by His bloodstained palms over the altar. “Can You not give me a sign? Can You not show me what I should do?”

I wait, but He says nothing. I have to wonder if the God who spoke so clearly to my mother is sleeping, or gone away. Why should He direct her, and yet remain silent for me? Why should I, raised as a fervently Christian child, a passionately Roman Catholic child, have no sense of being heard when I pray from my deepest grief? Why should God desert me, when I need Him so much?

I return to the embroidered kneeler before the altar but I do not kneel on it in a position of prayer, I turn it around and sit on it, as if I were at home, a cushion pulled up to a warm brazier, ready to talk, ready to listen. But no one speaks to me now. Not even my God.

“I know it is Your will that I should be queen,” I say thoughtfully, as if He might answer, as if He might suddenly reply in a tone as reasonable as my own. “I know that it is my mother’s wish too. I know that my darling—” I cut short the end of the sentence. Even now, a year on, I cannot take the risk of saying Arthur’s name, even in an empty chapel, even to God. I still fear an outpouring of tears, the slide into hysteria and madness. Behind my control is a passion for Arthur like a deep millpond held behind a sluice gate. I dare not let one drop of it out. There would be a flood of sorrow, a torrent.

“I know that he wished I should be queen. On his deathbed, he asked for a promise. In Your sight, I gave him that promise. In Your name I gave it. I meant it. I am sworn to be queen. But how am I to do it? If it is Your will, as well as his, as I believe, if it is Your will as well as my mother’s, as I believe, then, God: hear this. I have run out of stratagems. It has to be You. You have to show me the way to do it.”

I have been demanding this of God with more and more urgency for a year now, while the endless negotiations about the repayment of the dowry and the payment of the jointure drag on and on. Without one clear word from my mother I have come to think that she is playing the same game as me. Without doubt, I know that my father will have some long tactical play in mind. If only they would tell me what I should do! In their discreet silence I have to guess that they are leaving me here as bait for the king. They are leaving me here until the king sees, as I see, as Arthur saw, that the best resolution of this difficulty would be for me to marry Prince Harry.

The trouble is that as every month goes by, Harry grows in stature and status at the court: he becomes a more attractive prospect. The French king will make a proposal for him, the hundred princelings of Europe with their pretty daughters will make offers, even the Holy Roman Emperor has an unmarried daughter Margaret, who might suit. We have to bring this to a decision now; this very month of April, as my first year of widowhood ends. Now that I am free from my year of waiting. But the balance of power has changed. King Henry is in no hurry; his heir is young—a boy of only eleven. But I am seventeen years old. It is time I was married. It is time I was Princess of Wales once more.

Their Majesties of Spain are demanding the moon: full restitution of their investment and the return of their daughter, the full widow’s jointure to be paid for an indefinite period. The great cost of this is designed to prompt the King of England to find another way. My parents’ patience with negotiation allows England to keep both me and the money. They show that they expect the return of neither me nor the money. They are hoping that the King of England will see that he need return neither the dowry nor me.

But they underestimate him. King Henry does not need them to hint him to it. He will have seen perfectly well for himself. Since he is not progressing, he must be resisting both demands. And why should he not? He is in possession. He has half the dowry, and he has me.

And he is no fool. The calmness of the new emissary, Don Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, and the slowness of the negotiations has alerted this most acute king to the fact that my mother and father are content to leave me in his hands, in England. It does not take a Machiavelli to conclude that my parents hope for another English marriage—just as when Isabel was widowed, they sent her back to Portugal to marry her brother-in-law. These things happen. But only if everyone is in agreement. In England, where the king is new-come to his throne and filled with ambition, it may take more skill than we can deploy to bring it about.

My mother writes to me to say she has a plan but it will take some time to come to fruition. In the meantime she tells me to be patient and never to do anything to offend the king or his mother.

“I am Princess of Wales,” I reply to her. “I was born to be Princess of Wales and Queen of England. You raised me in these titles. Surely, I should not deny my own upbringing? Surely, I can be Princess of Wales and Queen of England, even now?”

“Be patient,” she writes back to me, in a travel-stained note which takes weeks to get to me and which has been opened; anyone can have read it. “I agree that your destiny is to be Queen of England. It is your destiny, God’s will, and my wish. Be patient.”

“How long must I be patient?” I ask God, on my knees to Him in His chapel on the anniversary of Arthur’s death. “If it is Your will, why do You not do it at once? If it is not Your will, why did You not destroy me with Arthur? If You are listening to me now—why do I feel so terribly alone?”

Late in the evening a rare visitor was announced in the quiet presence chamber of Durham House. “Lady Margaret Pole,” said the guard at the door. Catalina dropped her Bible and turned her pale face to see her friend hesitating shyly in the doorway.

“Lady Margaret!”

“Dowager Princess!” She curtseyed low and Catalina went swiftly across the room to her, raised her up, and fell into her arms.

“Don’t cry,” Lady Margaret said quietly into her ear. “Don’t cry or I swear I shall weep.”

“I won’t, I won’t, I promise I won’t.” Catalina turned to her ladies. “Leave us,” she said.

They went reluctantly. A visitor was a novelty in the quiet house, and besides, there were no fires burning in any of the other chambers. Lady Margaret looked around the shabby room.

“What is this?”

Catalina shrugged and tried to smile. “I am a poor manager, I am afraid. And Doña Elvira is no help. And in truth, I have only the money the king gives me and that is not much.”

“I was afraid of this,” the older woman said. Catalina drew her to the fire and sat her down on her own chair.

“I thought you were still at Ludlow?”

“We were. We have been. Since neither the king nor the prince comes to Wales all the business has fallen on my husband. You would think me a princess again to see my little court there.”

Catalina again tried to smile. “Are you grand?”

“Very. And mostly Welsh-speaking. Mostly singing.”

“I can imagine.”

“We came for the queen’s funeral, God bless her, and then I wanted to stay for a little longer and my husband said that I might come and see you. I have been thinking of you all day today.”

“I have been in the chapel,” Catalina said inconsequently. “It doesn’t seem like a year.”

“It doesn’t, does it?” Lady Margaret agreed, though privately she thought that the girl had aged far more than one year. Grief had refined her girlish prettiness, she had the clear decided looks of a woman who had seen her hopes destroyed. “Are you well?”

Catalina made a little face. “I am well enough. And you? And the children?”

Lady Margaret smiled. “Praise God, yes. But do you know what plans the king has for you? Are you to…” She hesitated. “Are you to go back to Spain? Or stay here?”

Catalina drew a little closer. “They are talking, about the dowry, about my return. But nothing gets done. Nothing is decided. The king is holding me and holding my dowry, and my parents are letting him do it.”

Lady Margaret looked concerned. “I had heard that they might consider betrothing you to Prince Harry,” she said. “I did not know.”

“It is the obvious choice. But it does not seem obvious to the king,” Catalina said wryly. “What do you think? Is he a man to miss an obvious solution, d’you think?”

“No,” said Lady Margaret, whose life had been jeopardized by the king’s awareness of the obvious fact of her family’s claim on his throne.

“Then I must assume that he has thought of this choice and is waiting to see if it is the best he can make,” Catalina said. She gave a little sigh. “God knows, it is weary work, waiting.”

“Now your mourning is over, no doubt he will make arrangements,” her friend said hopefully.

“No doubt,” Catalina replied.

After weeks spent alone, mourning for his wife, the king returned to the court at Whitehall Palace, and Catalina was invited to dine with the royal family and seated with the Princess Mary and the ladies of the court. The young Harry, Prince of Wales, was placed securely between his father and grandmother. Not for this Prince of Wales the cold journey to Ludlow Castle and the rigorous training of a prince-in-waiting. Lady Margaret had ruled that this prince, their only surviving heir, should be brought up under her own eye, in ease and comfort. He was not to be sent away, he was to be watched all the time. He was not even allowed to take part in dangerous sports, jousting or fighting, though he was quite wild to take part, and a boy who loved activity and excitement. His grandmother had ruled that he was too precious to risk.

He smiled at Catalina and she shot him a look that she hoped was discreetly warm. But there was no opportunity to exchange so much as one word. She was firmly anchored farther down the table and she could hardly see him thanks to My Lady the King’s Mother, who plied him with the best of all foods from her own plate and interposed her broad shoulder between him and the ladies.

Catalina thought that it was as Arthur had said, that the boy was spoiled by this attention. His grandmother leaned back for a moment to speak to one of the ushers and Catalina saw Harry’s gaze flick towards her. She gave him a smile and then cast down her eyes. When she glanced up, he was still looking at her and then he blushed red to be caught. “A child.” She shot a sideways little smile even as she silently criticized him. “A child of eleven. All boasting and boyishness. And why should this plump, spoiled boy be spared when Arthur…” At once she stopped the thought. To compare Arthur with his brother was to wish the little boy dead, and she would not do that. To think of Arthur in public was to risk breaking down and she would never do that.

“A woman could rule a boy like that,” she thought. “A woman could be a very great queen if she married such a boy. For the first ten years he would know nothing, and by then perhaps he might be in such a habit of obedience that he would let his wife continue to rule. Or he might be, as Arthur told me, a lazy boy. A young man wasted. He might be so lazy that he could be diverted by games and hunting and sports and amusements, so that the business of the kingdom could be done by his wife.”

Catalina never forgot that Arthur had told her that the boy fancied himself in love with her. “If they give him everything that he wants, perhaps he might be the one who chooses his bride,” she thought. “They are in the habit of indulging him. Perhaps he could beg to marry me and they would feel obliged to say yes.”

She saw him blush even redder; even his ears turned pink. She held his gaze for a long moment, she took in a little breath and parted her lips as if to whisper a word to him. She saw his blue eyes focus on her mouth and darken with desire, and then, calculating the effect, she looked down. “Stupid boy,” she thought.

The king rose from the table and all the men and women on the crowded benches of the hall rose, too, and bowed their heads.

“Give you thanks for coming to greet me,” King Henry said. “Comrades in war and friends in peace. But now forgive me, as I wish to be alone.”

He nodded to Harry, he offered his mother his hand, and the royal family went through the little doorway at the back of the great hall to their privy chamber.

“You should have stayed longer,” the king’s mother remarked as they settled into chairs by the fire and the groom of the ewery brought them wine. “It looks bad, to leave so promptly. I had told the master of horse you would stay, and there would be singing.”

“I was weary,” Henry said shortly. He looked over to where Catalina and the Princess Mary were sitting together. The younger girl was red-eyed, the loss of her mother had hit her hard. Catalina was—as usual—cool as a stream. He thought she had a great power of self-containment. Even this loss of her only real friend at court, her last friend in England, did not seem to distress her.

“She can go back to Durham House tomorrow,” his mother remarked, following the direction of his gaze. “It does no good for her to come to court. She has not earned her place here with an heir, and she has not paid for her place here with her dowry.”

“She is constant,” he said. “She is constant in her attendance on you, and on me.”

“Constant like the plague,” his mother returned.

“You are hard on her.”

“It is a hard world,” she said simply. “I am nothing but just. Why don’t we send her home?”

“Do you not admire her at all?”

She was surprised by the question. “What is there to admire in her?”

“Her courage, her dignity. She has beauty, of course, but she also has charm. She is educated, she is graceful. I think, in other circumstances, she could have been merry. And she has borne herself, under this disappointment, like a queen.”

“She is of no use to us,” she said. “She was our Princess of Wales, but our boy is dead. She is of no use to us now, however charming she may seem to be.”

Catalina looked up and saw them watching her. She gave a small controlled smile and inclined her head. Henry rose, went to a window bay on his own, and crooked his finger for her. She did not jump to come to him, as any of the women of court would have jumped. She looked at him, she raised an eyebrow as if she were considering whether or not to obey, and then she gracefully rose to her feet and strolled towards him.

“Good God, she is desirable,” he thought. “No more than seventeen. Utterly in my power, and yet still she walks across the room as if she were Queen of England crowned.”

“You will miss the queen, I daresay,” he said abruptly in French as she came up to him.

“I shall,” she replied clearly. “I grieve for you in the loss of your wife. I am sure my mother and father would want me to give you their commiserations.”

He nodded, never taking his eyes from her face. “We share a grief now,” he observed. “You have lost your partner in life and I have lost mine.”

He saw her gaze sharpen. “Indeed,” she said steadily. “We do.”

He wondered if she was trying to unravel his meaning. If that quick mind was working behind that clear lovely face, there was no sign of it. “You must teach me the secret of your resignation,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think I resign myself.”

Henry was intrigued. “You don’t?”

“No. I think I trust in God that He knows what is right for all of us, and His will shall be done.”

“Even when His ways are hidden and we sinners have to stumble about in the dark?”

“I know my destiny,” Catalina said calmly. “He has been gracious to reveal it to me.”

“Then you’re one of the very few,” he said, thinking to make her laugh at herself.

“I know,” she said without a glimmer of a smile. He realized that she was utterly serious in her belief that God had revealed her future to her. “I am blessed.”

“And what is this great destiny that God has for you?” he said sarcastically. He hoped so much that she would say that she should be Queen of England, and then he could ask her, or draw close to her, or let her see what was in his mind.

“To do God’s will, of course, and bring His kingdom to earth,” she said cleverly, and evaded him once more.

I speak very confidently of God’s will, and I remind the king that I was raised to be Princess of Wales, but in truth God is silent to me. Since the day of Arthur’s death I can have no genuine conviction that I am blessed. How can I call myself blessed when I have lost the one thing that made my life complete? How can I be blessed when I do not think I will ever be happy again? But we live in a world of believers—I have to say that I am under the especial protection of God, I have to give the illusion of being sure of my destiny. I am the daughter of Isabella of Spain. My inheritance is certainty.

But in truth, of course, I am increasingly alone. I feel increasingly alone. There is nothing between me and despair but my promise to Arthur, and the thin thread, like gold wire in a carpet, of my own determination.

MAY 1503

King Henry did not approach Catalina for one month for the sake of decency, but when he was out of his black jacket he made a formal visit to her at Durham House. Her household had been warned that he would come and were dressed in their best. He saw the signs of wear and tear in the curtains and rugs and hangings and smiled to himself. If she had the good sense that he thought she had, she would be glad to see a resolution to this awkward position. He congratulated himself on not making it easier for her in this last year. She should know by now that she was utterly in his power and her parents could do nothing to free her.

His herald threw open the double doors to her presence chamber and shouted, “His Grace, King Henry of England…”

Henry waved aside the other titles and went in to his daughter-in-law.

She was wearing a dark-colored gown with blue slashings on the sleeve, a richly embroidered stomacher, and a dark blue hood. It brought out the amber in her hair and the blue in her eyes, and he smiled in instinctive pleasure at the sight of her as she sank into a deep formal curtsey and rose up.

“Your Grace,” she said pleasantly. “This is an honor indeed.”

He had to force himself not to stare at the creamy line of her neck, at the smooth, unlined face that looked back up at him. He had lived all his life with a beautiful woman of his own age; now here was a girl young enough to be his daughter, with the rich-scented bloom of youth still on her and breasts full and firm. She was ready for marriage, indeed, she was over-ready for marriage. This was a girl who should be bedded. He checked himself at once, and thought he was part lecher, part lover to look on his dead son’s child bride with such desire.

“Can I offer you some refreshment?” she asked. There was a smile in the back of her eyes.

He thought if she had been an older, a more sophisticated woman, he would have assumed she was playing him, as knowingly as a skilled angler can land a salmon.

