Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

This edition published by Harper 2017

Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 2005

Cover design and illustration: Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover image © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy (portrait of Queen Katherine of Aragon (1485-1536), c. 1525. Artist: Horenbout, Lucas 1490/95-1544).

Prelims show reconstructions of letters written by Katherine of Aragon

Lettering © Stephen Raw 2005

Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007190317

Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780007370122

Version: 2017-01-23

Dedication

For Anthony

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Princess of Wales

Granada, 1491

Dogmersfield Palace, Hampshire, Autumn 1501

London, Winter 1501

Ludlow Castle, Spring 1502

Summer 1502

Princess in Waiting

Winter 1503

Princess Again

1504

1509

Katherine, Queen of England

Summer 1509

Autumn 1509

Spring 1510

Winter 1510

Spring 1511

Summer 1511

Autumn 1511

Spring 1512

Summer 1512

Winter 1512

Spring 1513

Summer 1513

Blackfriars Hall: The Papal Legate sitting as a court to hear the King’s Great Matter, June 1529

Author’s Note

Discover More of Philippa Gregory’s Tudor Novels

Gardens for The Gambia

About the Author

Also by Philippa Gregory

About the Publisher

Granada, 1491

There was a scream, and then the loud roar of fire enveloping silken hangings, then a mounting crescendo of shouts of panic that spread and spread from one tent to another as the flames ran too, leaping from one silk standard to another, running up guy ropes and bursting through muslin doors. Then the horses were neighing in terror and men shouting to calm them, but the terror in their own voices made it worse, until the whole plain was alight with a thousand raging blazes, and the night swirled with smoke and rang with shouts and screams.

The little girl, starting up out of her bed in her fear, cried out in Spanish for her mother and screamed: ‘The Moors? Are the Moors coming for us?’

‘Dear God, save us, they are firing the camp!’ her nurse gasped. ‘Mother of God, they will rape me, and spit you on their sickle blades.’

‘Mother!’ cried the child, struggling from her bed. ‘Where is my mother?’

She dashed outside, her nightgown flapping at her legs, the hangings of her tent now alight and blazing up behind her in an inferno of panic. All the thousand, thousand tents in the camp were ablaze, sparks pouring up into the dark night sky like fiery fountains, blowing like a swarm of fireflies to carry the disaster onwards.

‘Mother!’ She screamed for help.

Out of the flames came two huge, dark horses, like great, mythical beasts moving as one, jet black against the brightness of the fire. High up, higher than one could dream, the child’s mother bent down to speak to her daughter who was trembling, her head no higher than the horse’s shoulder. ‘Stay with your nurse and be a good girl,’ the woman commanded, no trace of fear in her voice. ‘Your father and I have to ride out and show ourselves.’

‘Let me come with you! Mother! I shall be burned. Let me come! The Moors will get me!’ The little girl reached her arms up to her mother.

The firelight glinted weirdly off the mother’s breastplate, off the embossed greaves of her legs, as if she were a metal woman, a woman of silver and gilt, as she leaned forwards to command. ‘If the men don’t see me, then they will desert,’ she said sternly. ‘You don’t want that.’

‘I don’t care!’ the child wailed in her panic. ‘I don’t care about anything but you! Lift me up!’

‘The army comes first,’ the woman mounted high on the black horse ruled. ‘I have to ride out.’

She turned her horse’s head from her panic-stricken daughter. ‘I will come back for you,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Wait there. I have to do this now.’

Helpless, the child watched her mother and father ride away. ‘Madre!’she whimpered. ‘Madre! Please!’but the woman did not turn.

‘We will be burned alive!’ Madilla, her servant, screamed behind her. ‘Run! Run and hide!’

‘You can be quiet.’ The child rounded on her with sudden angry spite. ‘If I, the Princess of Wales herself, can be left in a burning campsite, then you, who are nothing but a Morisco anyway, can certainly endure it.’

She watched the two horses go to and fro among the burning tents. Everywhere they went the screams were stilled and some discipline returned to the terrified camp. The men formed lines, passing buckets all the way to the irrigation channel, coming out of terror back into order. Desperately, their general ran among his men, beating them with the side of his sword into a scratch battalion from those who had been fleeing only a moment before, and arrayed them in defence formation on the plain, in case the Moors had seen the pillar of fire from their dark battlements, and sallied out to attack and catch the camp in chaos. But no Moors came that night; they stayed behind the high walls of their castle and wondered what fresh devilry the mad Christians were creating in the darkness, too fearful to come out to the inferno that the Christians had made, suspecting that it must be some infidel trap.

The five-year-old child watched her mother’s determination conquer fire itself, her queenly certainty douse panic, her belief in success overcome the reality of disaster and defeat. The little girl perched on one of the treasure chests, tucked her nightgown around her bare toes, and waited for the camp to settle.

When the mother rode back to her daughter she found her dry-eyed and steady.

‘Catalina, are you all right?’ Isabella of Spain dismounted and turned to her youngest, most precious daughter, restraining herself from pitching to her knees and hugging the little girl. Tenderness would not raise this child as a warrior for Christ, weakness must not be encouraged in a princess.

The child was as iron-spined as her mother. ‘I am all right now,’ she said.

‘You weren’t afraid?’

‘Not at all.’

The woman nodded her approbation. ‘That is good,’ she said. ‘That is what I expect of a princess of Spain.’

‘And Princess of Wales,’ her daughter added.

This is me, this little five-year-old girl, perching on the treasure chest with a face white as marble and blue eyes wide with fear, refusing to tremble, biting my lips so I don’t cry out again. This is me, conceived in a camp by parents who are rivals as well as lovers, born in a moment snatched between battles in a winter of torrential floods, raised by a strong woman in armour, on campaign for all of my childhood, destined to fight for my place in the world, to fight for my faith against another, to fight for my word against another’s: born to fight for my name, for my faith and for my throne. I am Catalina, Princess of Spain, daughter of the two greatest monarchs the world has ever known: Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. Their names are feared from Cairo to Baghdad to Constantinople to India and beyond by all the Moors in all their many nations: Turks, Indians, Chinamen; our rivals, admirers, enemies till death. My parents’ names are blessed by the Pope as the finest kings to defend the faith against the might of Islam, they are the greatest crusaders of Christendom as well as the first kings of Spain; and I am their youngest daughter, Catalina, Princess of Wales, and I will be Queen of England.

Since I was a child of three I have been betrothed in marriage to Prince Arthur, son of King Henry of England, and when I am fifteen I shall sail to his country in a beautiful ship with my standard flying at the top of the mast, and I shall be his wife and then his queen. His country is rich and fertile – filled with fountains and the sound of dripping water, ripe with warm fruits and scented with flowers; and it will be my country, I shall take care of it. All this has been arranged almost since my birth, I have always known it will be; and though I shall be sorry to leave my mother and my home, after all, I was born a princess, destined to be queen, and I know my duty.

I am a child of absolute convictions. I know that I will be Queen of England because it is God’s will, and it is my mother’s order. And I believe, as does everyone in my world, that God and my mother are generally of the same mind; and their will is always done.

In the morning the campsite outside Granada was a dank mess of smouldering hangings, destroyed tents, heaps of smoky forage, everything destroyed by one candle carelessly set. There could be nothing but retreat. The Spanish army had ridden out in its pride to set siege to the last great kingdom of the Moors in Spain, and had been burned to nothing. It would have to ride back again, to regroup.

‘No, we don’t retreat,’ Isabella of Spain ruled.

The generals, called to a makeshift meeting under a singed awning, batted away the flies that were swarming around the camp, feasting off the wreckage.

‘Your Majesty, we have lost for this season,’ one of the generals said gently to her. ‘It is not a matter of pride nor of willingness. We have no tents, we have no shelter, we have been destroyed by ill luck. We will have to go back and provision ourselves once more, set the siege again. Your husband –’ he nodded to the dark, handsome man who stood slightly to one side of the group, listening ‘– he knows this. We all know this. We will set the siege again, they will not defeat us. But a good general knows when he has to retreat.’

Every man nodded. Common sense dictated that nothing could be done but release the Moors of Granada from their siege for this season. The battle would keep. It had been coming for seven centuries. Each year had seen generations of Christian kings increase their lands at the cost of the Moors. Every battle had pushed back the time-honoured Moorish rule of al Andalus a little further to the south. Another year would make no difference. The little girl, her back against a damp tent post that smelled of wet embers, watched her mother’s serene expression. It never changed.

‘Indeed it is a matter of pride,’ she corrected him. ‘We are fighting an enemy who understands pride better than any other. If we crawl away in our singed clothes, with our burned carpets rolled up under our arms, they will laugh themselves to al-Yanna, to their paradise. I cannot permit it. But more than all of this: it is God’s will that we fight the Moors, it is God’s will that we go forwards. It is not God’s will that we go back. So we must go forwards.’

The child’s father turned his head with a quizzical smile but he did not dissent. When the generals looked to him he made a small gesture with his hand. ‘The queen is right,’ he said. ‘The queen is always right.’

‘But we have no tents, we have no camp!’

He directed the question to her. ‘What do you think?’

‘We shall build one,’ she decided.

‘Your Majesty, we have laid waste to the countryside for miles all around. I daresay we could not sew so much as a kamiz for the Princess of Wales. There is no cloth. There is no canvas. There are no watercourses, no crops in the fields. We have broken the canals and ploughed up the crops. We have laid them waste; but it is we that are destroyed.’

‘So we build in stone. I take it we have stone?’

The king turned a brief laugh into clearing his throat. ‘We are surrounded by a plain of arid rocks, my love,’ he said. ‘One thing we do have is stone.’

‘Then we will build, not a camp, but a city of stone.’

‘It cannot be done!’

She turned to her husband. ‘It will be done,’ she said. ‘It is God’s will and mine.’

He nodded. ‘It will be done.’ He gave her a quick, private smile. ‘It is my duty to see that God’s will is done; and my pleasure to enforce yours.’

The army, defeated by fire, turned instead to the elements of earth and water. They toiled like slaves in the heat of the sun and the chill of the evenings. They worked the fields like peasants where they had thought they would triumphantly advance. Everyone, cavalry officers, generals, the great lords of the country, the cousins of kings, was expected to toil in the heat of the sun and lie on hard, cold ground at night. The Moors, watching from the high, impenetrable battlements of the red fort on the hill above Granada, conceded that the Christians had courage. No-one could say that they were not determined. And equally, everyone knew that they were doomed. No force could take the red fort at Granada, it had never fallen in two centuries. It was placed high on a cliff, overlooking a plain that was itself a wide, bleached bowl. It could not be surprised by a hidden attack. The cliff of red rock that towered up from the plain became imperceptibly the walls of red stone of the castle, rising high and higher; no scaling ladders could reach the top, no party could climb the sheer face.

Perhaps it could be betrayed by a traitor; but what fool could be found who would abandon the steady, serene power of the Moors, with all the known world behind them, with an undeniable faith to support them, to join the rabid madness of the Christian army whose kings owned only a few mountainous acres of Europe and who were hopelessly divided? Who would want to leave al-Yanna, the garden, which was the image of paradise itself, inside the walls of the most beautiful palace in Spain, the most beautiful palace in Europe, for the rugged anarchy of the castles and fortresses of Castile and Aragon?

Reinforcements would come for the Moors from Africa, they had kin and allies from Morocco to Senegal. Support would come for them from Baghdad, from Constantinople. Granada might look small compared with the conquests that Ferdinand and Isabella had made, but standing behind Granada was the greatest empire in the world – the empire of the Prophet, praise be his name.

But, amazingly, day after day, week after week, slowly, fighting the heat of the spring days and the coldness of the nights, the Christians did the impossible. First there was a chapel built in the round like a mosque, since the local builders could do that most quickly; then, a small house, flat-roofed inside an Arabic courtyard, for King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella and the royal family: the Infante, their precious son and heir, the three older girls, Isabel, Maria, Juana, and Catalina the baby. The queen asked for nothing more than a roof and walls, she had been at war for years, she did not expect luxury. Then there were a dozen stone hovels around them where the greatest lords reluctantly took some shelter. Then, because the queen was a hard woman, there were stables for the horses and secure stores for the gunpowder and the precious explosives for which she had pawned her own jewels to buy from Venice; then, and only then, were built barracks and kitchens, stores and halls. Then there was a little town, built in stone, where once there had been a little camp. No-one thought it could be done; but, bravo! it was done. They called it Santa Fe and Isabella had triumphed over misfortune once again. The doomed siege of Granada by the determined, foolish Christian kings would continue.

