Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (14 page)

‘It is nothing.’ Dona Elvira straightened up and stood between the prince and his young wife, shielding Catalina as he jumped from his horse and came towards her. ‘The princess has been asleep, she is composing herself.’

‘I’ll see her,’ he said. He put the woman aside with one confident hand and kneeled down beside the litter.

‘Catalina?’ he asked quietly.

‘I am frozen with cold,’ said a little thread of voice. She lifted her head and he saw that she was as white as the snow itself and her
lips were blue. ‘I am so c…cold that I shall die and then you will be happy. You can b…bury me in this horrible country and m…marry some fat, stupid Englishwoman. And I shall never see…’ She broke off into sobs.

‘Catalina?’ He was utterly bemused.

‘I shall never see my m…mother again. But she will know that you killed me with your miserable country and your cruelty.’

‘I have not been cruel!’ he rejoined at once, quite blind to the gathering crowd of courtiers around them. ‘By God, Catalina, it was not me!’

‘You have been cruel.’ She lifted her face from the rugs. ‘You have been cruel because –’

It was her sad, white, tearstained face that spoke to him far more than her words could ever have done. She looked like one of his sisters when their grandmother scolded them. She did not look like an infuriating, insulting princess of Spain, she looked like a girl who had been bullied into tears – and he realised that it was he who had bullied her, he had made her cry, and he had left her in the cold litter for all the afternoon while he had ridden on ahead and delighted in the thought of her discomfort.

He reached into the rugs and pulled out her icy hand. Her fingers were numb with cold. He knew he had done wrong. He took her blue fingertips to his mouth and kissed them, then he held them against his lips and blew his warm breath against them. ‘God forgive me,’ he said. ‘I forgot I was a husband. I didn’t know I had to be a husband. I didn’t realise that I could make you cry. I won’t ever do so again.’

She blinked, her blue eyes swimming in unshed tears. ‘What?’

‘I was wrong. I was angry but quite wrong. Let me take you inside and we will get warm and I shall tell you how sorry I am and I will never be unkind to you again.’

At once she struggled with her rugs and Arthur pulled them off her legs. She was so cramped and so chilled that she stumbled when she tried to stand. Ignoring the muffled protests of her duenna, he
swept her up into his arms and carried her like a bride across the threshold of the hall.

Gently he put her down before the roaring fire, gently he put back her hood, untied her cloak, chafed her hands. He waved away the servants who would have come to take her cloak, offered her wine. He made a little circle of peace and silence around them, and he watched the colour come back to her pale cheeks.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, heartfelt. ‘I was very, very angry with you but I should not have taken you so far in such bad weather and I should never have let you get cold. It was wrong of me.’

‘I forgive you,’ she whispered, a little smile lighting her face.

‘I didn’t know that I had to take care of you. I didn’t think. I have been like a child, an unkind child. But I know now, Catalina. I will never be unkind to you again.’

She nodded. ‘Oh, please. And you too must forgive me. I have been unkind to you.’

‘Have you?’

‘At Oxford,’ she whispered, very low.

He nodded. ‘And what do you say to me?’

She stole a quick upwards glance at him. He was not making a play of offence. He was a boy still, with a boy’s fierce sense of fairness. He needed a proper apology.

‘I am very, very sorry,’ she said, speaking nothing but the truth. ‘It was not a good thing to do, and I was sorry in the morning, but I could not tell you.’

‘Shall we go to bed now?’ he whispered to her, his mouth very close to her ear.

‘Can we?’

‘If I say that you are ill?’

She nodded, and said nothing more.

‘The princess is unwell from the cold,’ Arthur announced generally. ‘Dona Elvira will take her to her room, and I shall dine there, alone with her, later.’

‘But the people have come to see Your Grace…’ his host pleaded. ‘They have an entertainment for you, and some disputes they would like you to hear…’

‘I shall see them all in the hall now, and we shall stay tomorrow also. But the princess must go to her rooms at once.’

‘Of course.’

There was a flurry around the princess as her ladies, led by Dona Elvira, escorted her to her room. Catalina glanced back at Arthur. ‘Please come to my room for dinner,’ she said clearly enough for everyone to hear. ‘I want to see you, Your Grace.’

It was everything to him: to hear her publicly avow her desire for him. He bowed at the compliment and then he went to the great hall and called for a cup of ale and dealt very graciously with the half-dozen men who had mustered to see him, and then he excused himself and went to her room.

Catalina was waiting for him, alone by the fireside. She had dismissed her women, her servants, there was no-one to wait on them, they were quite alone. He almost recoiled at the sight of the empty room; the Tudor princes and princesses were never left alone. But she had banished the servants who should wait at the table, she had sent away the ladies who should dine with them. She had even dismissed her duenna. There was no-one to see what she had done to her apartments, nor how she had set the dinner table.

She had swathed the plain wooden furniture in scarves of light cloth in vivid colours, she had even draped scarves from the tapestries to hide the cold walls, so the room was like a beautifully trimmed tent.

She had ordered them to saw the legs of the table down to stumps, so the table sat as low as a footstool, a most ridiculous piece of furniture. She had set big cushions at either end, as if they should recline
like savages to eat. The dinner was set out on the table at knee level, drawn up to the warmth of the burning logs like some barbaric feast, there were candles everywhere and a rich smell like incense, as heady as a church on a feast day.