“Thank you. I will take a glass of wine.”

And so she caught him. “I am afraid I have nothing fit to offer you,” she said smoothly. “I have nothing left in my cellars at all, and I cannot afford to buy good wine.”

Henry did not show by so much as a flicker that he knew she had trapped him into hearing of her financial difficulties. “I am sorry for that. I will have some barrels sent over,” he said. “Your housekeeping must be very remiss.”

“It is very thin,” she said simply. “Will you take a cup of ale? We brew our own ale very cheaply.”

“Thank you,” he said, biting his lip to hide a smile. He had not dreamed that she had so much self-confidence. The year of widowhood had brought out her courage, he thought. Alone in a foreign land she had not collapsed as other girls might have collapsed, she had gathered her power and become stronger.

“Is My Lady the King’s Mother in good health and the Princess Mary well?” she asked, as confidently as if she were entertaining him in the gold room of the Alhambra.

“Yes, thank God,” he said. “And you?”

She smiled and bowed her head. “And no need to ask for your health,” she remarked. “You never look any different.”

“Do I not?”

“Not since the very first time we met,” she said. “When I had just landed in England and was coming to London and you rode to meet me.” It cost Catalina a good deal not to think of Arthur as he was on that evening, mortified by his father’s rudeness, trying to talk to her in an undertone, stealing sideways looks at her.

Determinedly she put her young lover from her mind and smiled at his father, and said: “I was so surprised by your coming, and so startled by you.”

He laughed. He saw that she had conjured the picture of when he first saw her, a virgin by her bed, in a white gown with a blue cape with her hair in a plait down her back, and how he thought then that he had come upon her like a ravisher, he had forced his way into her bedchamber, he could have forced himself onto her.

He turned and took a chair to cover his thoughts, gesturing that she should sit down too. Her duenna, the same sour-faced Spanish mule, he noticed irritably, stood at the back of the room with two other ladies.

Catalina sat perfectly composed, her white fingers interlaced in her lap, her back straight, her entire manner that of a young woman confident of her power to attract. Henry said nothing and looked at her for a moment. Surely she must know what she was doing to him when she reminded him of their first meeting? And yet surely the daughter of Isabella of Spain and the widow of his own son could not be willfully tempting him to lust?

A servant came in with two cups of small ale. The king was served first and then Catalina took a cup. She took a tiny sip and set it down.

“D’you still not like ale?” He was startled at the intimacy in his own voice. Surely to God he could ask his daughter-in-law what she liked to drink?

“I drink it only when I am very thirsty,” she replied. “But I don’t like the taste it leaves in my mouth.” She put her hand to her mouth and touched her lower lip. Fascinated, he watched her fingertip brush the tip of her tongue. She made a little face. “I think it will never be a favorite of mine,” she said.

“What did you drink in Spain?” He found he could hardly speak. He was still watching her soft mouth, shiny where her tongue had licked her lips.

“We could drink the water,” she said. “In the Alhambra the Moors had piped clean water all the way from the mountains into the palace. We drank mountain spring water from the fountains; it was still cold. And juices from fruits of course, we had wonderful fruits in summer, and ices, and sherbets and wines as well.”

“If you come on progress with me this summer, we can go to places where you can drink the water,” he said. He thought he was sounding like a stupid boy, promising her a drink of water as a treat. Stubbornly, he persisted. “If you come with me, we can go hunting, we can go to Hampshire, beyond, to the New Forest. You remember the country around there? Near where we first met?”

“I should like that so much,” she said. “If I am still here, of course.”

“Still here?” He was startled. He had almost forgotten that she was his hostage, she was supposed to go home by summer. “I doubt your father and I will have agreed terms by then.”

“Why, how can it take so long?” she asked her blue eyes wide with assumed surprise. “Surely we can come to some agreement?” She hesitated. “Between friends? Surely if we cannot agree about the monies owed, there is some other way? Some other agreement that can be made? Since we have made an agreement before?”

It was so close to what he had been thinking that he rose to his feet, discomfited. At once she rose too. The top of her pretty blue hood only came to his shoulder. He thought he would have to bend his head to kiss her, and if she were under him in bed he would have to take care not to hurt her. He felt his face flush hot at the thought of it. “Come here,” he said thickly and led her to the window embrasure where her ladies could not overhear them.

“I have been thinking what sort of arrangement we might come to,” he said. “The easiest thing would be for you to stay here. I should certainly like you to stay here.”

Catalina did not look up at him. If she had done so then, he would have been sure of her. But she kept her eyes down, her face downcast. “Oh, certainly, if my parents agree,” she said, so softly that he could hardly hear.

He felt himself trapped. He felt he could not go forward while she held her head so delicately to one side and showed him only the curve of her cheek and her eyelashes, and yet he could hardly go back when she had asked him outright if there were not another way to resolve the conflict between him and her parents.

“You will think me very old,” he burst out.

Her blue eyes flashed up at him and were veiled again. “Not at all,” she said levelly.

“I am old enough to be your father,” he said, hoping she would disagree.

Instead she looked up at him. “I never think of you like that,” she said.

Henry was silent. He felt utterly baffled by this slim young woman who seemed at one moment so deliciously encouraging and yet at another moment quite opaque. “What would you like to do?” he demanded of her.

At last she raised her head and smiled up at him, her lips curving up but no warmth in her eyes. “Whatever you command,” she said. “I should like most of all to obey you, Your Grace.”

What does he mean? What is he doing? I thought he was offering me Harry and I was about to say yes when he said that I must think him very old, as old as my father. And of course he is; indeed, he looks far older than my father, that is why I never think of him like a father—a grandfather, perhaps, or an old priest. My father is handsome, a terrible womanizer, a brave soldier, a hero on the battlefield. This king has fought one halfhearted battle and put down a dozen unheroic uprisings of poor men too sickened with his rule to endure it anymore. So he is not like my father and I spoke only the truth when I said that I never see him like that.

But then he looked at me as if I had said something of great interest, and then he asked me what I wanted. I could not say to his face that I wanted him to overlook my marriage to his oldest son and marry me anew to his youngest. So I said that I wanted to obey him. There can be nothing wrong with that. But somehow it was not what he wanted. And it did not get me to where I wanted.

I have no idea what he wants. Nor how to turn it to my own advantage.

Henry went back to Whitehall Palace, his face burning and his heart pounding, hammered between frustration and calculation. If he could persuade Catalina’s parents to allow the wedding, he could claim the rest of her substantial dowry, be free of their claims for her jointure, reinforce the alliance with Spain at the very moment that he was looking to secure new alliances with Scotland and France, and perhaps, with such a young wife, get another son and heir on her. One daughter on the throne of Scotland, one daughter on the throne of France should lock both nations into peace for a lifetime. The Princess of Spain on the throne of England should keep the most Christian kings of Spain in alliance. He would have bolted the great powers of Christendom into peaceful alliance with England not just for a generation but for generations to come. They would have heirs in common; they would be safe. England would be safe. Better yet, England’s sons might inherit the kingdoms of France, of Scotland, of Spain. England might conceive its way into peace and greatness.

It made absolute sense to secure Catalina; he tried to focus on the political advantage and not think of the line of her neck nor the curve of her waist. He tried to steady his mind by thinking of the small fortune that would be saved by not having to provide her with a jointure nor with her keep, by not having to send a ship, several ships probably, to escort her home. But all he could think was that she had touched her soft mouth with her finger and told him that she did not like the lingering taste of ale. At the thought of the tip of her tongue against her lips, he groaned aloud and the groom holding the horse for him to dismount looked up and said: “Sire?”

“Bile,” the king said sourly.

It did feel like too rich a fare that was sickening him, he decided as he strode to his private apartments, courtiers eddying out of his way with sycophantic smiles. He felt that he must remember that she was little more than a child, she was his own daughter-in-law. If he listened to the good sense that had carried him so far, he should simply promise to pay her jointure, send her back to her parents, and then delay the payment till they had her married to some other kingly fool elsewhere and he could get away with paying nothing.

But at the mere thought of her married to another man he had to stop and put his hand out to the oak paneling for support.

“Your Grace?” someone asked him. “Are you ill?”

“Bile,” the king repeated. “Something I have eaten.”

His chief groom of the body came to him. “Shall I send for your physician, Your Grace?”

“No,” the king said. “But send a couple of barrels of the best wine to the Dowager Princess. She has nothing in her cellar, and when I have to visit her I should like to drink wine and not ale.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” the man said, bowed, and went away. Henry straightened up and went to his rooms. They were crowded with people as usual: petitioners, courtiers, favor seekers, fortune hunters, some friends, some gentry, some noblemen attending on him for love or calculation. Henry regarded them all sourly. When he had been Henry Tudor on the run in Brittany, he had not been blessed with so many friends.

“Where is my mother?” he asked one of them.

“In her rooms, Your Grace,” the man replied.

“I shall visit her,” he said. “Let her know.”

He gave her a few moments to ready herself, and then he went to her chambers. On her daughter-in-law’s death she had moved into the apartment traditionally given to the queen. She had ordered new tapestries and new furniture and now the place was more grandly furnished than any queen had ever had before.

“I’ll announce myself,” the king said to the guard at her door and stepped in without ceremony.

Lady Margaret was seated at a table in the window, the household accounts spread before her, inspecting the costs of the royal court as if it were a well-run farm. There was very little waste and no extravagance allowed in the court run by Lady Margaret, and royal servants who had thought that some of the payments which passed through their hands might leave a little gold on the side were soon disappointed.

Henry nodded his approval at the sight of his mother’s supervision of the royal business. He had never rid himself of his own anxiety that the ostentatious wealth of the throne of England might prove to be hollow show. He had financed a campaign for the throne on debt and favors; he never wanted to be cap in hand again.

She looked up as he came in. “My son.”

He kneeled for her blessing, as he always did when he first greeted her every day, and felt her fingers gently touch the top of his head.

“You look troubled,” she remarked.

“I am,” he said. “I went to see the Dowager Princess.”

“Yes?” A faint expression of disdain crossed her face. “What are they asking for now?”

“We—” He broke off and then started again. “We have to decide what is to become of her. She spoke of going home to Spain.”

“When they pay us what they owe,” she said at once. “They know they have to pay the rest of her dowry before she can leave.”

“Yes, she knows that.”

There was a brief silence.

“She asked if there could not be another agreement,” he said. “Some resolution.”

“Ah, I’ve been waiting for this,” Lady Margaret said exultantly. “I knew they would be after this. I am only surprised they have waited so long. I suppose they thought they should wait until she was out of mourning.”

“After what?”

“They will want her to stay,” she said.

Henry could feel himself beginning to smile and deliberately he set his face still. “You think so?”

“I have been waiting for them to show their hand. I knew that they were waiting for us to make the first move. Ha! That we have made them declare first!”

He raised his eyebrows, longing for her to spell out his desire. “For what?”

“A proposal from us, of course,” she said. “They knew that we would never let such a chance go. She was the right match then, and she is the right match now. We had a good bargain with her then, and it is still good. Especially if they pay in full. And now she is more profitable than ever.”

His color flushed as he beamed at her. “You think so?”

“Of course. She is here, half her dowry already paid, the rest we have only to collect. We have already rid ourselves of her escort. The alliance is already working to our benefit—we would never have the respect of the French if they did not fear her parents; the Scots fear us too—she is still the best match in Christendom for us.”

His sense of relief was overwhelming. If his mother did not oppose the plan, then he felt he could push on with it. She had been his best and safest advisor for so long that he could not have gone against her will.

“And the difference in age?”

She shrugged. “It is…what? Five, nearly six years? That is nothing for a prince.”

He recoiled as if she had slapped him in the face. “Six years?” he repeated.

“And Harry is tall for his age and strong. They will not look mismatched,” she said.

“No,” he said flatly. “No. Not Harry. I did not mean Harry. I was not speaking of Harry!”

The anger in his voice alerted her. “What?”

“No. No. Not Harry. Damn it! Not Harry!”

“What? Whatever can you mean?”

“It is obvious! Surely it is obvious!”

Her gaze flashed across his face, reading him rapidly, as only she could. “Not Harry?”

“I thought you were speaking of me.”

“Of you?” She quickly reconsidered the conversation. “Of you for the Infanta?” she asked incredulously.

He felt himself flush again. “Yes.”

“Arthur’s widow? Your own daughter-in-law?”

“Yes! Why not?”

Lady Margaret stared at him in alarm. She did not even have to list the obstacles.

“He was too young. It was not consummated,” he said, repeating the words that the Spanish ambassador had learned from Doña Elvira, which had been spread throughout Christendom.

She looked skeptical.

“She says so herself. Her duenna says so. The Spanish say so. Everybody says so.”

“And you believe them?” she asked coldly.

“He was impotent.”

“Well…” It was typical of her that she said nothing while she considered it. She looked at him, noting the color in his cheeks and the trouble in his face. “They are probably lying. We saw them wedded and bedded and there was no suggestion then that it had not been done.”

“That is their business. If they all tell the same lie and stick to it, then it is the same as the truth.”

“Only if we accept it.”

“We do,” he ruled.

She raised her eyebrows. “It is your desire?”

“It is not a question of desire. I need a wife,” Henry said coolly, as though it could be anyone. “And she is conveniently here, as you say.”

“She would be suitable by birth,” his mother conceded, “but for her relationship to you. She is your daughter-in-law even if it was not consummated. And she is very young.”

“She is seventeen,” he said. “A good age for a woman. And a widow. She is ready for a second marriage.”

“She is either a virgin or she is not,” Lady Margaret observed waspishly. “We had better agree.”

“She is seventeen,” he corrected himself. “A good age for marriage. She is ready for a full marriage.”

“The people won’t like it,” she observed. “They will remember her wedding to Arthur, we made such a show of it. They took to her. They took to the two of them. The pomegranate and the rose. She caught their fancy in her lace mantilla.”

“Well, he is dead,” he said harshly. “And she will have to marry someone.”

“People will think it odd.”

He shrugged. “They will be glad enough if she gives me a son.”

“Oh, yes, if she can do that. But she was barren with Arthur.”

“As we have agreed, Arthur was impotent. The marriage was not consummated.”

She pursed her lips but said nothing.

“And it gains us the dowry and removes the cost of the jointure,” he pointed out.

She nodded. She loved the thought of the fortune that Catalina would bring.

“And she is here already.”

“A most constant presence,” she said sourly.

“A constant princess.” He smiled.

“Do you really think her parents would agree? Their Majesties of Spain?”

“It solves their dilemma as well as ours. And it maintains the alliance.” He found he was still smiling, and tried to make his face stern, as normal. “She herself would think it was her destiny. She believes herself born to be Queen of England.”

“Well then, she is a fool,” his mother remarked smartly.

“She was raised to be queen since she was a child.”

“But she will be a barren queen. No son of hers will be any good. He could never be king. If she has one at all, he will come after Harry,” she reminded him. “He will even come after Harry’s sons. It’s a far poorer alliance for her than marriage to a Prince of Wales. The Spanish won’t like it.”

“Oh, Harry is still a child. His sons are a long way ahead. Years.”

“Even so. It would weigh on her parents. They will prefer Prince Harry for her. That way, she is queen and her son is king after her. Why would they agree to anything less?”

Henry hesitated. There was nothing he could say to fault her logic, except that he did not wish to follow it.

“Oh. I see. You want her,” she said flatly when the silence extended so long that she realized there was something he could not let himself say. “It is a matter of your desire.”