Catalina, Princess of Wales, came upon one of the great lords of the Spanish camp in whispered conference with his friends. ‘What are you doing, Don Hernando?’ she asked with all the precocious confidence of a five-year-old who had never been far from her mother’s side, whose father could deny her very little.

‘Nothing, Infanta,’ Hernando Perez del Pulgar said with a smile that told her that she could ask again.

‘You are.’

‘It’s a secret.’

‘I won’t tell.’

‘Oh! Princess! You would tell. It is such a great secret! Too big a secret for a little girl.’

‘I won’t! I really won’t! I truly won’t!’ She thought. ‘I promise upon Wales.’

‘On Wales! On your own country?’

‘On England?’

‘On England? Your inheritance?’

She nodded. ‘On Wales and on England, and on Spain itself.’

‘Well, then. If you make such a sacred promise I will tell you. Swear that you won’t tell your mother?’

She nodded, her blue eyes wide.

‘We are going to get into the Alhambra. I know a gate, a little postern gate, that is not well guarded, where we can force an entry. We are going to go in, and guess what?’

She shook her head vigorously, her auburn plait swinging beneath her veil like a puppy’s plump tail.

‘We are going to say our prayers in their mosque. And I am going to leave an Ave Maria stabbed to the floor with my dagger. What d’you think of that?’

She was too young to realise that they were going to a certain death. She had no idea of the sentries at every gate, of the merciless rage of the Moors. Her eyes lit up in excitement. ‘You are?’

‘Isn’t it a wonderful plan?’

‘When are you going?’

‘Tonight! This very night!’

‘I shan’t sleep till you come back!’

‘You must pray for me, and then go to sleep, and I will come myself, Princess, and tell you and your mother all about it in the morning.’

She swore she would never sleep and she lay awake, quite rigid in her little cot-bed, while her maid tossed and turned on the rug at the door. Slowly, her eyelids drooped until the lashes lay on the round cheeks, the little plump hands unclenched and Catalina slept.

But in the morning, he did not come, his horse was missing from its stall and his friends were absent. For the first time in her life, the little girl had some sense of the danger he had run – mortal danger, and for nothing but glory and to be featured in some song.

‘Where is he?’ she asked. ‘Where is Hernando?’

The silence of her maid, Madilla, warned her. ‘He will come?’ she asked, suddenly doubtful. ‘He will come back?’

Slowly, it dawns on me that perhaps he will not come back, that life is not like a ballad, where a vain hope is always triumphant and a handsome man is never cut down in his youth. But if he can fail and die, then can my father die? Can my mother die? Can I? Even I? Little Catalina, Infanta of Spain and Princess of Wales?

I kneel in the sacred circular space of my mother’s newly built chapel; but I am not praying. I am puzzling over this strange world that is suddenly opening up before me. If we are in the right – and I am sure of that; if these handsome young men are in the right – and I am sure of that – if we and our cause are under the especial hand of God, then how can we ever fail?

But if I have misunderstood something, then something is very wrong, and we are all indeed mortal, perhaps we can fail. Even handsome Hernando Perez del Pulgar and his laughing friends, even my mother and father can fail. If Hernando can die, then so too can my mother and father. And if this is so, then what safety is there in the world? If Madre can die, like a common soldier, like a mule pulling a baggage cart, as I have seen men and mules die, then how can the world go on? How could there be a God?

Then it was time for her mother’s audience for petitioners and friends, and suddenly he was there, in his best suit, his beard combed, his eyes dancing, and the whole story spilled out: how they had dressed in their Arab clothes so as to pass for townspeople in the darkness, how they had crept in through the postern gate, how they had dashed up to the mosque, how they had kneeled and gabbled an Ave Maria and stabbed the prayer into the floor of the mosque, and then, surprised by guards, they had fought their way, hand to hand, thrust and parry, blades flashing in the moonlight; back down the narrow street, out of the door that they had forced only moments earlier, and were away into the night before the full alarm had been sounded. Not a scratch on them, not a man lost. A triumph for them and a slap in the face for Granada.

It was a great joke to play on the Moors, it was the funniest thing in the world to take a Christian prayer into the very heart of their holy place. It was the most wonderful gesture to insult them. The queen was delighted, the king too, the princess and her sisters looked at their champion, Hernando Perez del Pulgar, as if he were a hero from the romances, a knight from the time of Arthur at Camelot. Catalina clapped her hands in delight at the story, and commanded that he tell it and re-tell it, over and over again. But in the back of her mind, pushed far away from thought, she remembered the chill she had felt when she had thought that he was not coming back.

Next, they waited for the reply from the Moors. It was certain to happen. They knew that their enemy would see the venture as the challenge that it was, there was bound to be a response. It was not long in coming.

The queen and her children were visiting Zubia, a village near to Granada, so Her Majesty could see the impregnable walls of the fort herself. They had ridden out with a light guard and the commander was white with horror when he came dashing up to them in the little village square and shouted that the gates of the red fort had opened and the Moors were thundering out, the full army, armed for attack. There was no time to get back to camp, the queen and the three princesses could never outrun Moorish horsemen on Arab stallions, there was nowhere to hide, there was nowhere even to make a stand.

In desperate haste Queen Isabella climbed to the flat roof of the nearest house, pulling the little princess by her hand up the crumbling stairs, her sisters running behind. ‘I have to see! I have to see!’ she exclaimed.

‘Madre! You are hurting me!’

‘Quiet, child. We have to see what they intend.’

‘Are they coming for us?’ the child whimpered, her little voice muffled by her own plump hand.

‘They may be. I have to see.’

It was a raiding party, not the full force. They were led by their champion, a giant of a man, dark as mahogany, a glint of a smile beneath his helmet, riding a huge black horse as if he were Night riding to overwhelm them. His horse snarled like a dog at the watching guard, its teeth bared.

‘Madre, who is that man?’ the Princess of Wales whispered to her mother, staring from the vantage point of the flat roof of the house.

‘That is the Moor called Yarfe, and I am afraid he has come for your friend, Hernando.’

‘His horse looks so frightening, like it wants to bite.’

‘He has cut off its lips to make it snarl at us. But we are not made fearful by such things. We are not frightened children.’

‘Should we not run away?’ asked the frightened child.

Her mother, watching the Moor parade, did not even hear her daughter’s whisper.

‘You won’t let him hurt Hernando, will you? Madre?’

‘Hernando laid the challenge. Yarfe is answering it. We will have to fight,’ she said levelly. ‘Yarfe is a knight, a man of honour. He cannot ignore the challenge.’

‘How can he be a man of honour if he is a heretic? A Moor?’

‘They are most honourable men, Catalina, though they are unbelievers. And this Yarfe is a hero to them.’

‘What will you do? How shall we save ourselves? This man is as big as a giant.’

‘I shall pray,’ Isabella said. ‘And my champion Garallosco de la Vega will answer Yarfe for Hernando.’

As calmly as if she were in her own chapel at Cordoba, Isabella kneeled on the roof of the little house and gestured that her daughters should do the same. Sulkily, Catalina’s older sister, Juana, dropped to her knees, the princesses Isabel and Maria, her other two older sisters, followed suit. Catalina saw, peeping through her clasped hands as she kneeled in prayer, that Maria was shaking with fear, and that Isabel, in her widow’s gown, was white with terror.

‘Heavenly Father, we pray for the safety of ourselves, of our cause, and of our army.’ Queen Isabella looked up at the brilliantly blue sky. ‘We pray for the victory of Your champion, Garallosco de la Vega, at this time of his trial.’

‘Amen,’ the girls said promptly, and then followed the direction of their mother’s gaze to where the ranks of the Spanish guard were drawn up, watchful and silent.

‘If God is protecting him …’ Catalina started.

‘Silence,’ her mother said gently. ‘Let him do his work, let God do His, and let me do mine.’ She closed her eyes in prayer.

Catalina turned to her eldest sister and pulled at her sleeve. ‘Isabel, if God is protecting him, then how can he be in danger?’

Isabel looked down at her little sister. ‘God does not make the way smooth for those He loves,’ she said in a harsh whisper. ‘He sends hardships to try them. Those that God loves the best are those who suffer the worst. I know that. I, who lost the only man that I will ever love. You know that. Think about Job, Catalina.’

‘Then how shall we win?’ the little girl demanded. ‘Since God loves Madre, won’t He send her the worst hardships? And so how shall we ever win?’

‘Hush,’ their mother said. ‘Watch. Watch and pray with faith.’

Their small guard and the Moorish raiding party were drawn up opposite each other, ready for battle. Then Yarfe rode forwards on his great black charger. Something white bobbed at the ground, tied to the horse’s glossy black tail. There was a gasp as the soldiers in the front rank recognised what he had. It was the Ave Maria that Hernando had left speared to the floor of the mosque. The Moor had tied it to the tail of his horse as a calculated insult, and now rode the great creature forwards and back before the Christian ranks, and smiled when he heard their roar of rage.

‘Heretic,’ Queen Isabella whispered. ‘A man damned to hell. God strike him dead and scourge his sin.’

The queen’s champion, de la Vega, turned his horse and rode towards the little house where the royal guards ringed the courtyard, the tiny olive tree, the doorway. He pulled up his horse beside the olive tree and doffed his helmet, looking up at his queen and the princesses on the roof. His dark hair was curly and sparkling with sweat from the heat, his dark eyes sparkled with anger. ‘Your Grace, do I have your leave to answer his challenge?’

‘Yes,’ the queen said, never shrinking for a moment. ‘Go with God, Garallosco de la Vega.’

‘That big man will kill him,’ Catalina said, pulling at her mother’s long sleeve. ‘Tell him he must not go. Yarfe is so much bigger. He will murder de la Vega!’

‘It will be as God wills,’ Isabella maintained, closing her eyes in prayer.

‘Mother! Your Majesty! He is a giant. He will kill our champion.’

Her mother opened her blue eyes and looked down at her daughter and saw her little face was flushed with distress and her eyes were filling with tears. ‘It will be as God wills it,’ she repeated firmly. ‘You have to have faith that you are doing God’s will. Sometimes you will not understand, sometimes you will doubt, but if you are doing God’s will you cannot be wrong, you cannot go wrong. Remember it, Catalina. Whether we win this challenge or lose it, it makes no difference. We are soldiers of Christ. You are a soldier of Christ. If we live or die, it makes no difference. We will die in faith, that is all that matters. This battle is God’s battle, He will send a victory, if not today, then tomorrow. And whichever man wins today, we do not doubt that God will win, and we will win in the end.’

‘But de la Vega …’ Catalina protested, her fat lower lip trembling.

‘Perhaps God will take him to His own this afternoon,’ her mother said steadily. ‘We should pray for him.’

Juana made a face at her little sister, but when their mother kneeled again the two girls clasped hands for comfort. Isabel kneeled beside them, Maria beside her. All of them squinted through their closed eyelids to the plain where the bay charger of de la Vega rode out from the line of the Spaniards, and the black horse of the Moor trotted proudly before the Saracens.

The queen kept her eyes closed until she had finished her prayer, she did not even hear the roar as the two men took up their places, lowered their visors, and clasped their lances.

Catalina leapt to her feet, leaning over the low parapet so that she could see the Spanish champion. His horse thundered towards the other, racing legs a blur, the black horse came as fast from the opposite direction. The clash when the two lances smacked into solid armour could be heard on the roof of the little house, as both men were flung from their saddles by the force of the impact, the lances smashed, their breastplates buckled. It was nothing like the ritualised jousts of the court. It was a savage impact designed to break a neck or stop a heart.

‘He is down! He is dead!’ Catalina cried out.

‘He is stunned,’ her mother corrected her. ‘See, he is getting up.’

The Spanish knight staggered to his feet, unsteady as a drunkard from the heavy blow to his chest. The bigger man was up already, helmet and heavy breastplate cast aside, coming for him with a huge sickle sword at the ready, the light flashing off the razor-sharp edge. De la Vega drew his own great weapon. There was a tremendous crash as the swords smacked together and then the two men locked blades and struggled, each trying to force the other down. They circled clumsily, staggering under the weight of their armour and from their concussion; but there could be no doubt that the Moor was the stronger man. The watchers could see that de la Vega was yielding under the pressure. He tried to spring back and get free; but the weight of the Moor was bearing down on him and he stumbled and fell. At once the black knight was on top of him, forcing him downwards. De la Vega’s hand closed uselessly on his long sword, he could not bring it up. The Moor raised his sword to his victim’s throat, ready to give the death blow, his face a black mask of concentration, his teeth gritted. Suddenly he gave a loud cry and fell back. De la Vega rolled up, scrabbled to his feet, crawling on his hands and knees like a rising dog.

