Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (27 page)

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

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

“Will she eat?”

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

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

“She will see no one.”

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

No, no, no.

*     *     *

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

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

“Princess,” Lady Margaret started tentatively.

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

“I would speak with you.”

Catalina inclined her head.

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

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

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

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

“Can I not stay here?” Catalina asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Princess?”

“Princess of what?” Catalina snapped.

Lady Margaret dropped into a curtsey, and stayed low.

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

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

There was intense silence.

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

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

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

“I am sorry, Princess.”

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

“I will never answer to it.”

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

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

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

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

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

“And if I am not with child?”

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

“And when the king dies?”

“Then Prince Harry becomes king.”

“And I?”

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

“And the next Queen of England?”

“Will be the wife of Prince Harry.”

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

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

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

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

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

Catalina turned her head. “You?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He does not,” Catalina said firmly.

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

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

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