He took the plunge. “Yes,” he confirmed.

Lady Margaret looked at him with calculation in her gaze. He had been taken from her as little more than a baby for safekeeping. Since then she had always seen him as a prospect, as a potential heir to the throne, as her passport to grandeur. She had hardly known him as a baby, never loved him as a child. She had planned his future as a man, she had defended his rights as a king, she had mapped his campaign as a threat to the House of York—but she had never known tenderness for him. She could not learn to feel indulgent towards him this late in her life; she was hardly ever indulgent to anyone, not even to herself.

“That’s very shocking,” she said coolly. “ I thought we were talking of a marriage of advantage. She stands as a daughter to you. This desire is a carnal sin.”

“It is not and she is not,” he said. “There is nothing wrong in honorable love. She is not my daughter. She is his widow. And it was not consummated.”

“You will need a dispensation. It is a sin.”

“He never even had her!” he exclaimed.

“The whole court put them to bed,” she pointed out levelly.

“He was too young. He was impotent. And he was dead, poor lad, within months.”

She nodded. “So she says now.”

“But you do not advise me against it,” he said.

“It is a sin,” she repeated. “But if you can get dispensation and her parents agree to it, then—” She pulled a sour face. “Well, better her than many others, I suppose,” she said begrudgingly. “And she can live at court under my care. I can watch over her and command her more easily than I could an older girl, and we know that she behaves herself well. She is obedient. She will learn her duties under me. And the people love her.”

“I shall speak to the Spanish ambassador today.”

She thought she had never seen such a bright gladness in his face. “I suppose I can teach her.” She gestured to the books before her. “She will have much to learn.”

“I shall tell the ambassador to propose it to Their Majesties of Spain and I shall talk to her tomorrow.”

“You will go again so soon?” she asked curiously.

Henry nodded. He would not tell her that even to wait till tomorrow seemed too long. If he had been free to do so, he would have gone back straightaway and asked her to marry him that very night, as if he were a humble squire and she a maid, and not King of England and Princess of Spain; father- and daughter-in-law.

Henry saw that Dr. de Puebla the Spanish ambassador was invited to Whitehall in time for dinner, given a seat at one of the top tables, and plied with the best wine. Some venison, hanged to perfection and cooked in a brandywine sauce, came to the king’s table; he helped himself to a small portion and sent the dish to the Spanish ambassador. De Puebla, who had not experienced such favors since first negotiating the Infanta’s marriage contract, loaded his plate with a heavy spoon and dipped the best manchet bread into the gravy, glad to eat well at court, wondering quietly behind his avid smile what it might mean.

The king’s mother nodded towards him, and de Puebla rose up from his seat to bow to her. “Most gracious,” he remarked to himself as he sat down once more. “Extremely. Exceptionally.”

He was no fool, he knew that something would be required for all these public favors. But given the horror of the past year—when the hopes of Spain had been buried beneath the nave in Worcester Cathedral—at least these were straws in a good wind. Clearly, King Henry had a use for him again as something other than a whipping boy for the failure of the Spanish sovereigns to pay their debts.

De Puebla had tried to defend Their Majesties of Spain to an increasingly irritable English king. He had tried to explain to them in long, detailed letters that it was fruitless asking for Catalina’s widow’s jointure if they would not pay the remainder of the dowry. He tried to explain to Catalina that he could not make the English king pay a more generous allowance for the upkeep of her household, nor could he persuade the Spanish king to give his daughter financial support. Both kings were utterly stubborn, both quite determined to force the other into a weak position. Neither seemed to care that in the meantime Catalina, only seventeen, was forced to keep house with an extravagant entourage in a foreign land on next to no money. Neither king would take the first step and undertake to be responsible for her keep, fearing that this would commit him to keeping her and her household forever.

De Puebla smiled up at the king, seated on his throne under the canopy of state. He genuinely liked King Henry, he admired the courage with which he had seized and held the throne, he liked the man’s direct good sense. And more than that, de Puebla liked living in England; he was accustomed to his good house in London, to the importance conferred on him by representing the newest and most powerful ruling house in Europe. He liked the fact that his Jewish background and recent conversion were utterly ignored in England, since everyone at this court had come from nowhere and changed their name or their affiliation at least once. England suited de Puebla, and he would do his best to remain. If it meant serving the King of England better than the King of Spain, he thought it was a small compromise to make.

Henry rose from the throne and gave the signal that the servers could clear the plates. They swept the board and cleared the trestle tables, and Henry strolled among the diners, pausing for a word here and there, still very much the commander among his men. All the favorites at the Tudor court were the gamblers who had put their swords behind their words and marched into England with Henry. They knew their value to him, and he knew his to them. It was still a victors’ camp rather than a softened civilian court.

At length Henry completed his circuit and came to de Puebla’s table. “Ambassador,” he greeted him.

De Puebla bowed low. “I thank you for your gift of the dish of venison,” he said. “It was delicious.”

The king nodded. “I would have a word with you.”

“Of course.”

“Privately.”

The two men strolled to a quieter corner of the hall while the musicians in the gallery struck a note and began to play.

“I have a proposal to resolve the issue of the Dowager Princess,” Henry said as drily as possible.

“Indeed?”

“You may find my suggestion unusual, but I think it has much to recommend it.”

“At last,” de Puebla thought. “He is going to propose Harry. I thought he was going to let her sink a lot lower before he did that. I thought he would bring her down so that he could charge us double for a second try at Wales. But, so be it. God is merciful.”

“Ah, yes?” de Puebla said aloud.

“I suggest that we forget the issue of the dowry,” Henry started. “Her goods will be absorbed into my household. I shall pay her an appropriate allowance, as I did for the late Queen Elizabeth—God bless her. I shall marry the Infanta myself.”

De Puebla was almost too shocked to speak. “You?”

“I. Is there any reason why not?”

The ambassador gulped, drew a breath, managed to say, “No, no, at least…I suppose there could be an objection on the grounds of affinity.”

“I shall apply for a dispensation. I take it that you are certain that the marriage was not consummated?”

“Certain,” de Puebla gasped.

“You assured me of that on her word?”

“The duenna said…”

“Then it is nothing,” the king ruled. “They were little more than promised to one another. Hardly man and wife.”

“I will have to put this to Their Majesties of Spain,” de Puebla said, desperately trying to assemble some order to his whirling thoughts, striving to keep his deep shock from his face. “Does the Privy Council agree?” he asked, playing for time. “The Archbishop of Canterbury?”

“It is a matter between ourselves at the moment,” Henry said grandly. “It is early days for me as a widower. I want to be able to reassure Their Majesties that their daughter will be cared for. It has been a difficult year for her.”

“If she could have gone home…”

“Now there will be no need for her to go home. Her home is England. This is her country,” Henry said flatly. “She shall be queen here, as she was brought up to be.”

De Puebla could hardly speak for shock at the suggestion that this old man, who had just buried his wife, should marry his dead son’s bride. “Of course. So, shall I tell Their Majesties that you are quite determined on this course? There is no other arrangement that we should consider?” De Puebla racked his brains as to how he could bring in the name of Prince Harry, who was surely Catalina’s most appropriate future husband. Finally, he plunged in. “Your son, for instance?”

“My son is too young to be considered for marriage as yet.” Henry disposed of the suggestion with speed. “He is eleven and a strong, forward boy, but his grandmother insists that we plan nothing for him for another four years. And by then, the Princess Dowager would be twenty-one.”

“Still young,” gasped de Puebla. “Still a young woman, and near him in age.”

“I don’t think Their Majesties would want their daughter to stay in England for another four years without husband or household of her own,” Henry said with unconcealed threat. “They could hardly want her to wait for Harry’s majority. What would she do in those years? Where would she live? Are they proposing to buy her a palace and set up a household for her? Are they prepared to give her an income? A court, appropriate to her position? For four years?”

“If she could return to Spain to wait?” de Puebla hazarded.

“She can leave at once, if she will pay the full amount of her dowry and find her own fortune elsewhere. Do you really think she can get a better offer than Queen of England? Take her away if you do!”

It was the sticking point that they had reached over and over again in the past year. De Puebla knew he was beaten. “I will write to Their Majesties tonight,” he said.

I dreamed I was a swift, flying over the golden hills of the Sierra Nevada. But this time, I was flying north, the hot afternoon sun was on my left, ahead of me was a gathering of cool cloud. Then suddenly, the cloud took shape. It was Ludlow Castle, and my little bird heart fluttered at the sight of it and at the thought of the night that would come when he would take me in his arms and press down on me, and I would melt with desire for him.

Then I saw it was not Ludlow but these great gray walls were those of Windsor Castle, and the curve of the river was the great gray glass of the river Thames, and all the traffic plying up and down and the great ships at anchor were the wealth and the bustle of the English. I knew I was far from my home, and yet I was at home. This would be my home. I would build a little nest against the gray stone of the towers here, just as I would have done in Spain. And here they would call me a swift; a bird which flies so fast that no one has ever seen it land, a bird that flies so high that they think it never touches the ground. I shall not be Catalina, the Infanta of Spain. I shall be Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England, just as Arthur named me: Katherine, Queen of England.

“The king is here again,” Doña Elvira said, looking out of the window. “He has ridden here with just two men. Not even a standard-bearer or guards.” She sniffed. The widespread English informality was bad enough but this king had the manners of a stableboy.

Catalina flew to the window and peered out. “What can he want?” she wondered. “Tell them to decant some of his wine.”

Doña Elvira went out of the room in a hurry. In the next moment Henry strolled in, unannounced. “I thought I would call on you,” he said.

Catalina sank into a deep curtsey. “Your Grace does me much honor,” she said. “And at least now I can offer you a glass of good wine.”

Henry smiled and waited. The two of them stood while Doña Elvira returned to the room with a Spanish maid-in-waiting carrying a tray of Morisco brassware with two Venetian glasses of red wine. Henry noted the fineness of the workmanship and assumed correctly that it was part of the dowry that the Spanish had withheld.

“Your health,” he said, holding up his glass to the princess.

To his surprise she did not simply raise her glass in return, she raised her eyes and gave him a long, thoughtful look. He felt himself tingle, like a boy, as his eyes met hers. “Princess?” he said quietly.

“Your Grace?”

They both of them glanced towards Doña Elvira, who was standing uncomfortably close, quietly regarding the floorboards beneath her worn shoes.

“You can leave us,” the king said.

The woman looked at the princess for her orders and made no move to leave.

“I shall talk in private with my daughter-in-law,” King Henry said firmly. “You may go.”

Doña Elvira curtseyed and left, and the rest of the ladies swept out after her.

Catalina smiled at the king. “As you command,” she said.

He felt his pulse speed at her smile. “Indeed, I do need to speak to you privately. I have a proposal to put to you. I have spoken to the Spanish ambassador and he has written to your parents.”

“At last. This is it. At last,” Catalina thought. “He has come to propose Harry for me. Thank God, who has brought me to this day. Arthur, beloved, this day you will see that I shall be faithful to my promise to you.”

“I need to marry again,” Henry said. “I am still young—” He thought he would not say his age of forty-six. “It may be that I can have another child or two.”

Catalina nodded politely, but she was barely listening. She was waiting for him to ask her to marry Prince Harry.

“I have been thinking of all the princesses in Europe who would be suitable partners for me,” he said.

Still the princess before him said nothing.

“I can find no one I would choose.”

She widened her eyes to indicate her attention.

Henry plowed on. “My choice has fallen on you,” he said bluntly, “for these reasons. You are here in London already, you have become accustomed to living here. You were brought up to be Queen of England, and you will be queen as my wife. The difficulties with the dowry can be put aside. You will have the same allowance that I paid to Queen Elizabeth. My mother agrees with this.”

At last his words penetrated her mind. She was so shocked that she could barely speak. She just stared at him. “Me?”

“There is a slight objection on the grounds of affinity, but I shall ask the Pope to grant a dispensation,” he went on. “I understand that your marriage to Prince Arthur was never consummated. In that case, there is no real objection.”

“It was not consummated.” Catalina repeated the words by rote, as if she no longer understood them. The great lie had been part of a plot to take her to the altar with Prince Harry, not with his father. She could not now retract it. Her mind was so dizzy that she could only cling to it. “It was not consummated.”

“Then there should be no difficulty,” the king said. “I take it that you do not object?”

He found that he could hardly breathe, waiting for her answer. Any thought that she had been leading him on, tempting him to this moment, had vanished when he looked into her bleached, shocked face.

He took her hand. “Don’t look so afraid,” he said, his voice low with tenderness. “I won’t hurt you. This is to resolve all your problems. I will be a good husband to you. I will care for you.” Desperately, he racked his brains for something that might please her. “I will buy you pretty things,” he said. “Like those sapphires that you liked so much. You shall have a cupboard full of pretty things, Catalina.”

She knew she had to reply. “I am so surprised,” she said.

“Surely you must have known that I desired you?”

I stopped my cry of denial. I wanted to say that of course I had not known. But it was not true. I had known, as any young woman would have known, from the way he had looked at me, from the way that I had responded to him. From the very first moment that I met him, there was this undercurrent between us. I ignored it. I pretended it was something easier than it was. I deployed it. I have been most at fault.

In my vanity, I thought that I was encouraging an old man to think of me kindly, that I could engage him, delight him, even flirt with him, first as a fond father-in-law and then to prevail upon him to marry me to Harry. I had meant to delight him as a daughter, I had wanted him to admire me, to pet me. I wanted him to dote on me.

This is a sin, a sin. This is a sin of vanity and a sin of pride. I have deployed his lust and covetousness. I have led him to sin through my folly. No wonder God has turned His face from me and my mother never writes to me. I am most wrong.

Dear God, I am a fool, and a childish, vain fool at that. I have not lured the king into a trap of my own satisfaction but merely baited his trap for me. My vanity and pride in myself made me think that I could tempt him to do whatever I want. Instead, I have tempted him only to his own desires, and now he will do what he wants. And what he wants is me. And it is my own stupid fault.

“You must have known.” Henry smiled down at her confidently. “You must have known when I came to see you yesterday, and when I sent you the good wine?”

Catalina gave a little nod. She had known something—fool that she was—she had known something was happening and praised her own diplomatic skills for being so clever as to lead the King of England by the nose. She had thought herself a woman of the world and thought her ambassador an idiot for not achieving this outcome from a king who was so easily manipulated. She had thought she had the King of England dancing to her bidding, when in fact he had his own tune in mind.

“I desired you from the moment I first saw you,” he told her, his voice very low.

She looked up. “You did?”

“Truly. When I came into your bedchamber at Dogmersfield.”

She remembered an old man, travel-stained and lean, the father of the man she would marry. She remembered the sweaty male scent as he forced his way into her bedroom and she remembered standing before him and thinking: what a clown, what a rough soldier to push in where he is not wanted. And then Arthur arrived, his blond hair tousled, and with the brightness of his shy smile.

“Oh, yes,” she said. From somewhere deep inside her own resolution, she found a smile. “I remember. I danced for you.”

Henry drew her a little closer and slid his arm around her waist. Catalina forced herself not to pull away. “I watched you,” he said. “I longed for you.”

“But you were married,” Catalina said primly.