The Moor was down, plucking at his breast, his great sword dropped to one side. In de la Vega’s left hand was a short stabbing dagger stained with blood, a hidden weapon used in a desperate riposte. With a superhuman effort the Moor got to his feet, turned his back on the Christian and staggered towards his own ranks. ‘I am lost,’ he said to the men who ran forwards to catch him. ‘We have lost.’

At a hidden signal the great gates of the red fort opened and the soldiers started to pour out. Juana leapt to her feet. ‘Madre, we must run!’ she screamed. ‘They are coming! They are coming in their thousands!’

Isabella did not rise from her knees, even when her daughter dashed across the roof and ran down the stairs. ‘Juana, come back,’ she ordered in a voice like a whip crack. ‘Girls, you will pray.’

She rose and went to the parapet. First she looked to the marshalling of her army, saw that the officers were setting the men into formation ready for a charge as the Moorish army, terrifying in their forward rush, came pouring on. Then she glanced down to see Juana, in a frenzy of fear, peeping around the garden wall, unsure whether to run for her horse or back to her mother.

Isabella, who loved her daughter, said not another word. She returned to the other girls and kneeled with them. ‘Let us pray,’ she said and closed her eyes.

‘She didn’t even look!’ Juana repeated incredulously that night when they were in their room, washing their hands and changing their dirty clothes, Juana’s tear-streaked face finally clean. ‘There we are, in the middle of a battle, and she closes her eyes!’

‘She knew that she would do more good appealing for the intercession of God than running around crying,’ Isabel said pointedly. ‘And it gave the army better heart than anything else to see her, on her knees, in full sight of everyone.’

‘What if she had been hit by an arrow or a spear?’

‘She was not. We were not. And we won the battle. And you, Juana, behaved like a half-mad peasant. I was ashamed of you. I don’t know what gets into you. Are you mad or just wicked?’

‘Oh, who cares what you think, you stupid widow?’

6th January 1492

Day by day the heart went out of the Moors. The Queen’s Skirmish turned out to be their last battle. Their champion was dead, their city encircled, they were starving in the land that their fathers had made fertile. Worse, the promised support from Africa had failed them, the Turks had sworn friendship but the janissaries did not come, their king had lost his nerve, his son was a hostage with the Christians, and before them were the Princes of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand, with all the power of Christendom behind them, with a holy war declared and a Christian crusade gathering pace with the scent of success. Within a few days of the meeting of the champions, Boabdil, the King of Granada, had agreed terms of peace, and a few days after, in the ceremony planned with all the grace that was typical of the Moors of Spain, he came down on foot to the iron gates of the city with the keys to the Alhambra Palace on a silken pillow and handed them over to the King and Queen of Spain in a complete surrender.

Granada, the red fort that stood above the city to guard it, and the gorgeous palace which was hidden inside the walls – the Alhambra – were given to Ferdinand and to Isabella.

Dressed in the gorgeous silks of their defeated enemy, turbaned, slippered, glorious as caliphs, the Spanish royal family, glittering with the spoils of Spain, took Granada. That afternoon Catalina, the Princess of Wales, walked with her parents up the winding, steep path through the shade of tall trees, to the most beautiful palace in Europe, slept that night in the brilliantly tiled harem and woke to the sound of rippling water in marble fountains, and thought herself a Moorish princess born to luxury and beauty, as well as a Princess of England.

And this is my life, from this day of victory. I had been born as a child of the camp, following the army from siege to battle, seeing things that perhaps no child should see, facing adult fears every day. I had marched past the bodies of dead soldiers rotting in the spring heat because there was no time to bury them, I had ridden behind mules whipped into staggering bloodstained corpses, pulling my father’s guns through the high passes of the Sierra. I saw my mother slap a man’s face for weeping with exhaustion. I heard children of my own age crying for their parents burned at the stake for heresy; but at this moment, when we dressed ourselves in embroidered silk and walked into the red fort of Granada and through the gates to the white pearl that is the Alhambra Palace, at this moment I became a princess for the first time.

I became a girl raised in the most beautiful palace in Christendom, protected by an impregnable fort, blessed by God among all others, I became a girl of immense, unshakeable confidence in the God that had brought us to victory, and in my destiny as His most favourite child and my mother’s most favourite daughter.

Alhambra proved to me, once and for all, that I was uniquely favoured by God, as my mother had been favoured by God. I was his chosen child, raised in the most beautiful palace in Christendom, and destined for the highest things.

The Spanish family with their officers ahead and the royal guard behind, glorious as Sultans, entered the fort through the enormous square tower known as the Justice Gate. As the shadow of the first arch of the tower fell on Isabella’s upturned face the trumpeters played a great shout of defiance, like Joshua before the walls of Jericho, as if they would frighten away the lingering devils of the infidel. At once there was an echo to the blast of sound, a shuddering sigh, from everyone gathered inside the gateway, pressed back against the golden walls, the women half-veiled in their robes, the men standing tall and proud and silent, watching, to see what the conquerors would do next. Catalina looked above the sea of heads and saw the flowing shapes of Arabic script engraved on the gleaming walls.

‘What does that say?’ she demanded of Madilla, her nursemaid.

Madilla squinted upwards. ‘I don’t know,’ she said crossly. She always denied her Moorish roots. She always tried to pretend that she knew nothing of the Moors or their lives though she had been born and bred a Moor herself and only converted – according to Juana – for convenience.

‘Tell us, or we’ll pinch you,’ Juana offered sweetly.

The young woman scowled at the two sisters. ‘It says: “May God allow the justice of Islam to prevail within.”’

Catalina hesitated for a moment, hearing the proud ring of certainty, a determination to match her own mother’s voice.

‘Well, He hasn’t,’ Juana said smartly. ‘Allah has deserted the Alhambra and Isabella has arrived. And if you Moors knew Isabella like we do, you would know that the greatest power is coming in and the lesser power going out.’

‘God save the queen,’ Madilla replied quickly. ‘I know Queen Isabella well enough.’

As she spoke the great doors before them, black wood studded with black nails, swung open on their black hammered hinges, and with another blast of trumpets the king and queen strode into the inner courtyard.

Like dancers rehearsed till they were step-perfect, the Spanish guard peeled off to right and left inside the town walls, checking that the place was safe, and no despairing soldiers were preparing a last ambush. The great fort of the Alcazaba, built like the prow of a ship, jutting out over the plain of Granada, was to their left, and the men poured into it, running across the parade square, ringing the walls, running up and down the towers. Finally, Isabella the queen looked up to the sky, shaded her eyes with her hand clinking with Moorish gold bracelets, and laughed aloud to see the sacred banner of St James and the silver cross of the crusade flying where the crescent had been.

Then she turned to see the domestic servants of the palace slowly approaching, their heads bowed. They were led by the Grand Vizier, his height emphasised by his flowing robes, his piercing black eyes meeting hers, scanning King Ferdinand at her side, and the royal family behind them: the prince and the four princesses. The king and the prince were dressed as richly as sultans, wearing rich, embroidered tunics over their trousers, the queen and the princesses were wearing the traditional kamiz tunics made from the finest silks, over white linen trousers, with veils falling from their heads held back by filets of gold.

‘Your Royal Highnesses, it is my honour and duty to welcome you to the Alhambra Palace,’ the Grand Vizier said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to hand over the most beautiful palace in Christendom to armed invaders.

The queen and her husband exchanged one brief glance. ‘You can take us in,’ she said.

The Grand Vizier bowed and led the way. The queen glanced back at her children. ‘Come along, girls,’ she said and went ahead of them, through the gardens surrounding the palace, down some steps and into the discreet doorway.

‘This is the main entrance?’ She hesitated before the small door set in the unmarked wall.

The man bowed. ‘Your Highness, it is.’

Isabella said nothing but Catalina saw her raise her eyebrows as if she did not think much of it, and then they all went inside.

But the little doorway is like a keyhole to a treasure chest of boxes, the one opening out from another. The man leads us through them like a slave opening doors to a treasury. Their very names are a poem: the Golden Chamber, the Courtyard of the Myrtles, the Hall of the Ambassadors, the Courtyard of the Lions, or the Hall of the Two Sisters. It will take us weeks to find our way from one exquisitely tiled room to another. It will take us months to stop marvelling at the pleasure of the sound of water running down the marble gulleys in the rooms, flowing to a white marble fountain that always spills over with the cleanest, freshest water of the mountains. And I will never tire of looking through the white stucco tracery to the view of the plain beyond, the mountains, the blue sky and golden hills. Every window is like a frame for a picture, they are designed to make you stop, look and marvel. Every window frame is like white-work embroidery – the stucco is so fine, so delicate, it is like sugar-work by confectioners, not like anything real.

We move into the harem as the easiest and most convenient rooms for my three sisters and me, and the harem servants light the braziers in the cool evenings, and scatter the scented herbs as if we were the sultanas who lived secluded behind the screens for so long. We have always worn Moorish dress at home and sometimes at great state occasions so still there is the whisper of silks and the slap of slippers on marble floors, as if nothing has changed. Now, we study where the slave girls read, we walk in the gardens that were planted to delight the favourites of the sultan. We eat their fruits, we love the taste of their sherbets, we tie their flowers into garlands for our own heads, and we run down their allées where the heavy scent of roses and honeysuckle is sweet in the cool of the morning.

We bathe in the hammam, standing stock still while the servants lather us all over with a rich soap that smells of flowers. Then they pour golden ewer after golden ewer of hot water over us, splashing from head to toe, to wash us clean. We are soothed with rose oil, wrapped in fine sheets and lie, half-drunk with sensual pleasure, on the warm marble table that dominates the entire room, under the golden ceiling where the star-shaped openings admit dazzling rays of sunlight into the shadowy peace of the place. One girl manicures our toes while another works on our hands, shaping the nails and painting delicate patterns of henna. We let the old woman pluck our eyebrows, paint our eyelashes. We are served as if we are sultanas, with all the riches of Spain and all the luxury of the East, and we surrender utterly to the delight of the palace. It captivates us, we swoon into submission; the so-called victors.

Even Isabel, grieving for the loss of her husband, starts to smile again. Even Juana, who is usually so moody and so sulky, is at peace. And I become the pet of the court, the favourite of the gardeners who let me pick my own peaches from the trees, the darling of the harem where I am taught to play and dance and sing, and the favourite of the kitchen where they let me watch them preparing the sweet pastries and dishes of honey and almonds of Arabia.

My father meets with foreign emissaries in the Hall of the Ambassadors, he takes them to the bath house for talks, like any leisurely sultan. My mother sits cross-legged on the throne of the Nasrids who have ruled here for generations, her bare feet in soft leather slippers, the drapery of her kamiz falling around her. She listens to the emissaries of the Pope himself, in a chamber that is walled with coloured tiles and dancing with pagan light. It feels like home to her, she was raised in the Alcazar in Seville, another Moorish palace. We walk in their gardens, we bathe in their hammam, we step into their scented leather slippers and we live a life that is more refined and more luxurious than they could dream of in Paris or London or Rome. We live graciously. We live, as we have always aspired to do, like Moors. Our fellow Christians herd goats in the mountains, pray at roadside cairns to the Madonna, are terrified by superstition and lousy with disease, live dirty and die young. We learn from Moslem scholars, we are attended by their doctors, study the stars in the sky which they have named, count with their numbers which start at the magical zero, eat of their sweetest fruits and delight in the waters which run through their aqueducts. Their architecture pleases us, at every turn of every corner we know that we are living inside beauty. Their power now keeps us safe; the Alcazabar is, indeed, invulnerable to attack once more. We learn their poetry, we laugh at their games, we delight in their gardens, in their fruits, we bathe in the waters they have made flow. We are the victors but they have taught us how to rule. Sometimes I think that we are the barbarians, like those who came after the Romans or the Greeks, who could invade the palaces and capture the aqueducts, and then sit like monkeys on a throne, playing with beauty but not understanding it.

We do not change our faith, at least. Every palace servant has to give lip service to the beliefs of the One True Church. The horns of the mosque are silenced, there is to be no call to prayer in my mother’s hearing. And anyone who disagrees can either leave for Africa at once, convert at once, or face the fires of the Inquisition. We do not soften under the spoils of war, we never forget that we are victors and that we won our victory by force of arms and by the will of God. We made a solemn promise to poor King Boabdil, that his people, the Moslems, should be as safe under our rule as the Christians were safe under his. We promise the convivencia – a way of living together – and they believe that we will make a Spain where anyone, Moor or Christian or Jew, can live quietly and with self-respect since all of us are ‘People of the Book’. Their mistake is that they meant that truce, and they trusted that truce, and we – as it turns out – do not.