Arthur was about to complain at the wild extravagance of sawing up the furniture; but then he paused. This was, perhaps, not just some girlish folly; she was trying to show him something.

She was wearing a most extraordinary costume. On her head was a twist of the finest silk, turned and knotted like a coronet with a tail hanging down behind which she had tucked nonchalantly in one side of the headdress as if she would pull it over her face like a veil. Instead of a decent gown she wore a simple shift of the finest, lightest silk, smoky blue in colour, so fine that he could almost see through it, to glimpse the paleness of her skin underneath. He could feel his heartbeat thud when he realised she was naked beneath this wisp of silk. Beneath the chemise she was wearing a pair of hose – like men’s hose – but nothing like men’s hose, for they were billowy leggings which fell from her slim hips where they were tied with a drawstring of gold thread, to her feet where they were tied again, leaving her feet half bare in dainty crimson slippers worked with a gold thread. He looked her up and down, from barbaric turban to Turkish slippers, and found himself bereft of speech.

‘You don’t like my clothes,’ Catalina said flatly, and he was too inexperienced to recognise the depth of embarrassment that she was ready to feel.

‘I’ve never seen anything like them before,’ he stammered. ‘Are they Arab clothes? Show me!’

She turned on the spot, watching him over her shoulder and then coming back to face him again. ‘We all wear them in Spain,’ she said. ‘My mother too. They are more comfortable than gowns, and cleaner. Everything can be washed, not like velvets and damask.’

He nodded, he noticed now a light rosewater scent which came from the silk.

‘And they are cool in the heat of the day,’ she added.

‘They are…beautiful.’ He nearly said ‘barbaric’ and was so glad that he had not, when her eyes lit up.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes.’

At once she raised her arms and twirled again to show him the flutter of the hose and the lightness of the chemise.

‘You wear them to sleep in?’

She laughed. ‘We wear them nearly all the time. My mother always wears them under her armour, they are far more comfortable than anything else, and she could not wear gowns under chain mail.’

‘No…’

‘When we are receiving Christian ambassadors, or for great state occasions, or when the court is at feast, we wear gowns and robes, especially at Christmas when it is cold. But in our own rooms, and always in the summer, and always when we are on campaign, we wear Morisco dress. It is easy to make, and easy to wash, and easy to carry, and best to wear.’

‘You cannot wear it here,’ Arthur said. ‘I am so sorry. But My Lady the King’s Mother would object if she knew you even had them with you.’

She nodded. ‘I know that. My mother was against me even bringing them. But I wanted something to remind me of my home and I thought I might keep them in my cupboard and tell nobody. Then tonight, I thought I might show you. Show you myself, and how I used to be.’

Catalina stepped to one side and gestured to him that he should come to the table. He felt too big, too clumsy, and on an instinct, he stooped and shucked off his riding boots and stepped on to the rich rugs barefoot. She gave a little nod of approval and beckoned him to sit. He dropped to one of the gold-embroidered cushions.

Serenely, she sat opposite him and passed him a bowl of scented water, with a white napkin. He dipped his fingers and wiped them.
She smiled and offered him a gold plate laid with food. It was a dish of his childhood, roasted chicken legs, devilled kidneys, with white manchet bread: a proper English dinner. But she had made them serve only tiny portions on each individual plate, dainty bones artfully arranged. She had sliced apples served alongside the meat, and added some precious spiced meats next to sliced sugared plums. She had done everything she could to serve him a Spanish meal, with all the delicacy and luxury of the Moorish taste.

Arthur was shaken from his prejudice. ‘This is…beautiful,’ he said, seeking a word to describe it. ‘This is…like a picture. You are like…’ He could not think of anything that he had ever seen that was like her. Then an image came to him. ‘You are like a painting I once saw on a plate,’ he said. ‘A treasure of my mother’s from Persia. You are like that. Strange, and most lovely.’

She glowed at his praise. ‘I want you to understand,’ she said, speaking carefully in Latin. ‘I want you to understand what I am. Cuiusmodi sum.’

‘What you are?’

‘I am your wife,’ she assured him. ‘I am the Princess of Wales, I will be Queen of England. I will be an Englishwoman. That is my destiny. But also, as well as this, I am the Infanta of Spain, of al Andalus.’

‘I know.’

‘You know; but you don’t know. You don’t know about Spain, you don’t know about me. I want to explain myself to you. I want you to know about Spain. I am a princess of Spain. I am my father’s favourite. When we dine alone, we eat like this. When we are on campaign, we live in tents and sit before the braziers like this, and we were on campaign for every year of my life until I was seven.’

‘But you are a Christian court,’ he protested. ‘You are a power in Christendom. You have chairs, proper chairs, you must eat your dinner off a proper table.’

‘Only at banquets of state,’ she said. ‘When we are in our private rooms we live like this, like Moors. Oh, we say grace; we thank the
One God at the breaking of the bread. But we do not live as you live here in England. We have beautiful gardens filled with fountains and running water. We have rooms in our palaces inlaid with precious stones and inscribed with gold letters telling beautiful truths in poetry. We have bath houses with hot water to wash in and thick steam to fill the scented room, we have ice houses packed in winter with snow from the sierras so our fruit and our drinks are chilled in summer.’

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

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

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

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

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

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