“And now I am widowed and so are you,” he said. He felt the stiffness of her body through the hard boning of the stomacher and let her go. He would have to court her slowly, he thought. She might have flirted with him, but now she was startled by the turn that things had taken. She had come from an absurdly sheltered upbringing and her innocent months with Arthur had hardly opened her eyes at all. He would have to take matters slowly with her. He would have to wait until she had permission from Spain, he would leave the ambassador to tell her of the wealth she might command, he would have to let her women urge the benefits of the match upon her. She was a young woman; by nature and experience she was bound to be a fool. He would have to give her time.

“I will leave you now,” he said. “I will come again tomorrow.”

She nodded and walked with him to the door of her privy chamber. There she hesitated. “You mean it?” she asked him, her blue eyes suddenly anxious. “You mean this as a proposal of marriage, not as a feint in a negotiation? You truly want to marry me? I will be queen?”

He nodded. “I mean it.” The depth of her ambition began to dawn on him and he smiled as he slowly saw the way to her. “Do you want to be queen so very much?”

Catalina nodded. “I was brought up to it,” she said. “I want nothing more.” She hesitated. For a moment she almost thought to tell him that it had been the last thought of his son, but then her passion for Arthur was too great for her to share him with anyone, even his father. And besides, Arthur had planned that she should marry Harry.

The king was smiling. “So you don’t have desire, but you do have ambition,” he observed a little coldly.

“It is nothing more than my due,” she said flatly. “I was born to be a queen.”

He took her hand and bent over it. He kissed her fingers, and he stopped himself from licking them. “Take it slowly,” he warned himself. “This is a girl and possibly a virgin, certainly not a whore.” He straightened up. “I shall make you Katherine of Aragon, Queen of England,” he promised her, and saw her blue eyes darken with desire at the title. “We can marry as soon as we have the dispensation from the Pope.”

Think! Think! I urgently command myself. You were not raised by a fool to be a fool, you were raised by a queen to be a queen. If this is a feint you ought to be able to see it. If it is a true offer you ought to be able to turn it to your advantage.

It is not a true fulfillment of the promise I made to my beloved, but it is close. He wanted me to be Queen of England and to have the children that he would have given me. So what if they will be his half brother and half sister rather than his niece and nephew? That makes no difference.

I shrink from the thought of marrying this old man, old enough to be my father. The skin at his neck is fine and loose, like that of a turtle. I cannot imagine being in bed with him. His breath is sour, an old man’s breath; and he is thin, and he will feel bony at the hips and shoulders. But I shrink from the thought of being in bed with that child Harry. His face is as smooth and as rounded as a little girl’s. In truth, I cannot bear the thought of being anyone’s wife but Arthur’s; and that part of my life has gone.

Think! Think! This might be the very right thing to do.

Oh, God, beloved, I wish you were here to tell me. I wish I could just visit you in the garden for you to tell me what I should do. I am only seventeen, I cannot outwit a man old enough to be my father, a king with a nose for pretenders.

Think!

I will have no help from anyone. I have to think alone.

Doña Elvira waited until the princess’s bedtime and until all the maids-in-waiting, the ladies and the grooms of the bedchamber had withdrawn. She closed the door on them all and then turned to the princess, who was seated in her bed, her hair in a neat plait, her pillows plumped behind her.

“What did the king want?” she demanded without ceremony.

“He proposed marriage to me,” Catalina said bluntly in reply. “For himself.”

For a moment the duenna was too stunned to speak then she crossed herself, as a woman seeing something unclean. “God save us,” was all she said. Then: “God forgive him for even thinking it.”

“God forgive you,” Catalina replied smartly. “I am considering it.”

“He is your father-in-law, and old enough to be your father.”

“His age doesn’t matter,” Catalina said truly. “If I go back to Spain they won’t seek a young husband for me but an advantageous one.”

“But he is the father of your husband.”

Catalina nipped her lips together. “My late husband,” she said bleakly. “And the marriage was not consummated.”

Doña Elvira swallowed the lie; but her eyes flicked away, just once.

“As you remember,” Catalina said smoothly.

“Even so! It is against nature!”

“It is not against nature,” Catalina asserted. “There was no consummation of the betrothal, there was no child. So there can be no sin against nature. And anyway, we can get a dispensation.”

Doña Elvira hesitated. “You can?”

“He says so.”

“Princess, you cannot want this?”

The princess’s little face was bleak. “He will not betroth me to Prince Harry,” she said. “He says the boy is too young. I cannot wait four years until he is grown. So what can I do but marry the king? I was born to be Queen of England and mother of the next King of England. I have to fulfill my destiny, it is my God-given destiny. I thought I would have to force myself to take Prince Harry. Now it seems I shall have to force myself to take the king. Perhaps this is God testing me. But my will is strong. I will be Queen of England and the mother of the king. I shall make this country a fortress against the Moors, as I promised my mother. I shall make it a country of justice and fairness defended against the Scots, as I promised Arthur.”

“I don’t know what your mother will think,” the duenna said. “I should not have left you alone with him, if I had known.”

Catalina nodded. “Don’t leave us alone again.” She paused. “Unless I nod to you,” she said. “I may nod for you to leave, and then you must go.”

The duenna was shocked. “He should not even see you before your wedding day. I shall tell the ambassador that he must tell the king that he cannot visit you at all now.”

Catalina shook her head. “We are not in Spain now,” she said fiercely. “D’you still not see it? We cannot leave this to the ambassador, not even my mother can say what shall happen. I shall have to make this happen. I alone have brought it so far, and I alone will make it happen.”

I hoped to dream of you, but I dreamed of nothing. I feel as if you have gone far, far away. I have no letter from my mother, so I don’t know what she will make of the king’s wish. I pray, but I hear nothing from God. I speak very bravely of my destiny and God’s will, but they feel now quite intertwined. If God does not make me Queen of England, then I do not know how I can believe in Him. If I am not Queen of England, then I do not know what I am.

Catalina waited for the king to visit her as he had promised. He did not come the next day but Catalina was sure he would come the day after. When three days had elapsed she walked on her own by the river, chafing her hands in the shelter of her cloak. She had been so sure that he would come again that she had prepared herself to keep him interested but under her control. She planned to lead him on, to keep him dancing at arm’s length. When he did not come she realized that she was anxious to see him. Not for desire—she thought she would never feel desire again—but because he was her only way to the throne of England. When he did not come, she was mortally afraid that he had had second thoughts, and he would not come at all.

“Why is he not coming?” I demand of the little waves on the river, washing against the bank as a boatman rows by. “Why would he come so passionate and earnest one day, and then not come at all?”

I am so fearful of his mother. She has never liked me and if she turns her face from me, I don’t know that he will go ahead. But then I remember that he said that his mother had given her permission. Then I am afraid that the Spanish ambassador might have said something against the match—but I cannot believe that de Puebla would ever say anything to inconvenience the king, even if he failed to serve me.

“Then why is he not coming?” I ask myself. “If he was courting in the English way, all rush and informality, then surely he would come every day?”

Another day went past, and then another. Finally Catalina gave way to her anxiety and sent the king a message at his court, hoping that he was well.

Doña Elvira said nothing, but her stiff back as she supervised the brushing and powdering of Catalina’s gown that night spoke volumes.

“I know what you are thinking,” Catalina said as the duenna waved the maid of the wardrobe from the room and turned to brush Catalina’s hair. “But I cannot risk losing this chance.”

“I am thinking nothing,” the older woman said coldly. “These are English ways. As you tell me, we cannot now abide by decent Spanish ways. And so I am not qualified to speak. Clearly, my advice is not taken. I am an empty vessel.”

Catalina was too worried to soothe the older woman. “It doesn’t matter what you are,” she said distractedly. “Perhaps he will come tomorrow.”

Henry, seeing her ambition as the key to her, had given the girl a few days to consider her position. He thought she might compare the life she led at Durham House—in seclusion with her little Spanish court, her furniture becoming more shabby and no new gowns—with the life she might lead as a young queen at the head of one of the richest courts in Europe. He thought she had the sense to think that through on her own. When he received a note from her, inquiring as to his health, he knew that he had been right; and the next day he rode down the Strand to visit her.

Her porter who kept the gate said that the princess was in the garden, walking with her ladies by the river. Henry went through the back door of the palace to the terrace, and down the steps through the garden. He saw her by the river walking alone, ahead of her ladies, her head slightly bowed in thought, and he felt an old familiar sensation in his belly at the sight of a woman he desired. It made him feel young again, that deep pang of lust, and he smiled at himself for feeling a young man’s passion, for knowing again a young man’s folly.

His page, running ahead, announced him, and he saw her head jerk up at his name and she looked across the lawn and saw him. He smiled. He was waiting for that moment of recognition between a woman and a man who loves her—the moment when their eyes meet and they both know that intense moment of joy, that moment when the eyes say: “Ah, it is you,” and that is everything.

Instead, like a dull blow, he saw at once that there was no leap of her heart at the sight of him. He was smiling shyly, his face lit up with anticipation; but she, in the first moment of surprise, was nothing more than startled. Unprepared, she did not feign emotion, she did not look like a woman in love. She looked up, she saw him—and he could tell at once that she did not love him. There was no shock of delight. Instead, chillingly, he saw a swift expression of calculation cross her face. She was a girl in an unguarded moment, wondering if she could have her own way. It was the look of a huckster, pricing a fool ready for fleecing. Henry, the father of two selfish girls, recognized it in a moment and knew that whatever the princess might say, however sweetly she might say it, this would be a marriage of convenience to her, whatever it was to him. And more than that, he knew that she had made up her mind to accept him.

He walked across the close-scythed grass towards her and took her hand. “Good day, Princess.”

Catalina curtseyed. “Your Grace.”

She turned her head to her ladies. “You can go inside.” To Doña Elvira she said, “See that there are refreshments for His Grace when we come in.” Then she turned back to him. “Will you walk, sire?”

“You will make a very elegant queen,” he said with a smile. “You command very smoothly.”

He saw her hesitate in her stride and the tension leave her slim young body as she exhaled. “Ah, you mean it, then,” she breathed. “You mean to marry me.”

“I do,” he said. “You will be a most beautiful Queen of England.”

She glowed at the thought of it. “I still have many English ways to learn.”

“My mother will teach you,” he said easily. “You will live at court in her rooms and under her supervision.”

Catalina checked a little in her stride. “Surely I will have my own rooms, the queen’s rooms?”

“My mother is occupying the queen’s rooms,” he said. “She moved in after the death of the late queen, God bless her. And you will join her there. She thinks that you are too young as yet to have your own rooms and a separate court. You can live in my mother’s rooms with her ladies, and she can teach you how things are done.”

He could see that she was troubled, but trying hard not to show it.

“I should think I know how things are done in a royal palace,” Catalina said, trying to smile.

“An English palace,” he said firmly. “Fortunately, my mother has run all my palaces and castles and managed my fortune since I came to the throne. She shall teach you how it is done.”

Catalina closed her lips on her disagreement. “When do you think we will hear from the Pope?” she asked.

“I have sent an emissary to Rome to inquire,” Henry said. “We shall have to apply jointly, your parents and myself. But it should be resolved very quickly. If we are all agreed, there can be no real objection.”

“Yes,” she said.

“And we are completely agreed on marriage?” he confirmed.

“Yes,” she said again.

He took her hand and tucked it into his arm. Catalina walked a little closer and let her head brush against his shoulder. She was not wearing a headdress, only the hood of her cape covered her hair, and the movement pushed it back. He could smell the essence of roses on her hair, he could feel the warmth of her head against his shoulder. He had to stop himself from taking her in his arms. He paused and she stood close to him; he could feel the warmth of her, down the whole length of his body.

“Catalina,” he said, his voice very low and thick.

She stole a glance and saw desire in his face, and she did not step away. If anything, she came a little closer. “Yes, Your Grace?” she whispered.

Her eyes were downcast, but slowly, in the silence, she looked up at him. When her face was upturned to his, he could not resist the unstated invitation. He bent and kissed her on the lips.

There was no shrinking, she took his kiss, her mouth yielded under his, he could taste her. His arms came around her, he pressed her towards him, he could feel his desire for her rising in him so strongly that he had to let her go, that minute, or disgrace himself.

He released her and stood shaking with desire so strong that he could not believe its power as it washed through him. Catalina pulled her hood forwards as if she would be veiled from him, as if she were a girl from a harem with a veil hiding her mouth, only dark, promising eyes showing above the mask. That gesture, so foreign, so secretive, made him long to push back her hood and kiss her again. He reached for her.

“We might be seen,” she said coolly, and stepped back from him. “We can be seen from the house, and anyone can go by on the river.”

Henry let her go. He could say nothing, for he knew his voice would tremble. Silently, he offered her his arm once more, and silently she took it. They fell into pace with each other, he tempering his longer stride to her steps. They walked in silence for a few moments.

“Our children will be your heirs?” she confirmed, her voice cool and steady, following a train of thought very far from his own whirl of sensations.

He cleared his throat. “Yes, yes, of course.”

“That is the English tradition?”

“Yes.”

“They will come before your other children?”

“Our son will inherit before the Princesses Margaret and Mary,” he said. “But our daughters would come after them.”

She frowned a little. “How so? Why would they not come before?”

“It is first on sex and then on age,” he said. “The firstborn boy inherits, then other boys, then girls according to age. Please God there is always a prince to inherit. England has no tradition of ruling queens.”

“A ruling queen can command as well as a king,” said the daughter of Isabella of Castile.

“Not in England,” said Henry Tudor.

She left it at that. “But our oldest son would be king when you died,” she pursued.

“Please God I have some years left,” he said wryly.

She was seventeen, she had no sensitivity about age. “Of course. But when you die, if we had a son, he would inherit?”

“No. The king after me will be Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales.”

She frowned. “I thought you could nominate an heir? Can you not make it our son?”

He shook his head. “Harry is Prince of Wales. He will be king after me.”

“I thought he was to go into the church?”

“Not now.”

“But if we have a son? Can you not make Harry king of your French dominions, or Ireland, and make our son King of England?”

Henry laughed shortly. “No. For that would be to destroy my kingdom, which I have had some trouble to win and to keep together. Harry will have it all by right.” He saw she was disturbed. “Catalina, you will be Queen of England, one of the finest kingdoms of Europe, the place your mother and father chose for you. Your sons and daughters will be princes and princesses of England. What more could you want?”

“I want my son to be king,” she answered him frankly.

He shrugged. “It cannot be.”

She turned away slightly, only his grip on her hand kept her close.

He tried to laugh it off. “Catalina, we are not even married yet. You might not even have a son. We need not spoil our betrothal for a child not yet conceived.”

“Then what would be the point of marriage?” she asked, direct in her self-absorption.

He could have said “desire.” “Destiny, so that you shall be queen.”

She would not let it go. “I had thought to be Queen of England and see my son on the throne,” she repeated. “I had thought to be a power in the court, like your mother is. I had thought that there are castles to build and a navy to plan and schools and colleges to found. I want to defend against the Scots on our northern borders and against the Moors on our coasts. I want to be a ruling queen in England, these are things I have planned and hoped for. I was named as the next Queen of England almost in my cradle, I have thought about the kingdom I would reign, I have made plans. There are many things that I want to do.”

He could not help himself—he laughed aloud at the thought of this girl, this child, presuming to make plans for the ruling of his kingdom. “You will find that I am before you,” he said bluntly. “This kingdom shall be run as the king commands. This kingdom is run as I command. I did not fight my way to the crown to hand it over to a girl young enough to be my daughter. Your task will be to fill the royal nurseries and your world will start and stop there.”