We betray our word in three months, expelling the Jews and threatening the Moslems. Everyone must convert to the True Faith and then, if there is any shadow of doubt, or any suspicion against them, their faith will be tested by the Holy Inquisition. It is the only way to make one nation: through one faith. It is the only way to make one people out of the great varied diversity which had been al Andalus. My mother builds a chapel in the council chamber and where it had once said ‘Enter and ask. Do not be afraid to seek justice for here you will find it,’ in the beautiful shapes of Arabic, she prays to a sterner, more intolerant God than Allah; and no-one comes for justice any more.

But nothing can change the nature of the palace. Not even the stamp of our soldiers’ feet on the marble floors can shake the centuries-old sense of peace. I make Madilla teach me what the flowing inscriptions mean in every room, and my favourite is not the promises of justice, but the words written in the Courtyard of the Two Sisters which says: ‘Have you ever seen such a beautiful garden?’ and then answers itself: ‘We have never seen a garden with greater abundance of fruit, nor sweeter, nor more perfumed.’

It is not truly a palace, not even as those we had known at Cordoba or Toledo. It is not a castle, nor a fort. It was built first and foremost as a garden with rooms of exquisite luxury so that one could live outside. It is a series of courtyards designed for flowers and people alike. It is a dream of beauty: walls, tiles, pillars melting into flowers, climbers, fruit and herbs. The Moors believe that a garden is a paradise on earth, and they have spent fortunes over the centuries to make this ‘al-Yanna’: the word that means garden, secret place, and paradise.

I know that I love it. Even as a little child I know that this is an exceptional place; that I will never find anywhere more lovely. And even as a child I know that I cannot stay here. It is God’s will and my mother’s will that I must leave al-Yanna, my secret place, my garden, my paradise. It is to be my destiny that I should find the most beautiful place in all the world when I am just six years old, and then leave it when I am fifteen; as homesick as Boabdil, as if happiness and peace for me will only ever be short-lived.

Dogmersfield Palace, Hampshire, Autumn 1501

‘I say, you cannot come in! If you were the King of England himself – you could not come in.’

‘I am the King of England,’ Henry Tudor said, without a flicker of amusement. ‘And she can either come out right now, or I damned well will come in and my son will follow me.’

‘The Infanta has already sent word to the king that she cannot see him,’ the duenna said witheringly. ‘The noblemen of her court rode out to explain to him that she is in seclusion, as a lady of Spain. Do you think the King of England would come riding down the road when the Infanta has refused to receive him? What sort of a man do you think he is?’

‘Exactly like this one,’ he said and thrust his fist with the great gold ring towards her face. The Count de Cabra came into the hall in a rush, and at once recognised the lean forty-year-old man threatening the Infanta’s duenna with a clenched fist, a few aghast servitors behind him, and gasped out: ‘The king!’

At the same moment the duenna recognised the new badge of England, the combined roses of York and Lancaster, and recoiled. The count skidded to a halt and threw himself into a low bow.

‘It is the king,’ he hissed, his voice muffled by speaking with his head on his knees. The duenna gave a little gasp of horror and dropped into a deep curtsey.

‘Get up,’ the king said shortly. ‘And fetch her.’

‘But she is a princess of Spain, Your Grace,’ the woman said, rising but with her head still bowed low. ‘She is to stay in seclusion. She cannot be seen by you before her wedding day. This is the tradition. Her gentlemen went out to explain to you …’

‘It’s your tradition. It’s not my tradition. And since she is my daughter-in-law in my country, under my laws, she will obey my tradition.’

‘She has been brought up most carefully, most modestly, most properly …’

‘Then she will be very shocked to find an angry man in her bedroom. Madam, I suggest that you get her up at once.’

‘I will not, Your Grace. I take my orders from the Queen of Spain herself and she charged me to make sure that every respect was shown to the Infanta and that her behaviour was in every way …’

‘Madam, you can take your working orders from me; or your marching orders from me. I don’t care which. Now send the girl out or I swear on my crown I will come in and if I catch her naked in bed then she won’t be the first woman I have ever seen in such a case. But she had better pray that she is the prettiest.’

The Spanish duenna went quite white at the insult.

‘Choose,’ the king said stonily.

‘I cannot fetch the Infanta,’ she said stubbornly.

‘Dear God! That’s it! Tell her I am coming in at once.’

She scuttled backwards like an angry crow, her face blanched with shock. Henry gave her a few moments to prepare, and then called her bluff by striding in behind her.

The room was lit only by candles and firelight. The covers of the bed were turned back as if the girl had hastily jumped up. Henry registered the intimacy of being in her bedroom, with her sheets still warm, the scent of her lingering in the enclosed space, before he looked at her. She was standing by the bed, one small white hand on the carved wooden post. She had a cloak of dark blue thrown over her shoulders and her white nightgown trimmed with priceless lace peeped through the opening at the front. Her rich auburn hair, plaited for sleep, hung down her back, but her face was completely shrouded in a hastily thrown mantilla of dark lace.

Dona Elvira darted between the girl and the king. ‘This is the Infanta,’ she said. ‘Veiled until her wedding day.’

‘Not on my money,’ Henry Tudor said bitterly. ‘I’ll see what I’ve bought, thank you.’

He stepped forwards. The desperate duenna nearly threw herself to her knees. ‘Her modesty …’

‘Has she got some awful mark?’ he demanded, driven to voice his deepest fear. ‘Some blemish? Is she scarred by the pox and they did not tell me?’

‘No! I swear.’

Silently, the girl put out her white hand and took the ornate lace hem of her veil. Her duenna gasped a protest but could do nothing to stop the princess as she raised the veil, and then flung it back. Her clear blue eyes stared into the lined, angry face of Henry Tudor without wavering. The king drank her in, and then gave a little sigh of relief at the sight of her.

She was an utter beauty: a smooth, rounded face, a straight, long nose, a full, sulky, sexy mouth. Her chin was up, he saw; her gaze challenging. This was no shrinking maiden fearing ravishment. This was a fighting princess standing on her dignity even in this most appalling moment of embarrassment.

He bowed. ‘I am Henry Tudor, King of England,’ he said.

She curtseyed.

He stepped forwards and saw her curb her instinct to flinch away. He took her firmly at the shoulders, and kissed one warm, smooth cheek and then the other. The perfume of her hair and the warm, female smell of her body came to him and he felt desire pulse in his groin and at his temples. Quickly he stepped back and let her go.

‘You are welcome to England,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘You will forgive my impatience to see you. My son too is on his way to visit you.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said icily, speaking in perfectly phrased French. ‘I was not informed until a few moments ago that Your Grace was insisting on the honour of this unexpected visit.’

Henry fell back a little from the whip of her temper. ‘I have a right …’

She shrugged, an absolutely Spanish gesture. ‘Of course. You have every right over me.’

At the ambiguous, provocative words, he was again aware of his closeness to her: of the intimacy of the small room, the tester bed hung with rich draperies, the sheets invitingly turned back, the pillow still impressed with the shape of her head. It was a scene for ravishment, not for a royal greeting. Again he felt the secret thud-thud of lust.

‘I’ll see you outside,’ he said abruptly, as if it was her fault that he could not rid himself of the flash in his mind of what it would be like to have this ripe little beauty that he had bought. What would it be like if he had bought her for himself, rather than for his son?

‘I shall be honoured,’ she said coldly.

He got himself out of the room briskly enough, and nearly collided with Prince Arthur, hovering anxiously in the doorway.

‘Fool,’ he remarked.

Prince Arthur, pale with nerves, pushed his blond fringe back from his face, stood still and said nothing.

‘I’ll send that duenna home at the first moment I can,’ the king said. ‘And the rest of them. She can’t make a little Spain in England, my son. The country won’t stand for it, and I damned well won’t stand for it.’

‘People don’t object. The country people seem to love the princess,’ Arthur suggested mildly. ‘Her escort says …’

‘Because she wears a stupid hat. Because she is odd: Spanish, rare. Because she is young and –’ he broke off ‘– pretty.’

‘Is she?’ he gasped. ‘I mean: is she?’

‘Haven’t I just gone in to make sure? But no Englishman will stand for any Spanish nonsense once they get over the novelty. And neither will I. This is a marriage to cement an alliance; not to flatter her vanity. Whether they like her or not, she’s marrying you. Whether you like her or not, she’s marrying you. Whether she likes it or not, she’s marrying you. And she’d better get out here now or I won’t like her and that will be the only thing that can make a difference.’

I have to go out, I have won only the briefest of reprieves and I know he is waiting for me outside the door to my bedchamber and he has demonstrated, powerfully enough, that if I do not go to him, then the mountain will come to Mohammed and I will be shamed again.

I brush Dona Elvira aside as a duenna who cannot protect me now, and I go to the door of my rooms. My servants are frozen, like slaves enchanted in a fairy tale by this extraordinary behaviour from a king. My heart hammers in my ears and I know a girl’s embarrassment at having to step forwards in public, but also a soldier’s desire to let battle be joined, the eagerness to know the worst, to face danger rather than evade it.

Henry of England wants me to meet his son, before his travelling party, without ceremony, without dignity as if we were a scramble of peasants. So be it. He will not find a princess of Spain falling back for fear. I grit my teeth, I smile as my mother commanded me.

I nod to my herald, who is as stunned as the rest of my companions. ‘Announce me,’ I order him.

His face blank with shock, he throws open the door. ‘The Infanta

Catalina, Princess of Spain and Princess of Wales,’ he bellows.

This is me. This is my moment. This is my battle cry.

I step forwards.

The Spanish Infanta – with her face naked to every man’s gaze – stood in the darkened doorway and then walked into the room, only a little flame of colour in both cheeks betraying her ordeal.

At his father’s side, Prince Arthur swallowed. She was far more beautiful than he had imagined, and a million times more haughty. She was dressed in a gown of dark black velvet, slashed to show an undergown of carnation silk, the neck cut square and low over her plump breasts, hung with ropes of pearls. Her auburn hair, freed from the plait, tumbled down her back in a great wave of red-gold. On her head was a black lace mantilla flung determinedly back. She swept a deep curtsey and came up with her head held high, graceful as a dancer.

‘I beg your pardon for not being ready to greet you,’ she said in French. ‘If I had known you were coming I would have been prepared.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t hear the racket,’ the king said. ‘I was arguing at your door for a good ten minutes.’

‘I thought it was a pair of porters brawling,’ she said coolly.

Arthur suppressed a gasp of horror at her impertinence; but his father was eyeing her with a smile as if a new filly was showing promising spirit.

‘No. It was me; threatening your lady-in-waiting. I am sorry that I had to march in on you.’

She inclined her head. ‘That was my duenna, Dona Elvira. I am sorry if she displeased you. Her English is not good. She cannot have understood what you wanted.’

‘I wanted to see my daughter-in-law, and my son wanted to see his bride, and I expect an English princess to behave like an English princess, and not like some damned sequestered girl in a harem. I thought your parents had beaten the Moors. I didn’t expect to find them set up as your models.’

Catalina ignored the insult with a slight turn of her head. ‘I am sure that you will teach me good English manners,’ she said. ‘Who better to advise me?’ She turned to Prince Arthur and swept him a royal curtsey. ‘My lord.’

He faltered in his bow in return, amazed at the serenity that she could muster in this most embarrassing of moments. He reached into his jacket for her present, fumbled with the little purse of jewels, dropped them, picked them up again and finally thrust them towards her, feeling like a fool.

She took them and inclined her head in thanks, but did not open them. ‘Have you dined, Your Grace?’

‘We’ll eat here,’ he said bluntly. ‘I ordered dinner already.’

‘Then can I offer you a drink? Or somewhere to wash and change your clothes before you dine?’ She examined the long, lean length of him consideringly, from the mud spattering his pale, lined face to his dusty boots. The English were a prodigiously dirty nation, not even a great house such as this one had an adequate hammam or even piped water. ‘Or perhaps you don’t like to wash?’

A harsh chuckle was forced from the king. ‘You can order me a cup of ale and have them send fresh clothes and hot water to the best bedroom and I’ll change before dinner.’ He raised a hand. ‘You needn’t take it as a compliment to you. I always wash before dinner.’

