Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1: The Constant Princess, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Boleyn Inheritance. Philippa Gregory
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 fulfil 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 travelled 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 Maria who was at her side in silent sympathy, nor to Dona Elvira who, at this crisis in Spanish affairs, was everywhere; her husband organising 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