“But your mother…”

“You will find my mother guards her domains as I guard mine,” he said, still chuckling at the thought of this child planning her future at his court. “She will command you as a daughter and you will obey. Make no mistake about it, Catalina. You will come into my court and obey me, you will live in my mother’s rooms and obey her. You will be Queen of England and have the crown on your head. But you will be my wife, and I will have an obedient wife, as I have always done.”

He stopped—he did not want to frighten her—but his desire for her was not greater than his determination to hold this kingdom that he had fought so hard to win. “I am not a child like Arthur,” he said to her quietly, thinking that his son, a gentle boy, might have made all sorts of soft promises to a determined young wife. “You will not rule beside me. You will be a child bride to me. I shall love you and make you happy. I swear you will be glad that you married me. I shall be kind to you. I shall be generous to you. I shall give you anything you want. But I shall not make you a ruler. Even at my death you will not rule my country.”

That night I dreamed that I was a queen in a court with a scepter in one hand and wand in the other and a crown on my head. I raised the scepter and found it changed in my hand, it was a branch of a tree, the stem of a flower, it was valueless. My other hand was no longer filled with the heavy orb of the scepter but with rose petals. I could smell their scent. I put my hand up to touch the crown on my head and I felt a little circlet of flowers. The throne room melted away and I was in the sultana’s garden at the Alhambra, my sisters plaiting circlets of daisies for each other’s heads.

“Where is the Queen of England?” someone called from the terrace below the garden.

I rose from the lawn of chamomile flowers and smelled the bittersweet perfume of the herb as I tried to run past the fountain to the archway at the end of the garden. “I am here!” I tried to call, but I made no noise above the splashing of the water in the marble bowl.

“Where is the Queen of England?” I heard them call again.

“I am here!” I called out silently.

“Where is Queen Katherine of England?”

“Here! Here! Here!”

The ambassador, summoned at daybreak to come at once to Durham House, did not trouble himself to get there until nine o’clock. He found Catalina waiting for him in her privy chamber with only Doña Elvira in attendance.

“I sent for you hours ago,” the princess said crossly.

“I was undertaking business for your father and could not come earlier,” he said smoothly, ignoring the sulky look on her face. “Is there something wrong?”

“I spoke with the king yesterday and he repeated his proposal of marriage,” Catalina said, a little pride in her voice.

“Indeed.”

“But he told me that I would live at court in the rooms of his mother.”

“Oh.” The ambassador nodded.

“And he said that my sons would inherit only after Prince Harry.”

The ambassador nodded again.

“Can we not persuade him to overlook Prince Harry? Can we not draw up a marriage contract to set him aside in favor of my son?”

The ambassador shook his head. “It’s not possible.”

“Surely a man can choose his heir?”

“No. Not in the case of a king come so new to his throne. Not an English king. And even if he could, he would not.”

She leapt from her chair and paced to the window. “My son will be the grandson of the kings of Spain!” she exclaimed. “Royal for centuries. Prince Harry is nothing more than the son of Elizabeth of York and a successful pretender.”

De Puebla gave a little hiss of horror at her bluntness and glanced towards the door. “You would do better never to call him that. He is to be the King of England.”

She nodded, accepting the reprimand. “But he has not my breeding,” she pursued. “Prince Harry would not be the king that my boy would be.”

“That is not the question,” the ambassador observed. “The question is of time and practice. The king’s oldest son is always the Prince of Wales. He always inherits the throne. This king, of all the kings in the world, is not going to make a pretender of his own legitimate heir. He has been dogged with pretenders. He is not going to make another.”

As always, Catalina flinched at the thought of the last pretender, Edward of Warwick, beheaded to make way for her.

“Besides,” the ambassador continued, “any king would rather have a sturdy eleven-year-old son as his heir than a newborn in the cradle. These are dangerous times. A man wants to leave a man to inherit, not a child.”

“If my son is not to be king, then what is the point of me marrying a king?” Catalina demanded.

“You would be queen,” the ambassador pointed out.

“What sort of a queen would I be with My Lady the King’s Mother ruling everything? The king would not let me have my way in the kingdom, and she would not let me have my way in the court.”

“You are very young,” he started, trying to soothe her.

“I am old enough to know my own mind,” Catalina stated. “And I want to be queen in truth as well as in name. But he will never let me be that, will he?”

“No,” de Puebla admitted. “You will never command while he is alive.”

“And when he is dead?” she demanded, without shrinking.

“Then you would be the Dowager Queen,” de Puebla offered.

“And my parents might marry me once more to someone else, and I might leave England anyway!” she finished, quite exasperated.

“It is possible,” he conceded.

“And Harry’s wife would be Princess of Wales, and Harry’s wife would be the new queen. She would go before me, she would rule in my place, and all my sacrifice would be for nothing. And her sons would be kings of England.”

“That is true.”

Catalina threw herself into her chair. “Then I have to be Prince Harry’s wife,” she said. “I have to be.”

De Puebla was quite horrified. “I understood you had agreed with the king to marry him! He gave me to believe that you were agreed.”

“I had agreed to be queen,” she said, white-faced with determination. “Not some cat’s-paw. D’you know what he called me? He said I would be his child bride, and I would live in his mother’s rooms, as if I were one of her ladies-in-waiting!”

“The former queen…”

“The former queen was a saint to put up with a mother-in-law like that one. She stepped back all her life. I can’t do it. It is not what I want, it is not what my mother wants, and it is not what God wants.”

“But if you have agreed…”

“When has any agreement been honored in this country?” Catalina demanded fiercely. “We will break this agreement and make another. We will break this promise and make another. I shall not marry the king, I shall marry another.”

“Who?” he asked numbly.

“Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales,” she said. “So that when King Henry dies, I shall be queen in deed as well as name.”

There was a short silence.

“So you say,” said de Puebla slowly. “Perhaps. But who is going to tell the king?”

God, if You are there, tell me that I am doing the right thing. If You are there, then help me. If it is Thy will that I am Queen of England, then I will need help to achieve it. It has all gone wrong now, and if this has been sent to try me, then see! I am on my knees and shaking with anxiety. If I am indeed blessed by You, destined by You, chosen by You, and favored by You, then why do I feel so hopelessly alone?

Ambassador Dr. de Puebla found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to bring bad news to one of the most powerful and irascible kings in Christendom. He had firm letters of refusal from Their Majesties of Spain in his hand, he had Catalina’s determination to be Princess of Wales, and he had his own shrinking courage, screwed up to the tightest point for this embarrassing meeting.

The king had chosen to see him in the stable yard of Whitehall Palace. He was there looking at a consignment of new Barbary horses, brought in to improve English stock. De Puebla thought of making a graceful reference to foreign blood refreshing native strains, breeding best done between young animals, but he saw Henry’s dark face and realized that there would be no easy way out of this dilemma.

“Your Grace,” he said, bowing low.

“De Puebla,” the king said shortly.

“I have a reply from Their Majesties of Spain to your most flattering proposal, but perhaps I should see you at a more opportune time?”

“Here is well enough. I can imagine from your tiptoeing in what they say.”

“The truth is…” De Puebla prepared to lie. “They want their daughter home, and they cannot contemplate her marriage to you. The queen is particularly vehement in her refusal.”

“Because?” the king inquired.

“Because she wants to see her daughter, her youngest, sweetest daughter, matched to a prince of her own age. It is a woman’s whim—” The diplomat made a little diffident gesture. “Only a woman’s whim. But we have to recognize a mother’s wishes, don’t we? Your Grace?”

“Not necessarily,” the king said unhelpfully. “But what does the Dowager Princess say? I thought that she and I had an understanding. She can tell her mother of her preference.” The king’s eyes were on the Arab stallion, walking proud-headed around the yard, his ears flickering backwards and forwards, his tail held high, his neck arched like a bow. “I imagine she can speak for herself.”

“She says that she will obey you, as ever, Your Grace,” de Puebla said tactfully.

“And?”

“But she has to obey her mother.” He fell back at the sudden hard glance that the king threw at him. “She is a good daughter, Your Grace. She is an obedient daughter to her mother.”

“I have proposed marriage to her and she has indicated that she would accept.”

“She would never refuse a king such as you. How could she? But if her parents do not consent, they will not apply for dispensation. Without dispensation from the Pope, there can be no marriage.”

“I understand that her marriage was not consummated. We barely need a dispensation. It is a courtesy, a formality.”

“We all know that it was not consummated,” de Puebla hastily confirmed. “The princess is a maid still, fit for marriage. But all the same, the Pope would have to grant a dispensation. If Their Majesties of Spain do not apply for such a dispensation, then what can anyone do?”

The king turned a dark, hard gaze on the Spanish ambassador. “I don’t know now. I thought I knew what we would do. But now I am misled. You tell me. What can anyone do?”

The ambassador drew on the enduring courage of his race, his secret Jewishness which he held to his heart in the worst moments of his life. He knew that he and his people would always, somehow, survive.

“Nothing can be done,” he said. He attempted a sympathetic smile and felt that he was smirking. He rearranged his face into the gravest expression. “If the Queen of Spain will not apply for dispensation there is nothing that can be done. And she is inveterate.”

“I am not one of Spain’s neighbors to be overrun in a spring campaign,” the king said shortly. “I am no Granada. I am no Navarre. I do not fear her displeasure.”

“Which is why they long for your alliance,” de Puebla said smoothly.

“An alliance how?” the king asked coldly. “I thought they were refusing me?”

“Perhaps we could avoid all this difficulty by celebrating another marriage,” the diplomat said carefully, watching Henry’s dark face. “A new marriage. To create the alliance we all want.”

“To whom?”

At the banked-down anger in the king’s face, the ambassador lost his words.

“Sire…I…”

“Who do they want for her now? Now that my son, the rose, is dead and buried? Now she is a poor widow with only half her dowry paid, living on my charity?”

“The prince,” de Puebla plunged in. “She was brought to the kingdom to be Princess of Wales. She was brought here to be wife to the prince, and later—much later, please God—to be queen. Perhaps that is her destiny, Your Grace. She thinks so, certainly.”

“She thinks!” the king exclaimed. “She thinks like that filly thinks! Nothing beyond the next minute.”

“She is young,” the ambassador said. “But she will learn. And the prince is young—they will learn together.”

“And we old men have to stand back, do we? She has told you of no preference, no particular liking for me? Though she gave me clearly to understand that she would marry me? She shows no regret at this turnaround? She is not tempted to defy her parents and keep her freely given word to me?”

The ambassador heard the bitterness in the old man’s voice. “She is allowed no choice,” he reminded the king. “She has to do as she is bidden by her parents. I think, for herself, there was an attraction, perhaps even a powerful attraction. But she knows she has to go where she is bid.”

“I thought to marry her! I would have made her queen! She would have been Queen of England.” He almost choked on the title. All his life he had thought it the greatest honor that a woman could think of, just as his title was the greatest in his own imagination.

The ambassador paused for a moment to let the king recover.

“You know, there are other, equally beautiful young ladies in her family,” he suggested carefully. “The young Queen of Naples is a widow now. As King Ferdinand’s niece, she would bring a good dowry, and she has the family likeness.” He hesitated. “She is said to be very lovely, and—” he paused “—amorous.”

“She gave me to understand that she loved me. Am I now to think her a pretender?”

The ambassador felt a cold sweat which seeped from every pore of his body at that dreadful word. “No pretender,” he said, his smile quite ghastly. “A loving daughter-in-law, an affectionate girl…”

There was an icy silence.

“You know how pretenders fare in this country,” the king said stiffly.

“Yes! But…”

“She will regret it, if she plays with me.”

“No play! No pretense! Nothing!”

The king let the ambassador stand, slightly shaking with anxiety.

“I thought to finish this whole difficulty with the dowry and the jointure,” Henry remarked, at length.

“And so it can be. Once the princess is betrothed to the prince, then Spain will pay the second half of the dowry and the widow’s jointure is no more,” de Puebla assured him. He noticed he was talking too rapidly, took a breath, and went slower. “All difficulties are finished. Their Majesties of Spain would be glad to apply for dispensation for their daughter to marry Prince Harry. It would be a good match for her and she will do as she is ordered. It leaves you free to look around for your wife, Your Grace, and it frees the revenues of Cornwall and Wales and Chester to your own disposal once more.”

King Henry shrugged his shoulders and turned from the schooling ring and the horse. “So it is over?” he asked coldly. “She does not desire me, as I thought she did. I mistook her attention to me. She meant to be nothing but filial?” He laughed harshly at the thought of her kiss by the river. “I must forget my desire for her?”

“She has to obey her parents as a princess of Spain,” de Puebla reminded him. “On her own account, I know there was a preference. She told me so herself.” He thought that Catalina’s double-dealing could be covered by this. “She is disappointed, to tell you the truth. But her mother is adamant. I cannot deny the Queen of Castile. She is utterly determined to have her daughter returned to Spain or married to Prince Harry. She will brook no other suggestion.”

“So be it,” said the king, his voice like ice. “I had a foolish dream, a desire. It can finish here.”

He turned and walked away from the stable yard, his pleasure in his horses soured.

“I hope that there is no ill feeling?” the ambassador asked, hobbling briskly behind him.

“None at all,” the king threw over his shoulder. “None in the world.”

“And the betrothal with Prince Harry? May I assure Their Catholic Majesties that it will go ahead?”

“Oh, at once. I shall make it my first and foremost office.”

“I do hope there is no offense?” de Puebla called to the king’s retreating back.

The king turned on his heel and faced the Spanish ambassador, his clenched fists on his hips, his shoulders square. “She has tried to play me like a fool,” he said through thin lips. “I don’t thank her for it. Her parents have tried to lead me by the nose. I think they will find that they have a dragon, not one of their baited bulls. I won’t forget this. You Spaniards, you will not forget it either. And she will regret the day she tried to lead me on as if I were a lovesick boy, as I regret it now.”

“It is agreed,” de Puebla said flatly to Catalina. He was standing before her—“Like an errand boy!” he thought indignantly—as she was ripping the velvet panels out of a gown to remodel the dress.

“I am to marry Prince Harry,” she said in a tone as dull as his own. “Has he signed anything?”

“He has agreed. He has to wait for a dispensation. But he has agreed.”

She looked up at him. “Was he very angry?”

“I think he was even angrier than he showed me. And what he showed me was bad.”

“What will he do?” she asked.

He scrutinized her pale face. She was white but she was not fearful. Her blue eyes were veiled as her father’s were veiled when he was planning something. She did not look like a damsel in distress; she looked like a woman trying to outwit a most dangerous protagonist. She was not endearing, as a woman in tears would have been endearing, he thought. She was formidable but not pleasing.

“I don’t know what he will do,” he said. “His nature is vengeful. But we must give him no advantage. We have to pay your dowry at once. We have to complete our side of the contract to force him to complete his.”

“The plate has lost its value,” she said flatly. “It is damaged by use. And I have sold some.”

He gasped. “You have sold it? It is the king’s own!”

She shrugged. “I have to eat, Dr. de Puebla. We cannot all go uninvited to court and thrust our way in to the common table. I am not living well, but I do have to live. And I have nothing to live on but my goods.”

“You should have preserved them intact!”

She shrugged. “I should never have been reduced to this. I have had to pawn my own plate to live. Whoever is to blame, it is not me.”

“Your father will have to pay the dowry and pay you an allowance,” he said grimly. “We must give them no excuse to withdraw. If your dowry is not paid he will not marry you to the prince. Infanta, I must warn you, he will revel in your discomfort. He will prolong it.”