Arthur saw her nip her lower lip with little white teeth as if to refrain from some sarcastic reply. ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ she said pleasantly. ‘As you wish.’ She summoned her lady-in-waiting to her side and gave her low-voiced orders in rapid Spanish. The woman curtseyed and led the king from the room.

The princess turned to Prince Arthur.

‘Et tu?’ she asked in Latin. ‘And you?’

‘I? What?’ he stammered.

He felt that she was trying not to sigh with impatience.

‘Would you like to wash and change your coat also?’

‘I’ve washed,’ he said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he could have bitten off his own tongue. He sounded like a child being scolded by a nurse, he thought. ‘I’ve washed,’ indeed. What was he going to do next? Hold out his hands palms-upwards so that she could see he was a good boy?

‘Then will you take a glass of wine? Or ale?’

Catalina turned to the table, where the servants were hastily laying cups and flagons.

‘Wine.’

She raised a glass and a flagon and the two chinked together, and then chink-chink-chinked again. In amazement, he saw that her hands were trembling.

She poured the wine quickly and held it to him. His gaze went from her hand and the slightly rippled surface of the wine to her pale face.

She was not laughing at him, he saw. She was not at all at ease with him. His father’s rudeness had brought out the pride in her, but alone with him she was just a girl, some months older than him, but still just a girl. The daughter of the two most formidable monarchs in Europe; but still just a girl with shaking hands.

‘You need not be frightened,’ he said very quietly. ‘I am sorry about all this.’

He meant – your failed attempt to avoid this meeting, my father’s brusque informality, my own inability to stop him or soften him, and, more than anything else, the misery that this business must be for you: coming far from your home among strangers and meeting your new husband, dragged from your bed under protest.

She looked down. He stared at the flawless pallor of her skin, at the fair eyelashes and pale eyebrows.

Then she looked up at him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I have seen far worse than this, I have been in far worse places than this, and I have known worse men than your father. You need not fear for me. I am afraid of nothing.’

No-one will ever know what it cost me to smile, what it cost me to stand before your father and not tremble. I am not yet sixteen, I am far from my mother, I am in a strange country, I cannot speak the language and I know nobody here. I have no friends but the party of companions and servants that I have brought with me, and they look to me to protect them. They do not think to help me.

I know what I have to do. I have to be a Spanish princess for the English, and an English princess for the Spanish. I have to seem at ease where I am not, and assume confidence when I am afraid. You may be my husband, but I can hardly see you, I have no sense of you yet. I have no time to consider you, I am absorbed in being the princess that your father has bought, the princess that my mother has delivered, the princess that will fulfil the bargain and secure a treaty between England and Spain.

No-one will ever know that I have to pretend to ease, pretend to confidence, pretend to grace. Of course I am afraid. But I will never, never show it. And, when they call my name I will always step forwards.

The king, having washed and taken a couple of glasses of wine before he came to his dinner, was affable with the young princess, determined to overlook their introduction. Once or twice she caught him glancing at her sideways, as if to get the measure of her, and she turned to look at him, full on, one sandy eyebrow slightly raised as if to interrogate him.

‘Yes?’ he demanded.

‘I beg your pardon,’she said equably. ‘I thought Your Grace needed something. You glanced at me.’

‘I was thinking you’re not much like your portrait,’ he said.

She flushed a little. Portraits were designed to flatter the sitter, and when the sitter was a royal princess on the marriage market, even more so.

‘Better-looking,’ Henry said begrudgingly, to reassure her. ‘Younger, softer, prettier.’

She did not warm to the praise as he expected her to do. She merely nodded as if it were an interesting observation.

‘You had a bad voyage,’ Henry remarked.

‘Very bad,’ she said. She turned to Prince Arthur. ‘We were driven back as we set out from Corunna in August and we had to wait for the storms to pass. When we finally set sail it was still terribly rough, and then we were forced into Plymouth. We couldn’t get to Southampton at all. We were all quite sure we would be drowned.’

‘Well, you couldn’t have come overland,’ Henry said flatly, thinking of the parlous state of France and the enmity of the French king. ‘You’d be a priceless hostage for a king who was heartless enough to take you. Thank God you never fell into enemy hands.’

She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Pray God I never do.’

‘Well, your troubles are over now,’ Henry concluded. ‘The next boat you are on will be the royal barge when you go down the Thames. How shall you like to become Princess of Wales?’

‘I have been the Princess of Wales ever since I was three years old,’ she corrected him. ‘They always called me Catalina, the Infanta, Princess of Wales. I knew it was my destiny.’ She looked at Arthur, who still sat silently observing the table. ‘I have known we would be married all my life. It was kind of you to write to me so often. It made me feel that we were not complete strangers.’

He flushed. ‘I was ordered to write to you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘As part of my studies. But I liked getting your replies.’

‘Good God, boy, you don’t exactly sparkle, do you?’ asked his father critically.

Arthur flushed scarlet to his ears.

‘There was no need to tell her that you were ordered to write,’ his father ruled. ‘Better to let her think that you were writing of your own choice.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Catalina said quietly. ‘I was ordered to reply. And, as it happens, I should like us always to speak the truth to each other.’

The king barked out a laugh. ‘Not in a year’s time you won’t,’ he predicted. ‘You will be all in favour of the polite lie then. The great saviour of a marriage is mutual ignorance.’

Arthur nodded obediently, but Catalina merely smiled, as if his observations were of interest, but not necessarily true. Henry found himself piqued by the girl, and still aroused by her prettiness.

‘I daresay your father does not tell your mother every thought that crosses his mind,’ he said, trying to make her look at him again.

He succeeded. She gave him a long, slow, considering gaze from her blue eyes. ‘Perhaps he does not,’she conceded. ‘I would not know. It is not fitting that I should know. But whether he tells her or not: my mother knows everything anyway.’

He laughed. Her dignity was quite delightful in a girl whose head barely came up to his chest. ‘She is a visionary, your mother? She has the gift of Sight?’

She did not laugh in reply. ‘She is wise,’ she said simply. ‘She is the wisest monarch in Europe.’

The king thought he would be foolish to bridle at a girl’s devotion to her mother, and it would be graceless to point out that her mother might have unified the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon but that she was still a long way from creating a peaceful and united Spain. The tactical skill of Isabella and Ferdinand had forged a single country from the Moorish kingdoms, they had yet to make everyone accept their peace. Catalina’s own journey to London had been disrupted by rebellions of Moors and Jews who could not bear the tyranny of the Spanish kings. He changed the subject. ‘Why don’t you show us a dance?’ he demanded, thinking that he would like to see her move. ‘Or is that not allowed in Spain either?’

‘Since I am an English princess I must learn your customs,’ she said. ‘Would an English princess get up in the middle of the night and dance for the king after he forced his way into her rooms?’

Henry laughed at her. ‘If she had any sense she would.’

She threw him a small, demure smile. ‘Then I will dance with my ladies,’ she decided, and rose from her seat at the high table and went down to the centre of the floor. She called one by name, Henry noted, Maria de Salinas, a pretty, dark-haired girl who came quickly to stand beside Catalina. Three other young women, pretending shyness but eager to show themselves off, came forwards.

Henry looked them over. He had asked Their Majesties of Spain that their daughter’s companions should all be pretty, and he was pleased to see that however blunt and ill-mannered they had found his request, they had acceded to it. The girls were all good-looking but none of them outshone the princess who stood, composed, and then raised her hands and clapped, to order the musicians to play.

He noticed at once that she moved like a sensual woman. The dance was a pavane, a slow ceremonial dance, and she moved with her hips swaying and her eyes heavy-lidded, a little smile on her face. She had been well-schooled, any princess would be taught how to dance in the courtly world where dancing, singing, music and poetry mattered more than anything else; but she danced like a woman who let the music move her, and Henry, who had some experience, believed that women who could be summoned by music were the ones who responded to the rhythms of lust.

He went from pleasure in watching her to a sense of rising irritation that this exquisite piece would be put in Arthur’s cold bed. He could not see his thoughtful, scholarly boy teasing and arousing the passion in this girl on the edge of womanhood. He imagined that Arthur would fumble about and perhaps hurt her, and she would grit her teeth and do her duty as a woman and a queen must, and then, like as not, she would die in childbirth; and the whole performance of finding a bride for Arthur would have to be undergone again, with no benefit for himself but only this irritated, frustrated arousal that she seemed to inspire in him. It was good that she was desirable, since she would be an ornament to his court; but it was a nuisance that she should be so very desirable to him.

Henry looked away from her dancing and comforted himself with the thought of her dowry which would bring him lasting benefit and come directly to him, unlike this bride who seemed bound to unsettle him and must go, however mismatched, to his son. As soon as they were married her treasurer would hand over the first payment of her dowry: in solid gold. A year later he would deliver the second part in gold and in her plate and jewels. Having fought his way to the throne on a shoestring and uncertain credit, Henry trusted the power of money more than anything in life; more even than his throne, for he knew he could buy a throne with money, and far more than women, for they are cheaply bought; and far, far more than the joy of a smile from a virgin princess who stopped her dance now, swept him a curtsey and came up smiling.

‘Do I please you?’ she demanded, flushed and a little breathless.

‘Well enough,’ he said, determined that she should never know how much. ‘But it’s late now and you should go back to your bed. We’ll ride with you a little way in the morning before we go ahead of you to London.’

She was surprised at the abruptness of his reply. Again, she glanced towards Arthur as if he might contradict his father’s plans; perhaps stay with her for the remainder of the journey, since his father had bragged of their informality. But the boy said nothing. ‘As you wish, Your Grace,’ she said politely.

The king nodded and rose to his feet. The court billowed into deep curtseys and bows as he stalked past them, out of the room. ‘Not so informal, at all,’ Catalina thought as she watched the King of England stride through his court, his head high. ‘He may boast of being a soldier with the manners of the camp, but he insists on obedience and on the show of deference. As indeed, he should,’ added Isabella’s daughter to herself.

Arthur followed behind his father with a quick ‘Goodnight’ to the princess as he left. In a moment all the men in their train had gone too, and the princess was alone but for her ladies.

‘What an extraordinary man,’ she remarked to her favourite, Maria de Salinas.

‘He liked you,’ the young woman said. ‘He watched you very closely, he liked you.’

‘And why should he not?’ she asked with the instinctive arrogance of a girl born to the greatest kingdom in Europe. ‘And even if he did not, it is all already agreed, and there can be no change. It has been agreed for almost all my life.’

He is not what I expected, this king who fought his way to the throne and picked up his crown from the mud of a battlefield. I expected him to be more like a champion, like a great soldier, perhaps like my father. Instead he has the look of a merchant, a man who puzzles over profit indoors, not a man who won his kingdom and his wife at the point of a sword.

I suppose I hoped for a man like Don Hernando, a hero that I could look up to, a man I would be proud to call father. But this king is lean and pale like a clerk, not a knight from the romances at all.

I expected his court to be more grand, I expected a great procession and a formal meeting with long introductions and elegant speeches, as we would have done it in the Alhambra. But he is abrupt; in my view he is rude. I shall have to become accustomed to these northern ways, this scramble to do things, this brusque ordering. I cannot expect things to be done well or even correctly. I shall have to overlook a lot until I am queen and can change things.

But, anyway, it hardly matters whether I like the king or he likes me. He has engaged in this treaty with my father and I am betrothed to his son. It hardly matters what I think of him, or what he thinks of me. It is not as if we will have to deal much together. I shall live and rule Wales and he will live and rule England, and when he dies it will be my husband on his throne and my son will be the next Prince of Wales, and I shall be queen.

As for my husband-to-be – oh! – he has made a very different first impression. He is so handsome! I did not expect him to be so handsome! He is so fair and slight, he is like a page boy from one of the old romances. I can imagine him waking all night in a vigil, or singing up to a castle window. He has pale, almost silvery skin, he has fine golden hair, and yet he is taller than me and lean and strong like a boy on the edge of manhood.

He has a rare smile, one that comes reluctantly and then shines. And he is kind. That is a great thing in a husband. He was kind when he took the glass of wine from me, he saw that I was trembling, and he tried to reassure me.

I wonder what he thinks of me? I do so wonder what he thinks of me?

Just as the king had ruled, he and Arthur went swiftly back to Windsor the next morning and Catalina’s train, with her litter carried by mules, with her trousseau in great travelling chests, her ladies-in-waiting, her Spanish household, and the guards for her dowry treasure, laboured up the muddy roads to London at a far slower pace.

She did not see the prince again until their wedding day, but when she arrived in the village of Kingston-upon-Thames her train halted in order to meet the greatest man in the kingdom, the young Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and Henry, Duke of York, the king’s second son, who were appointed to accompany her to Lambeth Palace.