Catalina nodded. “He is my enemy too, then.”

“I fear it.”

“It will happen, you know,” she said inconsequentially.

“What?”

“I will marry Harry. I will be queen.”

“Infanta, it is my dearest wish.”

“Princess,” she replied.

Whitehall, June 1503

“YOU ARE TO BE BETROTHED TO CATALINA OF ARAGON,” the king told his son, thinking of the son who had gone before.

The blond boy flushed as pink as a girl. “Yes, sire.”

He had been coached perfectly by his grandmother. He was prepared for everything but real life.

“Don’t think the marriage will happen,” the king warned him.

The boy’s eyes flashed up in surprise and were then cast down again. “No?”

“No. They have robbed us and cheated us at every turn. They have rolled us over like a bawd in a tavern. They have cozened us and promised one thing after another like a cock teaser in drink. They say—” He broke off, his son’s wide-eyed gaze reminding him that he had spoken as a man to a man, and this was a boy. Also, his resentment should not show however fiercely it burned.

“They have taken advantage of our friendship,” he summed up. “And now we will take advantage of their weakness.”

“Surely we are all friends?”

Henry grimaced, thinking of that scoundrel Ferdinand and of his daughter, the cool beauty who had turned him down. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Loyal friends.”

“So I am to be betrothed, and later, when I am fifteen, we will be married?”

The boy had understood nothing. So be it. “Say sixteen.”

“Arthur was fifteen.”

Henry bit down the reply that much good it had done Arthur. Besides, it did not matter since it would never happen. “Oh, yes,” he said again. “Fifteen, then.”

The boy knew that something was wrong. His smooth forehead was furrowed. “We do mean this, don’t we, Father? I would not mislead such a princess. It is a most solemn oath I will make?”

“Oh, yes,” the king said again.

The night before my betrothal to Prince Harry, I have a dream so lovely that I do not want to wake. I am in the garden of the Alhambra, walking with my hand in Arthur’s, laughing up at him and showing him the beauty around us: the great sandstone wall which encircles the fort, the city of Granada below us, and the mountains capped with silvery snow on the horizon.

“I have won,” I say to him. “I have done everything you wanted, everything that we planned. I will be princess as you made me. I will be queen as you wanted me to be. My mother’s wishes are fulfilled, my own destiny will be complete, your desire and God’s will. Are you happy now, my love?”

He smiles down at me, his eyes warm, his face tender, a smile he has only for me. “I shall watch over you,” he whispers. “All the time. Here in al-Yanna.”

I hesitate at the odd sound of the word on his lips, and then I realize that he has used the Moorish word “al-Yanna,” which means both heaven, a cemetery, and a garden. For the Moors heaven is a garden, an eternal garden.

“I shall come to you one day,” I whisper, even as his grasp on my hand becomes lighter and then fades, though I try to hold him. “I shall be with you again, my love. I shall meet you here in the garden.”

“I know,” he says, and now his face is melting away like mist in the morning, like a mirage in the hot air of the sierra. “I know we will be together again, Catalina, my Katherine, my love.”

25TH JUNE 1503

It was a bright, hot June day. Catalina was dressed in a new gown of blue with a blue hood. The eleven-year-old boy opposite her was radiant with excitement, dressed in cloth of gold.

They were before the Bishop of Salisbury with a small court present: the king, his mother, the Princess Mary, and a few other witnesses. Catalina put her cold hand in the prince’s warm palm and felt the plumpness of childhood beneath her fingers.

Catalina looked beyond the flushed boy to his father’s grave face. The king had aged in the months since the death of his wife, and the lines in his face were more deeply grooved, his eyes shadowed. Men at the court said he was sick, some illness which was thinning his blood and wearing him out. Others said that he was sour with disappointment: at the loss of his heir, at the loss of his wife, at the frustration of his plans. Some said he had been crossed in love, outwitted by a woman. Only that could have unmanned him so bitterly.

Catalina smiled shyly at him, but there was no echoing warmth from the man who would be her father-in-law for the second time; but had wanted her for his own. For a moment, her confidence dimmed. She had allowed herself to hope that the king had surrendered to her determination, to her mother’s ruling, to God’s will. Now, seeing his cold look, she had a moment of fear that perhaps this ceremony—even something as serious and sacred as a betrothal—might perhaps be nothing more than revenge by this most cunning of kings.

Chilled, she turned away from him to listen to the bishop recite the words of the marriage service and she repeated her part, making sure not to think of when she had said the words before, only a year and a half ago, when her hand had been cool in the grasp of the most handsome young man she had ever seen, when her bridegroom had given her a shy sideways smile, when she had stared at him through the veil of her mantilla and been aware of the thousands of silently watching faces beyond.

The young prince, who had been dazzled then by the beauty of his sister-in-law the bride, was now the bridegroom. His beam was the boisterous joy of a young boy in the presence of a beautiful older girl. She had been the bride of his older brother, she was the young woman he had been proud to escort on her wedding day. He had begged her for a present of a Barbary horse for his tenth birthday. He had looked at her at her wedding feast and that night prayed that he too might have a Spanish bride just like her.

When she had left the court with Arthur he had dreamed of her, he had written poems and love songs, secretly dedicating them to her. He had heard of Arthur’s death with a bright, fierce joy that now she was free.

Now, not even two years on, she was before him, her hair brushed out bronze and golden over her shoulders signifying her virgin state, her blue lace mantilla veiling her face. Her hand was in his, her blue eyes were on him, her smile was only for him.

Harry’s braggart boyish heart swelled so full in his chest that he could scarcely reply to his part of the service. Arthur was gone, and he was Prince of Wales; Arthur was gone, and he was his father’s favorite, the rosebush of England. Arthur was gone, and Arthur’s bride was his wife. He stood straight and proud and repeated his oaths in his clear treble voice. Arthur was gone, and there was only one Prince of Wales and one Princess: Prince Harry and Princess Katherine.

Princess Again

1504

I MAY THINK THAT I HAVE WON, but still I have not won. I should have won, but I have not won. Harry reaches twelve, and they declare him Prince of Wales but they do not come for me, declare our betrothal, or invest me as princess. I send for the ambassador. He does not come in the morning, he does not even come that day. He comes the day after, as if my affairs have no urgency, and he does not apologize for his delay. I ask him why I have not been invested as Princess of Wales alongside Harry and he does not know. He suggests that they are waiting for the payment of my dowry and without it nothing can go ahead. But he knows, and I know, and King Henry knows, that I no longer have all my plate to give to them, and if my father will not send his share, there is nothing I can do.

My mother the queen must know that I am desolate, but I hear from her only rarely. It is as if I am one of her explorers, a solitary Cristóbal Colón with no companions and no maps. She has sent me out into the world and if I tumble off the edge or am lost at sea, there is nothing that anyone can do.

She has nothing to say to me. I fear that she is ashamed of me, as I wait at court like a supplicant for the prince to honor his promise. In November I am so filled with foreboding that she is ill or sad that I write to her and beg her to reply to me, to send me at least one word. That, as it happens, was the very day that she died and so she never had my letter and I never had my one word. She leaves me in death as she left me in life: to silence and a sense of her absence.

I knew that I would miss her when I left home. But it was a comfort to me to know that the sun still shone in the gardens of the Alhambra and she was still there beside the green-trimmed pool. I did not know that the loss of her would make my situation in England so much worse. My father, having long refused to pay the second half of my dowry as part of his game with the King of England, now finds his play has become a bitter fruit—he cannot pay. He has spent his life and his fortune in ceaseless crusade against the Moors and there is no money left for anyone. The rich revenues of Castile are now paid to Juana, my mother’s heir, and my father has nothing in the treasury of Aragon for my marriage. My father is now no more than one of the many kings of Spain. Juana is the great heiress of Castile, and, if the gossips are to be believed, Juana has run as mad as a rabid dog, tormented by love and by her husband into insanity. Anyone looking at me now no longer sees a princess of a united Spain, one of the great brides of Christendom, but a widowed pauper with bad blood. Our family fortunes are cascading down like a house of cards without my mother’s steady hand and watchful eye. There is nothing left for my father but despair, and I fear that is all the dowry he can give me.

I am only nineteen. Is my life over?

1509

And then, I waited. Incredibly, I waited for a total of six years. Six years when I went from a bride of seventeen to a woman of twenty-three. I knew then that King Henry’s rage against me was bitter, and effective, and long-lasting. No princess in the world had ever been made to wait so long or been treated so harshly, or left in such despair. I am not exaggerating this, as a troubadour might do to make a better story—as I might have told you, beloved, in the dark hours of the night. No, it was not like a story, it was not even like a life. It was like a prison sentence; it was like being a hostage with no chance of redemption; it was loneliness and the slow realization that I had failed.

I failed my mother and failed to bring to her the alliance with England that I had been born and bred to do. I was ashamed of my failure. Without the dowry payment from Spain I could not force the English to honor the betrothal. With the king’s enmity I could force them to do nothing. Harry was a child of thirteen. I hardly ever saw him. I could not appeal to him to make his promise good. I was powerless, neglected by the court, and falling into shameful poverty.

Then Harry was fourteen years of age and our betrothal was still not made marriage, and that marriage not celebrated. I waited a year. He reached fifteen years, and nobody came for me. So Harry reached his sixteenth, and then his seventeenth birthday, and still nobody came for me. Those years turned. I grew older. I waited. I was constant. It was all I could be.

I turned the panels on my gowns and sold my jewels for food. I had to sell my precious plate, one gold piece at a time. I knew it was the property of the king as I sent for the goldsmiths. I knew that each time I pawned a piece I put my wedding back another day. But I had to eat, my household had to eat. I could pay them no wages, I could hardly ask them to beg for me as well as go hungry on their own account.

I was friendless. I discovered that Doña Elvira was plotting against my father in favor of Juana and her husband, Philip, and I dismissed her in a rage and sent her away. I did not care if she spoke against me, if she named me as a liar. I did not care even if she declared that Arthur and I had been lovers. I had caught her in treason against my father; did she truly think I would ally with my sister against the King of Aragon? I was so angry that I did not care what her enmity cost me.

Also, since I am not a fool, I calculated rightly that no one would believe her word against mine. She fled to Philip and Juana in the Netherlands, and I never heard from her again, and I never complained of my loss.

I lost my ambassador, Dr. de Puebla. I had often complained to my father of his divided loyalties, of his disrespect, of his concessions to the English court. But when he was recalled to Spain I found that he had known more than I had realized, he had used his friendship with the king to my advantage, he had understood his way around this most difficult court. He had been a better friend than I had known, and I was the poorer without him. I lost a friend and an ally, through my own arrogance, and I was sorry for his absence. His replacement: the emissary who had come to take me home, Don Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, was a pompous fool who thought the English were honored by his presence. They sneered at his face and laughed behind his back, and I was a ragged princess with an ambassador entranced by his own self-importance.

I lost my dear father in Christ, the confessor I trusted, appointed by my mother to guide me, and I had to find another for myself. I lost the ladies of my little court, who would not live in hardship and poverty, and I could not pay anyone else to serve me. María de Salinas stood by me through all these long years of endurance, for love; but the other ladies wanted to leave. Then, finally, I lost my house, my lovely house on the Strand, which had been my home, a little safe place in this most foreign land.

The king promised me rooms at court and I thought that he had at last forgiven me. I thought he was offering me to come to court, to live in the rooms of a princess and to see Harry. But when I moved my household there I found that I was given the worst rooms, allocated the poorest service, unable to see the prince except on the most formal of state occasions. One dreadful day, the court left on progress without telling us and we had to dash after them, finding our way down the unmarked country lanes, as unwanted and as irrelevant as a wagon filled with old goods. When we caught up, no one had noticed that we were missing and I had to take the only rooms left: over the stables, like a servant.

The king stopped paying my allowance; his mother did not press my case. I had no money of my own at all. I lived despised on the fringe of the court, with Spaniards who served me only because they could not leave. They were trapped like me, watching the years slide by, getting older and more resentful till I felt like the sleeping princess of the fairy tale and thought that I would never wake.

I lost my vanity—my proud sense that I could be cleverer than that old fox who was my father-in-law and that sharp vixen his mother. I learned that he had betrothed me to his son Prince Harry not because he loved and forgave me, but because it was the cleverest and cruelest way to punish me. If he could not have me, then he could make sure that no one had me. It was a bitter day when I realized that.

And then Philip died and my sister Juana was a widow like me, and King Henry came up with a plan to marry her, my poor sister—driven from her wits by the loss of her husband—and put her over me, on the throne of England, where everyone would see that she was crazed, where everyone could see the bad blood which I share, where everyone would know that he had made her queen and thrown me down to nothing. It was a wicked plan, certain to shame and distress both me and Juana. He would have done it if he could, and he made me his pander as well—he forced me to recommend him to my father. Under my father’s orders I spoke to the king of Juana’s beauty; under the king’s orders I urged my father to accept his suit, all the time knowing that I was betraying my very soul. I lost my ability to refuse King Henry my persecutor, my father-in-law, my would-be seducer. I was afraid to say no to him. I was very much reduced that day.

I lost my vanity in my allure, I lost my confidence in my intelligence and skills, but I never lost my will to live. I was not like my mother, I was not like Juana, I did not turn my face to the wall and long for my pain to be over. I did not slide into the wailing grief of madness nor into the gentle darkness of sloth. I gritted my teeth, I am the constant princess, I don’t stop when everyone else stops. I carried on. I waited. Even when I could do nothing else, I could still wait. So I waited.

These were not the years of my defeat; these were the years when I grew up, and it was a bitter maturing. I grew from a girl of sixteen ready for love to a half-orphaned, lonely widow of twenty-three. These were the years when I drew on the happiness of my childhood in the Alhambra and my love for my husband to sustain me, and swore that whatever the obstacles before me, I should be Queen of England. These were the years when, though my mother was dead, she lived again through me. I found her determination inside me, I found her courage inside me, I found Arthur’s love and optimism inside me. These were the years when although I had nothing left—no husband, no mother, no friends, no fortune and no prospects—I swore that however disregarded, however poor, however unlikely a prospect, I would still be Queen of England.

News, always slow to reach the bedraggled Spaniards on the fringe of the royal court, filtered through that Harry’s sister the Princess Mary was to be married, gloriously, to Prince Charles, son of King Philip and Queen Juana, grandson to both the Emperor Maximilian and King Ferdinand. Amazingly, at this of all moments, King Ferdinand at last found the money for Catalina’s dowry and packed it off to London.

“My God, we are freed. There can be a double wedding. I can marry him,” Catalina said, heartfelt, to the Spanish emissary, Don Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida.

He was pale with worry, his yellow teeth nipping at his lips. “Oh, Infanta, I hardly know how to tell you. Even with this alliance, even with the dowry money—dear God, I fear it comes too late. I fear it will not help us at all.”

“How can it be? Princess Mary’s betrothal only deepens the alliance with my family.”

“What if…” he started and broke off. He could hardly speak of the danger that he foresaw. “Princess, all the English know that the dowry money is coming, but they do not speak of your marriage. Oh, Princess, what if they plan an alliance that does not include Spain? What if they plan an alliance between the emperor and King Henry? What if the alliance is for them to go to war against Spain?”

She turned her head. “It cannot be.”

“What if it is?”

“Against the boy’s own grandfather?” she demanded.

“It would only be one grandfather, the emperor, against another, your father.”

“They would not,” she said determinedly.

“They could.”

“King Henry would not be so dishonest.”