‘I’ll come out,’ Catalina said hastily, emerging from her litter and walking quickly past the waiting horses, not wanting another quarrel with her strict duenna about young ladies meeting young men before their wedding day. ‘Dona Elvira, say nothing. The boy is a child of ten years old. It doesn’t matter. Not even my mother would think that it matters.’

‘At least wear your veil!’ the woman implored. ‘The Duke of Buck … Buck … whatever his name, is here too. Wear your veil when you go before him, for your own reputation, Infanta.’

‘Buckingham,’ Catalina corrected her. ‘The Duke of Buckingham. And call me Princess of Wales. And you know I cannot wear my veil because he will have been commanded to report to the king. You know what my mother said: that he is the king’s mother’s ward, restored to his family fortunes, and must be shown the greatest respect.’

The older woman shook her head, but Catalina marched out bare-faced, feeling both fearful and reckless at her own daring, and saw the duke’s men drawn up in array on the road and before them, a young boy: helmet off, bright head shining in the sunshine.

Her first thought was that he was utterly unlike his brother. While Arthur was fair-haired and slight and serious-looking, with a pale complexion and warm brown eyes, this was a sunny boy who looked as if he had never had a serious thought in his head. He did not take after his lean-faced father, he had the look of a boy for whom life came easily. His hair was red-gold, his face round and still baby-plump, his smile when he first saw her was genuinely friendly and bright, and his blue eyes shone as if he was accustomed to seeing a very pleasing world.

‘Sister!’ he said warmly, jumped down from his horse with a clatter of armour, and swept her a low bow.

‘Brother Henry,’ she said, curtseying back to him to precisely the right height, considering that he was only a second son of England, and she was an Infanta of Spain.

‘I am so pleased to see you,’ he said quickly, his Latin rapid, his English accent strong. ‘I was so hoping that His Majesty would let me come to meet you before I had to take you into London on your wedding day. I thought it would be so awkward to go marching down the aisle with you, and hand you over to Arthur, if we hadn’t even spoken. And call me Harry. Everyone calls me Harry.’

‘I too am pleased to meet you, Brother Harry,’ Catalina said politely, rather taken-aback at his enthusiasm.

‘Pleased! You should be dancing with joy!’ he exclaimed buoyantly. ‘Because Father said that I could bring you the horse which was to be one of your wedding-day presents and so we can ride together to Lambeth. Arthur said you should wait for your wedding day, but I said, why should she wait? She won’t be able to ride on her wedding day. She’ll be too busy getting married. But if I take it to her now we can ride at once.’

‘That was kind of you.’

‘Oh, I never take any notice of Arthur,’ Harry said cheerfully.

Catalina had to choke down a giggle. ‘You don’t?’

He made a face and shook his head. ‘Serious,’ he said. ‘You’ll be amazed how serious. And scholarly, of course, but not gifted. Everyone says I am very gifted, languages mostly, but music also. We can speak French together if you wish, I am extraordinarily fluent for my age. I am considered a pretty fair musician. And of course I am a sportsman. Do you hunt?’

‘No,’ Catalina said, a little overwhelmed. ‘At least, I only follow the hunt when we go after boar or wolves.’

‘Wolves? I should so like to hunt wolves. D’you really have bears?’

‘Yes, in the hills.’

‘I should so like to hunt a bear. Do you hunt wolves on foot like boar?’

‘No, on horseback,’ she said. ‘They’re very fast, you have to take very fast dogs to pull them down. It’s a horrid hunt.’

‘I shouldn’t mind that,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind anything like that. Everyone says I am terribly brave about things like that.’

‘I am sure they do,’ she said, smiling.

A handsome man in his mid-twenties came forwards and bowed. ‘Oh, this is Edward Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham,’ Harry said quickly. ‘May I present him?’

Catalina held out her hand and the man bowed again over it. His intelligent, handsome face was warm with a smile. ‘You are welcome to your own country,’ he said in faultless Castilian. ‘I hope everything has been to your liking on your journey? Is there anything I can provide for you?’

‘I have been well cared for indeed,’ Catalina said, blushing with pleasure at being greeted in her own language. ‘And the welcome I have had from people all along the way has been very kind.’

‘Look, here’s your new horse,’ Harry interrupted, as the groom led a beautiful black mare forwards. ‘You’ll be used to good horses, of course. D’you have Barbary horses all the time?’

‘My mother insists on them for the cavalry,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ he breathed. ‘Because they are so fast?’

‘They can be trained as fighting horses,’ she said, going forwards and holding out her hand, palm upwards, for the mare to sniff at and nibble at her fingers with a soft, gentle mouth.

‘Fighting horses?’ he pursued.

‘The Saracens have horses which can fight as their masters do, and the Barbary horses can be trained to do it too,’ she said. ‘They rear up and strike down a soldier with their front hooves, and they will kick out behind, too. The Turks have horses that will pick up a sword from the ground and hand it back to the rider. My mother says that one good horse is worth ten men in battle.’

‘I should so like to have a horse like that,’ Harry said longingly. ‘I wonder how I should ever get one?’

He paused, but she did not rise to the bait. ‘If only someone would give me a horse like that, I could learn how to ride it,’ he said transparently. ‘Perhaps for my birthday, or perhaps next week, since it is not me getting married, and I am not getting any wedding gifts. Since I am quite left out, and quite neglected.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Catalina, who had once seen her own brother get his way with exactly the same wheedling.

‘I should be trained to ride properly,’ he said. ‘Father has promised that though I am to go into the church I shall be allowed to ride at the quintain. But My Lady the King’s Mother says I may not joust. And it’s really unfair. I should be allowed to joust. If I had a proper horse I could joust, I am sure I would beat everyone.’

‘I am sure you would,’ she said.

‘Well, shall we go?’ he asked, seeing that she would not give him a horse for asking.

‘I cannot ride, I do not have my riding clothes unpacked.’

He hesitated. ‘Can’t you just go in that?’

Catalina laughed. ‘This is velvet and silk. I can’t ride in it. And besides, I can’t gallop around England looking like a mummer.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, shall you go in your litter then? Won’t it make us very slow?’

‘I am sorry for that, but I am ordered to travel in a litter,’ she said. ‘With the curtains drawn. I can’t think that even your father would want me to charge around the country with my skirts tucked up.’

‘Of course the princess cannot ride today,’ the Duke of Buckingham ruled. ‘As I told you. She has to go in her litter.’

Harry shrugged. ‘Well, I didn’t know. Nobody told me what you were going to wear. Can I go ahead then? My horses will be so much faster than the mules.’

‘You can ride ahead but not out of sight,’ Catalina decided. ‘Since you are supposed to be escorting me you should be with me.’

‘As I said,’ the Duke of Buckingham observed quietly and exchanged a little smile with the princess.

‘I’ll wait at every crossroads,’ Harry promised. ‘I am escorting you, remember. And on your wedding day I shall be escorting you again. I have a white suit with gold slashing.’

‘How handsome you will look,’ she said, and saw him flush with pleasure.

‘Oh, I don’t know …’

‘I am sure everyone will remark what a handsome boy you are,’ she said, as he looked pleased.

‘Everyone always cheers most loudly for me,’ he confided. ‘And I like to know that the people love me. Father says that the only way to keep a throne is to be beloved by the people. That was King Richard’s mistake, Father says.’

‘My mother says that the way to keep the throne is to do God’s work.’

‘Oh,’ he said, clearly unimpressed. ‘Well, different countries, I suppose.’

‘So we shall travel together,’ she said. ‘I will tell my people that we are ready to move on.’

‘I will tell them,’ he insisted. ‘It is me who escorts you. I shall give the orders and you shall rest in your litter.’ He gave one quick sideways glance at her. ‘When we get to Lambeth Palace you shall stay in your litter till I come for you. I shall draw back the curtains and take you in, and you should hold my hand.’

‘I should like that very much,’ she assured him, and saw his ready rush of colour once again.

He bustled off and the duke bowed to her with a smile. ‘He is a very bright boy, very eager,’ he said. ‘You must forgive his enthusiasm. He has been much indulged.’

‘His mother’s favourite?’ she asked, thinking of her own mother’s adoration for her only son.

‘Worse still,’ the duke said with a smile. ‘His mother loves him as she should; but he is the absolute apple of his grandmother’s eye, and it is she who rules the court. Luckily he is a good boy, and well-mannered. He has too good a nature to be spoiled, and the king’s mother tempers her treats with lessons.’

‘She is an indulgent woman?’ she asked.

He gave a little gulp of laughter. ‘Only to her son,’ he said. ‘The rest of us find her – er – more majestic than motherly.’

‘May we talk again at Lambeth?’ Catalina asked, tempted to know more about this household that she was to join.

‘At Lambeth and London, I shall be proud to serve you,’ the young man said, his eyes warm with admiration. ‘You must command me as you wish. I shall be your friend in England, you can call on me.’

I must have courage, I am the daughter of a brave woman and I have prepared for this all my life. When the young duke spoke so kindly to me there was no need for me to feel like weeping, that was foolish. I must keep my head up and smile. My mother said to me that if I smile no-one will know that I am homesick or afraid, I shall smile and smile however odd things seem.

And though this England seems so strange now, I will become accustomed. I will learn their ways and feel at home here. Their odd ways will become my ways, and the worst things – the things that I utterly cannot bear – those I shall change when I am queen. And anyway, it will be better for me than it was for Isabel, my sister. She was only married a few months and then she had to come home, a widow. Better for me than for Maria, who had to follow in Isabel’s footsteps to Portugal, better for me than for Juana, who is sick with love for her husband Philip. It must be better for me than it was for Juan, my poor brother, who died so soon after finding happiness. And always better for me than for my mother, whose childhood was lived on a knife edge.

My story won’t be like hers, of course. I have been born to less exciting times. I shall hope to make terms with my husband Arthur and with his odd, loud father, and with his sweet little braggart brother. I shall hope that his mother and his grandmother will love me or at the very least teach me how to be a Princess of Wales, a Queen of England. I shall not have to ride in desperate dashes by night from one besieged fortress to another, as my mother did. I shall not have to pawn my own jewels to pay mercenary soldiers, as she did. I shall not have to ride out in my own armour to rally my troops. I shall not be threatened by the wicked French on one side and the heretic Moors on the other, as my mother was. I shall marry Arthur and when his father dies – which must be soon, for he is so very old and so very bad-tempered – then we shall be King and Queen of England and my mother will rule in Spain as I rule in England and she will see me keep England in alliance with Spain as I have promised her, she will see me hold my country in an unbreakable treaty with hers, she will see I shall be safe forever.

London, 14th November 1501

On the morning of her wedding day Catalina was called early; but she had been awake for hours, stirring as soon as the cold, wintry sun had started to light the pale sky. They had prepared a great bath – her ladies told her that the English were amazed that she was going to wash before her wedding day and that most of them thought that she was risking her life. Catalina, brought up in the Alhambra where the bath houses were the most beautiful suite of rooms in the palace, centres of gossip, laughter and scented water, was equally amazed to hear that the English thought it perfectly adequate to bathe only occasionally, and that the poor people would bathe only once a year.

She had already realised that the scent of musk and ambergris which had wafted in with the king and Prince Arthur had underlying notes of sweat and horse, and that she would live for the rest of her life among people who did not change their underwear from one year to the next. She had seen it as another thing that she must learn to endure, as an angel from heaven endures the privations of earth. She had come from al Yanna – the garden, the paradise – to the ordinary world. She had come from the Alhambra Palace to England, she had anticipated some disagreeable changes.

‘I suppose it is always so cold that it does not matter,’ she said uncertainly to Dona Elvira.

‘It matters to us,’ the duenna said. ‘And you shall bathe like an Infanta of Spain though all the cooks in the kitchen have had to stop what they are doing to boil up water.’

Dona Elvira had commanded a great tureen from the flesh kitchen which was usually deployed to scald beast carcases, had it scoured by three scullions, lined it with linen sheets and filled it to the brim with hot water scattered with rose petals and scented with oil of roses brought from Spain. She lovingly supervised the washing of Catalina’s long white limbs, the manicuring of her toes, the filing of her fingernails, the brushing of her teeth and finally the three-rinse washing of her hair. Time after time the incredulous English maids toiled to the door to receive another ewer of hot water from exhausted page boys, and tipped it in the tub to keep the temperature of the bath hot.