“Princess, you know that he would.”

She hesitated. “What is it?” she suddenly demanded, sharp with irritation. “There is something else. Something you are not telling me. What is it?”

He paused, a lie in his mouth; then he told her the truth. “I am afraid, I am very afraid, that they will betroth Prince Harry to Princess Eleanor, the sister of Charles.”

“They cannot, he is betrothed to me.”

“They may plan it as part of a great treaty. Your sister Juana to marry the king, your nephew Charles for Princess Mary, and your niece Eleanor for Prince Harry.”

“But what about me? Now that my dowry money is on its way at last?”

He was silent. It was painfully apparent that Catalina was excluded by these alliances and no provision made for her.

“A true prince has to honor his promise,” she said passionately. “We were betrothed by a bishop before witnesses. It is a solemn oath.”

The ambassador shrugged, hesitated. He could hardly make himself tell her the worst news of all. “Your Grace, Princess, be brave. I am afraid he may withdraw his oath.”

“He cannot.”

Fuensalida went further. “Indeed, I am afraid it is already withdrawn. He may have withdrawn it years ago.”

“What?” she asked sharply. “How?”

“A rumor, I cannot be sure of it. But I am afraid…” He broke off.

“Afraid of what?”

“I am afraid that the prince may be already released from his betrothal to you.” He hesitated at the sudden darkening of her face. “It will not have been his choice,” he said quickly. “His father is determined against us.”

“How could he? How can such a thing be done?”

“He could have sworn an oath that he was too young, that he was under duress. He may have declared that he did not want to marry you. Indeed, I think that is what he has done.”

“He was not under duress!” Catalina exclaimed. “He was utterly delighted. He has been in love with me for years, I am sure he still is. He did want to marry me!”

“An oath sworn before a bishop that he was not acting of his own free will would be enough to secure his release from his promise.”

“So all these years that I have been betrothed to him, and acted on that premise, all these years that I have waited and waited and endured…” She could not finish. “Are you telling me that for all these years, when I believed that we had them tied down, contracted, bound, he has been free?”

The ambassador nodded; her face was so stark and shocked that he could hardly find his voice.

“This is…a betrayal,” she said. “A most terrible betrayal.” She choked on the words. “This is the worst betrayal of all.”

He nodded again.

There was a long, painful silence. “I am lost,” she said simply. “Now I know it. I have been lost for years and I did not know. I have been fighting a battle with no army, with no support. Actually—with no cause. You tell me that I have been defending a cause that was gone long ago. I was fighting for my betrothal but I was not betrothed. I have been all alone, all this long time. And now I know it.”

Still she did not weep, though her blue eyes were horrified.

“I made a promise,” she said, her voice harsh. “I made a solemn and binding promise.”

“Your betrothal?”

She made a little gesture with her hand. “Not that. I swore a promise. A deathbed promise. Now you tell me it has all been for nothing.”

“Princess, you have stayed at your post, as your mother would have wanted you to do.”

“I have been made a fool!” burst out of her, from the depth of her shock. “I have been fighting for the fulfillment of a vow, not knowing that the vow was long broken.”

He could say nothing; her pain was too raw for any soothing words.

After a few moments, she raised her head. “Does everyone know but me?” she asked bleakly.

He shook his head. “I am sure it was kept most secret.”

“My Lady the King’s Mother,” she predicted bitterly. “She will have known. It will have been her decision. And the king, the prince himself, and if he knew, then the Princess Mary will know—he would have told her. And his closest companions…” She raised her head. “The king’s mother’s ladies, the princess’s ladies. The bishop that he swore to, a witness or two. Half the court, I suppose.” She paused. “I thought that at least some of them were my friends,” she said.

The ambassador shrugged. “In a court there are no friends, only courtiers.”

“My father will defend me from this…cruelty!” she burst out. “They should have thought of that before they treated me so! There will be no treaties for England with Spain when he hears about this. He will take revenge for this abuse of me.”

He could say nothing, and in the still, silent face that he turned to her she saw the worst truth.

“No,” she said simply. “Not him. Not him as well. Not my father. He did not know. He loves me. He would never injure me. He would never abandon me here.”

Still he could not tell her. He saw her take a deep breath.

“Oh. Oh. I see. I see from your silence. Of course. He knows, of course he knows, doesn’t he? My father? The dowry money is just another trick. He knows of the proposal to marry Prince Harry to Princess Eleanor. He has been leading the king on to think that he can marry Juana. He ordered me to encourage the king to marry Juana. He will have agreed to this new proposal for Prince Harry. And so he knows that the prince has broken his oath to me? And is free to marry?”

“Princess, he has told me nothing. But I think he must know. But perhaps he plans…”

Her gesture stopped him. “He has given up on me. I see. I have failed him and he has cast me aside. I am indeed alone.”

“So shall I try to get us home now?” Fuensalida asked quietly. Truly, he thought, it had become the very pinnacle of his ambitions. If he could get this doomed princess home to her unhappy father and her increasingly deranged sister, the new Queen of Castile, he would have done the best he could in a desperate situation. Nobody would marry Catalina of Spain now she was the daughter of a divided kingdom. Everyone could see that the madness in her blood was coming out in her sister. Not even Henry of England could pretend that Juana was fit to marry when she was on a crazed progress across Spain with her dead husband’s coffin. Ferdinand’s tricky diplomacy had rebounded on him and now everyone in Europe was his enemy, with two of the most powerful men in Europe allied to make war against him. Ferdinand was lost and going down. The best that this unlucky princess could expect was a scratch marriage to some Spanish grandee and retirement to the countryside, with a chance to escape the war that must come. The worst was to remain trapped and in poverty in England, a forgotten hostage that no one would ransom. A prisoner who would be soon forgotten, even by her jailers.

“What shall I do?” Finally she accepted danger. He saw her take it in. Finally, she understood that she had lost. He saw her, a queen in every inch, learn the depth of her defeat. “I must know what I should do. Or I shall be hostage, in an enemy country, with no one to speak for me.”

He did not say that he had thought her just that, ever since he had arrived.

“We shall leave,” he said decisively. “If war comes they will keep you as a hostage and they will seize your dowry. God forbid that now the money is finally coming, it should be used to make war against Spain.”

“I cannot leave,” she said flatly. “If I go, I will never get back here.”

“It is over!” he cried in sudden passion. “You see it yourself, at last. We have lost. We are defeated. It is over for you and England. You have held on and faced humiliation and poverty; you have faced it like a princess, like a queen, like a saint. Your mother herself could not have shown more courage. But we are defeated, Infanta. You have lost. We have to get home as best we can. We have to run, before they catch us.”

“Catch us?”

“They could imprison us both as enemy spies and hold us to ransom,” he told her. “They could impound whatever remains of your dowry goods and impound the rest when it arrives. God knows, they can make up a charge and execute you, if they want to enough.”

“They dare not touch me! I am a princess of royal blood,” she flared up. “Whatever else they can take from me, they can never take that! I am Infanta of Spain even if I am nothing else! Even if I am never Queen of England, at least I will always be Infanta of Spain.”

“Princes of royal blood have gone into the Tower of London before and not come out again,” the ambassador said bleakly. “Princes of the royal blood of England have had those gates shut behind them and never seen daylight again. He could call you a pretender. You know what happens in England to pretenders. We have to go.”

Catalina curtseyed to My Lady the King’s Mother and received not even a nod of the head in return. She stiffened. The two retinues had met on their way to Mass; behind the old lady was her granddaughter the Princess Mary and half a dozen ladies. All of them showed frosty faces to the young woman who was supposed to be betrothed to the Prince of Wales but who had been neglected for so long.

“My lady.” Catalina stood in her path, waiting for an acknowledgment.

The king’s mother looked at the young woman with open dislike. “I hear that there are difficulties over the betrothal of the Princess Mary,” she said.

Catalina looked towards the Princess Mary, and the girl, hidden behind her grandmother, made an ugly grimace at her and broke off with a sudden snort of laughter.

“I did not know,” Catalina said.

“You may not know, but your father undoubtedly knows,” the old woman said irritably. “In one of your constant letters to him you might tell him that he does his cause and your cause no good by trying to disturb our plans for our family.”

“I am very sure he does not—” Catalina started.

“I am very sure that he does; and you had better warn him not to stand in our way,” the old woman interrupted her sharply, and swept on.

“My own betrothal—” Catalina tried.

“Your betrothal?” The king’s mother repeated the words as if she had never heard them before. “Your betrothal?” Suddenly she laughed, throwing her head back, her mouth wide. Behind her the princess laughed too, and then all the ladies were laughing out loud at the thought of the pauper princess pauper speaking of her betrothal to the most eligible prince in Christendom.

“My father is sending my dowry!” Catalina cried out.

“Too late! You are far too late!” the king’s mother wailed, clutching at the arm of her friend.

Catalina, confronted by a dozen laughing faces reduced to helpless hysteria at the thought of this patched princess offering her bits of plate and gold, ducked her head down, pushed through them, and went away.

That night the ambassador of Spain and an Italian merchant of some wealth and great discretion stood side by side on a shadowy quayside at a quiet corner of the London docks and watched the quiet loading of Spanish goods on to a ship bound for Bruges.

“She has not authorized this?” the merchant whispered, his dark face lit by flickering torchlight. “We are all but stealing her dowry! What will happen if the English suddenly say that the marriage is to go ahead and we have emptied her treasure room? What if they see that the dowry has come from Spain at last, but it never reached her treasure room? They will call us thieves. We will be thieves!”

“They will never say it is to go ahead,” the ambassador said simply. “They will impound her goods and imprison her the moment that they declare war on Spain, and they could do that any day now. I dare not let King Ferdinand’s money fall into the hands of the English. They are our enemies, not our allies.”

“What will she do? We have emptied her treasury. There is nothing in her strong room but empty boxes. We have left her a pauper.”

The ambassador shrugged. “She is ruined anyway. If she stays here when England is at war with Spain then she is an enemy hostage and they will imprison her. If she runs away with me she will have no kind welcome back at home. Her mother is dead and her family is ruined and she is ruined too. I would not be surprised if she did not throw herself into the Thames and drown. Her life is over. I cannot see what will become of her. I can save her money, if you will ship it out for me. But I cannot save her.”

I know I have to leave England; Arthur would not want me to stay to face danger. I have a terror of the Tower and the block that would be fitting only if I were a traitor, and not a princess who has never done anything wrong but tell one great lie, and that for the best. It would be the jest of all time if I had to put my head down on Warwick’s block and die, a Spanish pretender to the throne where he died a Plantagenet.

That must not happen. I see that my writ does not run. I am not such a fool as to think I can command anymore. I do not even pray anymore. I do not even ask for my destiny. But I can run away. And I think the time to run away is now.

“You have done what?” Catalina demanded of her ambassador. The inventory in her hand trembled.

“I took it upon my own authority to move your father’s treasure from the country. I could not risk…”

“My dowry.” She raised her voice.

“Your Grace, we both know it will not be needed for a wedding. He will never marry you. They would take your dowry and he would still not marry you.”

“It was my side of the bargain!” she shouted. “I keep faith! Even if no one else does! I have not eaten, I have given up my own house so as not to pawn that treasure. I make a promise and I keep to it, whatever the cost!”

“The king would have used it to pay for soldiers to fight against your father. He would have fought against Spain with your father’s own gold!” Fuensalida exclaimed miserably. “I could not let it happen.”

“So you robbed me!”

He stumbled over the words. “I took your treasure into safekeeping in the hopes that—”

“Go!” she said abruptly.

“Princess?”

“You have betrayed me, just as Doña Elvira betrayed me, just as everyone always betrays me,” she said bitterly. “You may leave me. I shall not send for you again. Ever. Be very sure that I shall never speak to you again. But I shall tell my father what you have done. I shall write to him at once and tell him that you have stolen my dowry monies, that you are a thief. You will never be received at the court in Spain.”

He bowed, trembling with emotion, and then he turned to leave, too proud to defend himself.

“You are nothing more than a traitor!” Catalina cried as he reached the door. “And if I were a queen with the power of the queen I would have you hanged for treason.”

He stiffened. He turned, he bowed again; his voice when he spoke was ice. “Infanta, please do not make a fool of yourself by insulting me. You are badly mistaken. It was your own father who commanded me to return your dowry. I was obeying his direct order. Your own father wanted your treasury stripped of every valuable. It is he who decided to make you a pauper. He wanted the dowry money returned because he has given up all hope of your marriage. He wanted the money kept safe and smuggled safely out of England.

“But I must tell you,” he added with weighty malice, “he did not order me to make sure that you were safe. He gave no orders to smuggle you safely out of England. He thought of the treasure but not of you. His orders were to secure the safety of the goods. He did not even mention you by name. I think he must have given you up for lost.”

As soon as the words were out he wished he had not said them. The stricken look on her face was worse than anything he had ever seen before. “He told you to send back the gold but to leave me behind? With nothing?”

“I am sure…”

Blindly, she turned her back to him and walked to the window so that he could not see the blank horror on her face. “Go,” she repeated. “Just go.”

I am the sleeping princess in the story, a snow princess left in a cold land and forgetting the feel of the sun. This winter has been a long one, even for England. Even now, in April, the grass is so frosty in the morning that when I wake and see the ice on my bedroom windows, the light filtering through is so white that I think it has snowed overnight. The water in the cup by my bed is frozen by midnight, and we cannot now afford to keep the fire in through the night. When I walk outside on the icy grass, it crunches thickly under my feet and I can feel its chill through the thin soles of my boots. This summer, I know will have all the mild sweetness of an English summer, but I long for the burning heat of Spain. I want to have my despair baked out of me once more. I feel as if I have been cold for seven years, and if nothing comes to warm me soon I shall simply die of it, just melt away under the rain, just blow away like the mist off the river. If the king is indeed dying, as the court rumor says, and Prince Harry comes to the throne and marries Eleanor, then I shall ask my father for permission to take the veil and retire to a convent. It could not be worse than here. It could not be poorer, colder or more lonely. Clearly my father has forgotten his love for me and given me up, just as if I had died with Arthur. Indeed, now, I acknowledge that every day I wish that I had died with Arthur.

I have sworn never to despair—the women of my family dissolve into despair like molasses into water. But this ice in my heart does not feel like despair. It feels as if my rock-hard determination to be queen has turned me to stone. I don’t feel as if I am giving way to my feelings like Juana; I feel as if I have mislaid my feelings. I am a block, an icicle, a princess of constant snow.

I try to pray to God but I cannot hear Him. I fear He has forgotten me as everyone else has done. I have lost all sense of His presence, I have lost my fear of His will, and I have lost my joy in His blessing. I can feel nothing for Him. I no longer think I am His special child, chosen to be blessed. I no longer console myself that I am His special child, chosen to be especially tested. I think He has turned His face from me. I don’t know why, but if my earthly father can forget me, and forget that I was his favorite child, as he has done, then I suppose my Heavenly Father can forget me too.

In all the world I find that I care for only two things now: I can still feel my love for Arthur, like a warm, still-beating heart in a little bird that has fallen from a frozen sky, chilled and cold. And I still long for Spain, for the Alhambra Palace, for al-Yanna: the garden, the secret place, paradise.