‘If only we had a proper bath house,’ Dona Elvira mourned. ‘With steam and a tepidarium and a proper clean marble floor! Hot water on tap and somewhere for you to sit and be properly scrubbed.’

‘Don’t fuss,’ Catalina said dreamily as they helped her from the bath and patted her all over with scented towels. One maid took her hair, squeezed out the water and rubbed it gently with red silk soaked in oil to give it shine and colour.

‘Your mother would be so proud of you,’ Dona Elvira said as they led the Infanta towards her wardrobe and started to dress her in layer after layer of shifts and gowns. ‘Pull that lace tighter, girl, so that the skirt lies flat. This is her day, as well as yours, Catalina. She said that you would marry him whatever it cost her.’

Yes, but she did not pay the greatest price. I know they bought me this wedding with a king’s ransom for my dowry, and I know that they endured long and hard negotiations, and I survived the worst voyage anyone has ever taken, but there was another price paid that we never speak of – wasn’t there? And the thought of that price is in my mind today, as it has been on the journey, as it was on the voyage, as it has been ever since I first heard of it.

There was a man of only twenty-four years old, Edward Plantagenet, the Duke of Warwick and a son of the kings of England, with – truth be told – a better claim to the throne of England than that of my father-in-law. He was a prince, nephew to the king, and of blood royal. He committed no crime, he did nothing wrong, but he was arrested for my sake, taken to the Tower for my benefit, and finally killed, beheaded on the block, for my gain, so that my parents could be satisfied that there were no pretenders to the throne that they had bought for me.

My father himself told King Henry himself that he would not send me to England while the Duke of Warwick was alive, and so I am like Death himself, carrying the scythe. When they ordered the ship for me to come to England: Warwick was a dead man.

They say he was a simpleton. He did not really understand that he was under arrest, he thought that he was housed in the Tower as a way of giving him honour. He knew he was the last of the Plantagenet princes, and he knew that the Tower has always been royal lodgings as well as a prison. When they put a pretender, a cunning man who had tried to pass himself off as a royal prince, into the room next door to poor Warwick, he thought it was for company. When the other man invited him to escape, he thought it was a clever thing to do, and like the innocent he was, he whispered of their plans where his guards could hear. That gave them the excuse they needed for a charge of treason. They trapped him very easily, they beheaded him with little protest from anyone.

The country wants peace and the security of an unchallenged king. The country will wink at a dead claimant or two. I am expected to wink at it also. Especially as it is done for my benefit. It was done at my father’s request, for me. To make my way smooth.

When they told me that he was dead, I said nothing, for I am an Infanta of Spain. Before anything else, I am my mother’s daughter. I do not weep like a girl and tell all the world my every thought. But when I was alone in the gardens of the Alhambra in the evening with the sun going down and leaving the world cool and sweet, I walked beside a long canal of still water, hidden by the trees, and I thought that I would never walk in the shade of trees again and enjoy the flicker of hot sunshine through cool green leaves without thinking that Edward, Duke of Warwick, will see the sun no more, so that I might live my life in wealth and luxury. I prayed then that I might be forgiven for the death of an innocent man.

My mother and father have fought down the length of Castile and Aragon, have ridden the breadth of Spain to make justice run in every village, in the smallest of hamlets – so that no Spaniard can lose his life on the whim of another. Even the greatest lords cannot murder a peasant; they have to be ruled by the law. But when it came to England and to me, they forgot this. They forgot that we live in a palace where the walls are engraved with the promise: ‘Enter and ask. Do not be afraid to seek justice for here you will find it.’ They just wrote to King Henry and said that they would not send me until Warwick was dead, and in a moment, at their expressed wish, Warwick was killed.

And sometimes, when I do not remember to be Infanta of Spain nor Princess of Wales but just the Catalina who walked behind her mother through the great gate into the Alhambra Palace, and knew that her mother was the greatest power the world had ever known; sometimes I wonder childishly, if my mother has not made a great mistake? If she has not driven God’s will too far? Farther even than God would want? For this wedding is launched in blood, and sails in a sea of innocent blood. How can such a wedding ever be the start of a good marriage? Must it not – as night follows sunset – be tragic and bloody too? How can any happiness ever come to Prince Arthur and to me that has been bought at such a terrible price? And if we could be happy would it not be an utterly sinfully-selfish joy?

Prince Harry, the ten-year-old Duke of York, was so proud of his white taffeta suit that he scarcely glanced at Catalina until they were at the west doors of St Paul’s Cathedral and then he turned and stared, trying to see her face through the exquisite lace of the white mantilla. Ahead of them stretched a raised pathway, lined with red cloth, studded with golden nails, running at head height from the great doorway of the church where the citizens of London crowded to get a better view, up the long aisle to the altar where Prince Arthur stood, pale with nerves, six hundred slow ceremonial paces away.

Catalina smiled at the young boy at her side, and he beamed with delight. Her hand was steady on his proffered arm. He paused for a moment more, until everyone in the enormous church realised that the bride and prince were at the doorway, waiting to make their entrance, a hush fell, everyone craned to see the bride, and then, at the precise, most theatrical moment, he led her forwards.

Catalina felt the congregation murmur around her feet as she went past them, high on the stage that King Henry had ordered to be built so that everyone should see the flower of Spain meet the rosebush of England. The prince turned as she came towards him, but was blinded for a moment by irritation at the sight of his brother, leading the princess as if he himself were the bridegroom, glancing around as he walked, acknowledging the doffing of caps and the whispering of curtseys with his smug little smile, as if it were him that everyone had come to see.

Then they were both at Arthur’s side and Harry had to step back, however reluctantly, as the princess and prince faced the archbishop together and kneeled together on the specially embroidered white taffeta cushions.

‘Never has a couple been more married,’ King Henry thought sourly, standing in the royal pew with his wife and his mother. ‘Her parents trusted me no further than they would a snake, and my view of her father has always been that of a half-Moor huckster. Nine times they have been betrothed. This will be a marriage that nothing can break. Her father cannot wriggle from it, whatever second thoughts he has. He will protect me against France now; this is his daughter’s inheritance. The very thought of our alliance will frighten the French into peace with me, and we must have peace.’

He glanced at his wife at his side. Her eyes were filled with tears, watching her son and his bride as the archbishop raised their clasped hands and wrapped them in his holy stole. Her face, beautiful with emotion, did not stir him. Who ever knew what she was thinking behind that lovely mask? Of her own marriage, the union of York and Lancaster which put her as a wife on the throne that she could have claimed in her own right? Or was she thinking of the man she would have preferred as a husband? The king scowled. He was never sure of his wife, Elizabeth. In general, he preferred not to consider her.

Beyond her, his flint-faced mother, Margaret Beaufort, watched the young couple with a glimmer of a smile. This was England’s triumph, this was her son’s triumph, but far more than that, this was her triumph – to have dragged this base-born bastard family back from disaster, to challenge the power of York, to defeat a reigning king, to capture the very throne of England against all the odds. This was her making. It was her plan to bring her son back from France at the right moment to claim his throne. They were her alliances who gave him the soldiers for the battle. It was her battle plan which left the usurper Richard to despair on the field at Bosworth, and it was her victory that she celebrated every day of her life. And this was the marriage that was the culmination of that long struggle. This bride would give her a grandson, a Spanish–Tudor king for England, and a son after him, and after him: and so lay down a dynasty of Tudors that would be never-ending.

Catalina repeated the words of the marriage vow, felt the weight of a cold ring on her finger, turned her face to her new husband and felt his cool kiss, in a daze. When she walked back down that absurd walkway and saw the smiling faces stretching from her feet to the walls of the cathedral she started to realise that it was done. And when they went from the cool dark of the cathedral to the bright wintry sunlight outside and heard the roar of the crowd for Arthur and his bride, the Prince and Princess of Wales, she realised that she had done her duty finally and completely. She had been promised to Arthur from childhood, and now, at last, they were married. She had been named the Princess of Wales since she was three years old and now, at last, she had taken her name, and taken her place in the world. She looked up and smiled and the crowd, delighted with the free wine, with the prettiness of the young girl, with the promise of safety from civil war that could only come with a settled royal succession, roared their approval.

They were husband and wife; but they did not speak more than a few words to each other for the rest of the long day. There was a formal banquet, and though they were seated side by side, there were healths to be drunk and speeches to be attended to, and musicians playing. After the long dinner of many courses there was an entertainment with poetry and singers and a tableau. No-one had ever seen so much money flung at a single occasion. It was a greater celebration than the king’s own wedding, greater even than his own coronation. It was a redefinition of the English kingly state, and it told the world that this marriage of the Tudor rose to the Spanish princess was one of the greatest events of the new age. Two new dynasties were proclaiming themselves by this union: Ferdinand and Isabella of the new country that they were forging from al Andalus, and the Tudors who were making England their own.

The musicians played a dance from Spain and Queen Elizabeth, at a nod from her mother-in-law, leaned over and said quietly to Catalina, ‘It would be a great pleasure for us all if you would dance.’

Catalina, quite composed, rose from her chair and went to the centre of the great hall as her ladies gathered around her, formed a circle and held hands. They danced the pavane, the same dance that Henry had seen at Dogmersfield, and he watched his daughter-in-law through narrowed eyes. Undoubtedly, she was the most beddable young woman in the room. A pity that a cold fish like Arthur would be certain to fail to teach her the pleasures that could be had between sheets. If he let them both go to Ludlow Castle she would either die of boredom or slip into complete frigidity. On the other hand, if he kept her at his side she would delight his eyes, he could watch her dance, he could watch her brighten the court. He sighed. He thought he did not dare.

‘She is delightful,’ the queen remarked.

‘Let’s hope so,’ he said sourly.

‘My lord?’

He smiled at her look of surprised inquiry. ‘No, nothing. You are right, delightful indeed. And she looks healthy, doesn’t she? As far as you can tell?’

‘I am sure she is, and her mother assured me that she is most regular in her habits.’

He nodded. ‘That woman would say anything.’

‘But surely not; nothing that would mislead us? Not on a matter of such importance?’ she suggested.

He nodded and let it go. The sweetness of his wife’s nature and her faith in others was not something he could change. Since she had no influence on policy, her opinions did not matter. ‘And Arthur?’ he said. ‘He seems to be growing and strong? I would to God he had the spirits of his brother.’

They both looked at young Harry who was standing, watching the dancers, his face flushed with excitement, his eyes bright.

‘Oh, Harry,’ his mother said indulgently. ‘But there has never been a prince more handsome and more full of fun than Harry.’

The Spanish dance ended and the king clapped his hands. ‘Now Harry and his sister,’ he commanded. He did not want to force Arthur to dance in front of his new bride. The boy danced like a clerk, all gangling legs and concentration. But Harry was raring to go and was on the floor with his sister Princess Margaret in a moment. The musicians knew the young royals’ taste in music and struck up a lively galliard. Harry tossed his jacket to one side and threw himself into the dance, stripped down to his shirtsleeves like a peasant.

There was a gasp from the Spanish grandees at the young prince’s shocking behaviour, but the English court smiled with his parents at his energy and enthusiasm. When the two had romped their way through the final turns and gallop, everyone applauded, laughing. Everyone but Prince Arthur, who was staring into the middle distance, determined not to watch his brother dance. He came to with a start only when his mother put her hand on his arm.

‘Please God he’s daydreaming of his wedding night,’ his father remarked to Lady Margaret his mother. ‘Though I doubt it.’

She gave a sharp laugh. ‘I can’t say I think much of the bride,’ she said critically.

‘You don’t?’ he asked. ‘You saw the treaty yourself.’

‘I like the price but the goods are not to my taste,’ she said with her usual sharp wit. ‘She is a slight, pretty thing, isn’t she?’

‘Would you rather a strapping milkmaid?’

‘I’d like a girl with the hips to give us sons,’ she said bluntly. ‘A nursery-full of sons.’

‘She looks well enough to me,’ he ruled. He knew that he would never be able to say how well she looked to him. Even to himself he should never even think it.

Catalina was put into her wedding bed by her ladies, Maria de Salinas kissed her goodnight, and Dona Elvira gave her a mother’s blessing; but Arthur had to undergo a further round of backslapping ribaldry, before his friends and companions escorted him to her door. They put him into bed beside the princess, who lay still and silent as the strange men laughed and bade them goodnight, and then the archbishop came to sprinkle the sheets with holy water and pray over the young couple. It could not have been a more public bedding unless they had opened the doors for the citizens of London to see the young people side by side, awkward as bolsters, in their marital bed. It seemed like hours to both of them until the doors were finally closed on the smiling, curious faces and the two of them were quite alone, seated upright against the pillows, frozen like a pair of shy dolls.