I endure my life only because I cannot escape it. Each year I hope that my fortunes will change. Each year when Harry’s birthday comes around and the betrothal is not made marriage, I know that another year of my fertile life has come and gone. Each midsummer day, when the dowry payment falls due and there is no draft from my father, I feel shame like a sickness in my belly. And twelve times a year, for seven years, that is eighty-four times, my courses have come and gone. Each time I bleed I think, there is another chance to make a prince for England wasted. I have learned to grieve for the stain on my linen as if it is a child lost. Eighty-four chances for me to have a son, in the very flush of my youth; eighty-four chances lost. I am learning to miscarry. I am learning the sorrow of miscarriage.

Each day, when I go to pray, I look up at the crucified Christ and say, “Your will be done.” That is each day for seven years, that is two thousand, five hundred and fifty-six times. This is the arithmetic of my pain. I say, “Your will be done,” but what I mean is, “Make Your will on these wicked English councilors and this spiteful, unforgiving English king and his old witch of a mother. Give me my rights. Make me queen. I must be queen, I must have a son, or I will become a princess of snow.”

21ST APRIL 1509

“The king is dead,” Fuensalida the ambassador wrote briefly to Catalina, knowing that she would not receive him in person, knowing that she would never forgive him for stealing her dowry and naming her as a pretender, for telling her that her father had abandoned her. “I know you will not see me but I have to do my duty and warn you that on his deathbed the king told his son that he was free to marry whomever he chooses. If you wish me to commission a ship to take you home to Spain I have personal funds to do so. Myself, I cannot see that you will gain anything by staying in this country but insult, ignominy, and perhaps danger.”

“Dead,” Catalina said.

“What?” one of her ladies asked.

Catalina crumpled the letter into her hand. She never trusted anyone with anything now. “Nothing,” she said. “I am going for a walk.”

María de Salinas stood up and put Catalina’s patched cloak about her shoulders. It was the same cloak that she had worn wrapped around her in the winter cold when she and Arthur had left London for Ludlow, seven years earlier.

“Shall we come with you?” María offered, without enthusiasm, glancing at the gray sky beyond the windows.

“No.”

I pound alongside the river, the graveled walk pricking the soles of my feet through the thin leather, as if I am trying to run away from hope itself. I wonder if there is any chance that my luck might change, might be changing now. The king who wanted me, and then hated me for refusing him, is dead. They said he was sick; but God knows, he never weakened. I thought he would reign forever. But now he is dead. Now he has gone. It will be the prince who decides.

I dare not touch hope. After all these years of fasting, I feel as if hope would make me drunk if I had so much of a drop of it on my lips. But I do hope for just a little taste of optimism, just a little flavor which is not my usual diet of grim despair.

Because I know the boy, Harry. I swear I know him. I have watched him as a falconer wakes with a tired bird. Watched him, and judged him, and checked my judgment against his behavior again and again. I have read him as if I were studying my catechism. I know his strengths and his weaknesses, and I think I have faint, very faint, reason for hope.

Harry is vain. It is the sin of a young boy and I do not blame him for it, but he has it in abundance. On the one hand this might make him marry me, for he will want to be seen to be doing the right thing—honoring his promise, even rescuing me. At the thought of being saved by Harry, I have to stop in my stride and pinch my nails into the palms of my hands in the shelter of my cloak. This humiliation too I can learn to bear. Harry may want to rescue me and I shall have to be grateful. Arthur would have died of shame at the thought of his little braggart brother rescuing me; but Arthur died before this hour, my mother died before this hour: I shall have to bear it alone.

But equally, his vanity could work against me. If they emphasize the wealth of Princess Eleanor, the influence of her Hapsburg family, the glory of the connection to the Holy Roman Emperor—he may be seduced. His grandmother will speak against me and her word has been his law. She will advise him to marry Princess Eleanor and he will be attracted—like any young fool—to the idea of an unknown beauty.

But even if he wants to marry her, it still leaves him with the difficulty of what to do with me. He would look bad if he sent me home. Surely he cannot have the gall to marry another woman with me still in attendance at court? I know that Harry would do anything rather than look foolish. If I can find a way to stay here until they have to consider his marriage, then I will be in a strong position indeed.

I walk more slowly, looking around me at the cold river, the passing boatmen huddled in their winter coats against the cold. “God bless you, Princess!” calls out one man, recognizing me. I raise my hand in reply. The people of this odd, fractious country have loved me from the moment they scrambled to see me in the little port of Plymouth. That will count in my favor too with a prince new-come to his throne and desperate for affection.

Harry is not mean with money. He is not old enough yet to know the value of it, and he has always been given anything he might want. He will not bicker over the dowry and the jointure. I am sure of that. He will be disposed to make a lordly gesture. I shall have to make sure that Fuensalida and my father do not offer to ship me home to make way for the new bride. Fuensalida despaired long ago of our cause. But now I do not. I shall have to resist his panic and my own fears. I must stay here to be in the field. I cannot draw back now.

Harry was attracted to me once, I know that. Arthur told me of it first, said that the little boy liked leading me into my wedding, had been dreaming that he was the bridegroom and I was his bride. I have nurtured his liking, every time I see him I pay him particular attention. When his sister laughs at him and disregards him, I glance his way, ask him to sing for me, watch him dance with admiration. On the rare occasions that I have caught a moment with him in private, I ask him to read to me and we discuss our thoughts on great writers. I make sure that he knows that I find him illuminating. He is a clever boy; it is no hardship to talk with him.

My difficulty always has been that everyone else admires him so greatly that my modest warmth can hardly weigh with him. Since his grandmother My Lady the King’s Mother declares that he is the handsomest prince in Christendom, the most learned, the most promising, what can I say to compare? How can one compliment a boy who is already flattered into extreme vanity, who already believes that he is the greatest prince the world has known?

These are my advantages. Against them I could list the fact that he has been destined for me for six years and he perhaps sees me as his father’s choice and a dull choice at that. That he has sworn before a bishop that I was not his choice in marriage and that he does not want to marry me. He might think to hold to that oath, he might think to proclaim he never wanted me and deny the oath of our betrothal. At the thought of Harry announcing to the world that I was forced on him and now he is glad to be free of me, I pause again. This too I can endure.

These years have not been kind to me. He has never seen me laughing with joy, he has never seen me smiling and easy. He has never seen me dressed other than poorly and anxious about my appearance. They have never called me forwards to dance before him or to sing for him. I always have a poor horse when the court is hunting and sometimes I cannot keep up. I always look weary and I am always anxious. He is young and frivolous and he loves luxury and fineness of dress. He might have a picture of me in his mind as a poor woman, a drag upon his family, a pale widow, a ghost at the feast. He is a self-indulgent boy; he might decide to excuse himself from his duty. He is vain and lighthearted and might think nothing of sending me away.

But I have to stay. If I leave, he will forget me in a moment. I am certain of that, at least. I have to stay.

Fuensalida, summoned to the king’s council, went in with his head held high, trying to seem unbowed, certain that they had sent for him to tell him to leave and take the unwanted Infanta with him. His high Spanish pride, which had so much offended them so very often in the past, took him through the door and to the Privy Council table. The new king’s ministers were seated around the table; there was a place left empty for him in the plumb center. He felt like a boy, summoned before his tutors for a scolding.

“Perhaps I should start by explaining the condition of the Princess of Wales,” he said diffidently. “The dowry payment is safely stored, out of the country, and can be paid in—”

“The dowry does not matter,” one of the councilors said.

“The dowry?” Fuensalida was stunned into silence. “But the princess’s plate?”

“The king is minded to be generous to his betrothed.”

There was a stunned silence from the ambassador. “His betrothed?”

“Of the greatest importance now is the power of the King of France and the danger of his ambitions in Europe. It has been thus since Agincourt. The king is most anxious to restore the glory of England. And now we have a king as great as that Henry, ready to make England great again. English safety depends on a three-way alliance between Spain and England and the emperor. The young king believes that his wedding with the Infanta will secure the support of the King of Aragon to this great cause. This is, presumably, the case?”

“Certainly,” said Fuensalida, his head reeling. “But the plate—”

“The plate does not matter,” one of the councilors repeated.

“I thought that her goods—”

“They do not matter.”

“I shall have to tell her of this…change…in her fortunes.”

The Privy Council rose to their feet. “Pray do.”

“I shall return when I have…er…seen her. ”Pointless, Fuensalida thought, to tell them that she had been so angry with him for what she saw as his betrayal that he could not be sure that she would see him. Pointless to reveal that the last time he had seen her he had told her that she was lost and her cause was lost and everyone had known it for years.

He staggered as much as walked from the room, and almost collided with the young prince. The youth, still not yet eighteen, was radiant. “Ambassador!”

Fuensalida threw himself back and dropped to his knee. “Your Grace! I must…condole with you on the death of…”

“Yes, yes.” He waved aside the sympathy. He could not make himself look grave. He was wreathed in smiles, taller than ever. “You will wish to tell the princess that I propose that our marriage takes place as soon as possible.”

Fuensalida found he was stammering with a dry mouth. “Of course sire.”

“I shall send a message to her for you,” the young man said generously. He giggled. “I know that you are out of favor. I know that she has refused to see you, but I am sure that she will see you for my sake.”

“I thank you,” the ambassador said. The prince waved him away. Fuensalida rose from his bow and went towards the princess’s chambers. He realized that it would be hard for the Spanish to recover from the largesse of this new English king. His generosity, his ostentatious generosity, was crushing.

Catalina kept her ambassador waiting, but she admitted him within the hour. He had to admire the self-control that set her to watch the clock when the man who knew her destiny was waiting outside to tell her.

“Emissary,” she said levelly.

He bowed. The hem of her gown was ragged. He saw the neat, small threads where it had been stitched up and then worn ragged again. He had a sense of great relief that whatever happened to her after this unexpected marriage, she would never again have to wear an old gown.

“Dowager Princess, I have been to the Privy Council. Our troubles are over. He wants to marry you.”

Fuensalida had thought she might cry with joy, or pitch into his arms, or fall to her knees and thank God. She did none of these things. Slowly, she inclined her head. The tarnished gold leaf on the hood caught the light. “I am glad to hear it,” was all she said.

“They say that there is no issue about the plate.” He could not keep the jubilation from his voice.

She nodded again.

“The dowry will have to be paid. I shall get them to send the money back from Bruges. It has been in safekeeping, Your Grace. I have kept it safe for you.” His voice quavered, he could not help it.

Again she nodded.

He dropped to one knee. “Princess, rejoice! You will be Queen of England.”

Her blue eyes when she turned them to him were hard, like the sapphires she had sold long ago. “Emissary, I was always going to be Queen of England.”

I have done it. Good God, I have done it. After seven endless years of waiting, after hardship and humiliation, I have done it. I go into my bedchamber and kneel before my prie-dieu and close my eyes. But I speak to Arthur, not to the risen Lord.

“I have done it,” I tell him. “Harry will marry me, I have done as you wished me to do.”

For a moment I can see his smile. I can see him as I did so often when I glanced sideways at him during dinner and caught him smiling down the hall to someone. Before me again is the brightness of his face, the darkness of his eyes, the clear line of his profile. And more than anything else, the scent of him, the very perfume of my desire.

Even on my knees before a crucifix I give a little sigh of longing. “Arthur, beloved. My only love. I shall marry your brother but I am always yours.” For a moment, I remember, as bright as the first taste of early cherries, the scent of his skin in the morning. I raise my face and it is as if I can feel his chest against my cheek as he bears down on me, thrusts towards me. “Arthur,” I whisper. I am now, I will always be, forever his.

Catalina had to face one ordeal. As she went in to dinner in a hastily tailored new gown, with a collar of gold at her neck and pearls in her ears, and was conducted to a new table at the very front of the hall she curtseyed to her husband-to-be and saw his bright smile at her, and then she turned to her grandmother-in-law and met the basilisk gaze of Lady Margaret Beaufort.

“You are fortunate,” the old lady said afterwards, as the musicians started to play and the tables were taken away.

“I am?” Catalina replied, deliberately dense.

“You married one great prince of England and lost him; now it seems you will marry another.”

“This can come as no surprise,” Catalina observed in flawless French, “since I have been betrothed to him for six years. Surely, my lady, you never doubted that this day would come? You never thought that such an honorable prince would break his holy word?”

The old woman hid her discomfiture well. “I never doubted our intentions,” she returned. “We keep our word. But when you withheld your dowry and your father reneged on his payments, I wondered as to your intentions. I wondered about the honor of Spain.”

“Then you were kind to say nothing to disturb the king,” Catalina said smoothly. “For he trusted me, I know. And I never doubted your desire to have me as your granddaughter. And see! Now I will be your granddaughter, I will be Queen of England, the dowry is paid, and everything is as it should be.”

She left the old lady with nothing to say—and there were few that could do that. “Well, at any rate, we will have to hope that you are fertile,” was all she sourly mustered.

“Why not? My mother had half a dozen children,” Catalina said sweetly. “Let us hope my husband and I are blessed with the fertility of Spain. My emblem is the pomegranate—a Spanish fruit, filled with life.”

My Lady the King’s Grandmother swept away, leaving Catalina alone. Catalina curtseyed to her departing back and rose up, her head high. It did not matter what Lady Margaret might think or say, all that mattered was what she could do. Catalina did not think she could prevent the wedding, and that was all that mattered.

Greenwich Palace,

11th June 1509

I WAS DREADING THE WEDDING, the moment when I would have to say the words of the marriage vows that I had said to Arthur. But in the end the service was so unlike that glorious day in St. Paul’s Cathedral that I could go through it with Harry before me and Arthur locked away in the very back of my mind. I was doing this for Arthur, the very thing he had commanded, the very thing that he had insisted on—and I could not risk thinking of him.

There was no great congregation in a cathedral, there were no watching ambassadors or fountains flowing with wine. We were married within the walls of Greenwich Palace in the church of the Friars Observant, with only three witnesses and half a dozen people present.

There was no rich feasting or music or dancing; there was no drunkenness at court or rowdiness. There was no public bedding. I had been afraid of that—the ritual of putting to bed and then the public showing of the sheets in the morning; but the prince—the king, I now have to say—is as shy as I am, and we dine quietly before the court and withdraw together. They drink our healths and let us go. His grandmother is there, her face like a mask, her eyes cold. I show her every courtesy, it doesn’t matter to me what she thinks now. She can do nothing. There is no suggestion that I shall be living in her chambers under her supervision. On the contrary she has moved out of her rooms for me. I am married to Harry. I am Queen of England and she is nothing more than the grandmother of a king.

My ladies undress me in silence. This is their triumph too, this is their escape from poverty as well as mine. Nobody wants to remember the night at Oxford, the night at Burford, the nights at Ludlow. Their fortunes as much as mine depend on the success of this great deception. If I asked them, they would deny Arthur’s very existence.

Besides, it was all so long ago. Seven long years. Who but I can remember that far back? Who but I ever knew the delight of waiting for Arthur, the firelight on the rich-colored curtains of the bed, the glow of candlelight on our entwined limbs? The sleepy whispers in the early hours of the morning: “Tell me a story!”

They leave me in one of my dozen exquisite new nightgowns and withdraw in silence. I wait for Harry, as long ago I used to wait for Arthur. The only difference is the utter absence of joy.

The men-at-arms and the gentlemen of the bedchamber brought the young king to the queen’s door, tapped on it and admitted him to her rooms. She was in her gown, seated by the fireside, a richly embroidered shawl thrown over her shoulders. The room was warm, welcoming. She rose as he came in and swept him a curtsey.

Harry lifted her up with a touch on her elbow. She saw at once that he was flushed with embarrassment, she felt his hand tremble.