There was silence.

‘Would you like a glass of ale?’ Arthur suggested in a voice thin with nerves.

‘I don’t like ale very much,’ Catalina said.

‘This is different. They call it wedding ale, it’s sweetened with mead and spices. It’s for courage.’

‘Do we need courage?’

He was emboldened by her smile and got out of bed to fetch her a cup. ‘I should think we do,’ he said. ‘You are a stranger in a new land, and I have never known any girls but my sisters. We both have much to learn.’

She took the cup of hot ale from him and sipped the heady drink. ‘Oh, that is nice.’

Arthur gulped down a cup and took another. Then he came back to the bed. Raising the cover and getting in beside her seemed an imposition; the idea of pulling up her night shift and mounting her was utterly beyond him.

‘I shall blow out the candle,’ he announced.

The sudden dark engulfed them, only the embers of the fire glowed red.

‘Are you very tired?’ he asked, longing for her to say that she was too tired to do her duty.

‘Not at all,’ she said politely, her disembodied voice coming out of the darkness. ‘Are you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to sleep now?’ he asked.

‘I know what we have to do,’ she said abruptly. ‘All my sisters have been married. I know all about it.’

‘I know as well,’ he said, stung.

‘I didn’t mean that you don’t know, I meant that you need not be afraid to start. I know what we have to do.’

‘I am not afraid, it is just that I …’

To his absolute horror he felt her hand pull his nightshirt upwards, and touch the bare skin of his belly.

‘I did not want to frighten you,’ he said, his voice unsteady, desire rising up even though he was sick with fear that he would be incompetent.

‘I am not afraid,’ said Isabella’s daughter. ‘I have never been afraid of anything.’

In the silence and the darkness he felt her take hold of him and grasp firmly. At her touch he felt his desire well up so sharply that he was afraid he would come in her hand. With a low groan he rolled over on top of her and found she had stripped herself naked to the waist, her nightgown pulled up. He fumbled clumsily and felt her flinch as he pushed against her. The whole process seemed quite impossible, there was no way of knowing what a man was supposed to do, nothing to help or guide him, no knowing the mysterious geography of her body, and then she gave a little cry of pain, stifled with her hand, and he knew he had done it. The relief was so great that he came at once, a half-painful, half-pleasurable rush which told him that, whatever his father thought of him, whatever his brother Harry thought of him, the job was done and he was a man and a husband; and the princess was his wife and no longer a virgin untouched.

Catalina waited till he was asleep and then she got up and washed herself in her privy chamber. She was bleeding but she knew it would stop soon, the pain was no worse than she had expected, Isabel her sister had said it was not as bad as falling from a horse, and she had been right. Margot, her sister-in-law, had said that it was paradise; but Catalina could not imagine how such deep embarrassment and discomfort could add up to bliss – and concluded that Margot was exaggerating, as she often did.

Catalina came back to the bedroom. But she did not go back to the bed. Instead she sat on the floor by the fire, hugging her knees and watching the embers.

‘Not a bad day,’ I say to myself, and I smile; it is my mother’s phrase. I want to hear her voice so much that I am saying her words to myself. Often, when I was little more than a baby, and she had spent a long day in the saddle, inspecting the forward scouting parties, riding back to chivvy up the slower train, she would come into her tent, kick off her riding boots, drop down to the rich Moorish rugs and cushions by the fire in the brass brazier and say: ‘Not a bad day.’

‘Is there ever a bad day?’ I once asked her.

‘Not when you are doing God’s work,’ she replied seriously. ‘There are days when it is easy and days when it is hard. But if you are on God’s work then there are never bad days.’

I don’t for a moment doubt that bedding Arthur, even my brazen touching him and drawing him into me, is God’s work. It is God’s work that there should be an unbreakable alliance between Spain and England. Only with England as a reliable ally can Spain challenge the spread of France. Only with English wealth, and especially English ships, can we Spanish take the war against wickedness to the very heart of the Moorish empires in Africa and Turkey. The Italian princes are a muddle of rival ambitions, the French are a danger to every neighbour, it has to be England who joins the crusade with Spain to maintain the defence of Christendom against the terrifying might of the Moors; whether they be black Moors from Africa, the bogeymen of my childhood, or light-skinned Moors from the dreadful Ottoman Empire. And once they are defeated, then the crusaders must go on, to India, to the East, as far as they have to go to challenge and defeat the wickedness that is the religion of the Moors. My great fear is that the Saracen kingdoms stretch forever, to the end of the world and even Cristóbal Colón does not know where that is.

‘What if there is no end to them?’ I once asked my mother, as we leaned over the sun-warmed walls of the fort and watched the despatch of a new group of Moors leaving the city of Granada, their baggage loaded on mules, the women weeping, the men with their heads bowed low, the flag of St James now flying over the red fort where the crescent had rippled for seven centuries, the bells ringing for Mass where once horns had blown for heretic prayers. ‘What if now we have defeated these, they just go back to Africa and in another year, they come again?’

‘That is why you have to be brave, my Princess of Wales,’ my mother had answered. ‘That is why you have to be ready to fight them whenever they come, wherever they come. This is war till the end of the world, till the end of time when God finally ends it. It will take many shapes. It will never cease. They will come again and again, and you will have to be ready in Wales as we will be ready in Spain. I bore you to be a fighting princess as I am a Queen Militant. Your father and I placed you in England as Maria is placed in Portugal, as Juana is placed with the Hapsburgs in the Netherlands. You are there to defend the lands of your husbands, and to hold them in alliance with us. It is your task to make England ready and keep it safe. Make sure that you never fail your country, as your sisters must never fail theirs, as I have never failed mine.’

Catalina was awakened in the early hours of the morning by Arthur gently pushing between her legs. Resentfully, she let him do as he wanted, knowing that this was the way to get a son and make the alliance secure. Some princesses, like her mother, had to fight their way in open warfare to secure their kingdom. Most princesses, like her, had to endure painful ordeals in private. It did not take long, and then he fell asleep. Catalina lay as still as a frozen stone in order not to wake him again.

He did not stir until daybreak, when his grooms of the bedchamber rapped brightly on the door. He rose up with a slightly embarrassed ‘Good morning’ to her; and went out. They greeted him with cheers and marched him in triumph to his own rooms. Catalina heard him say, vulgarly, boastfully, ‘Gentlemen, this night I have been in Spain,’ and heard the yell of laughter that applauded his joke. Her ladies came in with her gown and heard the men’s laughter. Dona Elvira raised her thin eyebrows to heaven at the manners of these English.

‘I don’t know what your mother would say,’ Dona Elvira remarked.

‘She would say that words count less than God’s will, and God’s will has been done,’ Catalina said firmly.

It was not like this for my mother. She fell in love with my father on sight and she married him with great joy. When I grew older I began to understand that they felt a real desire for each other – it was not just a powerful partnership of a great king and queen. My father might take other women as his lovers; but he needed his wife, he could not be happy without her. And my mother could not even see another man. She was blind to anybody but my father. Alone, of all the courts in Europe, the court of Spain had no tradition of love-play, of flirtation, of adoration of the queen in the practice of courtly love. It would have been a waste of time. My mother simply did not notice other men and when they sighed for her and said her eyes were as blue as the skies she simply laughed and said, ‘What nonsense,’ and that was an end to it.

When my parents had to be apart they wrote every day, he would not move one step without telling her of it, and asking for her advice. When he was in danger she hardly slept.

He could not have got through the Sierra Nevada if she had not been sending him men and digging teams to level the road for him. No-one else could have driven a road through there. He would have trusted no-one else to support him, to hold the kingdom together as he pushed forwards. She could have conquered the mountains for no-one else, he was the only one that could have attracted her support. What looked like a remarkable unity of two calculating players was deceptive – it was their passion which they played out on the political stage. She was a great queen because that was how she could evoke his desire. He was a great general in order to match her. It was their love, their lust, which drove them; almost as much as God.

We are a passionate family. When Isabel, my sister, now with God, came back from Portugal a widow she swore that she had loved her husband so much that she would never take another. She had been with him for only six months but she said that without him, life had no meaning. Juana, my second sister, is so in love with her husband Philip that she cannot bear to let him out of her sight, when she learns that he is interested in another woman she swears that she will poison her rival, she is quite mad with love for him. And my brother … my darling brother Juan … simply died of love. He and his beautiful wife Margot were so passionate, so besotted with each other, that his health failed, he was dead within six months of their wedding. Is there anything more tragic than a young man dying six months into his marriage? I come from passionate stock – but what about me? Shall I ever fall in love?

Not with this clumsy boy, for a certainty. My early liking for him has quite melted away. He is too shy to speak to me, he mumbles and pretends he cannot think of the words. He forced me to command in the bedroom, and I am ashamed that I had to be the one to make the first move. He makes me into a woman without shame, a woman of the marketplace when I want to be wooed like a lady in a romance. But if I had not invited him – what could he have done? I feel a fool now, and I blame him for my embarrassment. ‘In Spain,’ indeed! He would have got no closer than the Indies if I had not showed him how to do it. Stupid puppy.

When I first saw him I thought he was as beautiful as a knight from the romances, like a troubadour, like a poet. I thought I could be like a lady in a tower and he could sing beneath my window and persuade me to love him. But although he has the looks of a poet he doesn’t have the wit. I can never get more than two words out of him, and I begin to feel that I demean myself in trying to please him.

Of course, I will never forget that it is my duty to endure this youth, this Arthur. My hope is always for a child, and my destiny is to keep England safe against the Moors. I shall do that; whatever else happens, I shall be Queen of England and protect my two countries: the Spain of my birth and the England of my marriage.

London, Winter 1501

Arthur and Catalina, standing stiffly side by side on the royal barge, but not exchanging so much as one word, led a great fleet of gaily painted barges downriver to Baynard’s Castle, which would be their London home for the next weeks. It was a huge, rectangular palace of a house overlooking the river, with gardens running down to the water’s edge. The Mayor of London, the councillors, and all the court followed the royal barge; and musicians played as the heirs to the throne took up residence in the heart of the City.

Catalina noticed that the Scots envoys were much in attendance, negotiating the marriage of her new sister-in-law, Princess Margaret. King Henry was using his children as pawns in his game for power, as every king must do. Arthur had made the vital link with Spain, Margaret, though only twelve years old, would make Scotland into a friend, rather than the enemy that it had been for generations. Princess Mary also would be married, when her time came, either to the greatest enemy that the country faced, or the greatest friend that they hoped to keep. Catalina was glad that she had known from childhood that she should be the next Queen of England. There had been no changes of policy and no shifting alliances. She had been Queen of England-to-be almost from birth. It made the separation from her home and from her family so much easier.

She noticed that Arthur was very restrained in his greeting when he met the Scots lords at dinner at the Palace of Westminster.

‘The Scots are our most dangerous enemies,’ Edward Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham, told Catalina in whispered Castilian, as they stood at the back of the hall, waiting for the company to take their seats. ‘The king and the prince hope that this marriage will make them our friend forever, will bind the Scots to us. But it is hard for any of us to forget how they have constantly harried us. We have all been brought up to know that we have a most constant and malignant enemy to the north.’

‘Surely they are only a poor little kingdom,’ she queried. ‘What harm can they do us?’

‘They always ally with France,’ he told her. ‘Every time we have a war with France they make an alliance and pour over our northern borders. And, they may be small and poor but they are the doorway for the terrible danger of France to invade us from the north. I think Your Grace knows from your own childhood that even a small country on your frontier can be a danger.’

‘Well, the Moors had only a small country at the end,’ she observed. ‘My father always said that the Moors were like a disease. They might be a small irritation but they were always there.’

‘The Scots are our plague,’ he agreed. ‘Once every three years or so, they invade and make a little war, and we lose an acre of land or win it back again. And every summer they harry the border countries and steal what they cannot grow or make themselves. No northern farmer has ever been safe from them. The king is determined to have peace.’

‘Will they be kind to the Princess Margaret?’

‘In their own rough way.’ He smiled. ‘Not as you have been welcomed, Infanta.’

Catalina beamed in return. She knew that she was warmly welcomed in England. Londoners had taken the Spanish princess to their hearts, they liked the gaudy glamour of her train, the oddness of her dress, and they liked the way the princess always had a smile for a waiting crowd. Catalina had learned from her mother that the people are a greater power than an army of mercenaries and she never turned her head away from a cheer. She always waved, she always smiled, and if they raised a great bellow of applause she would even bob them a pretty little curtsey.

She glanced over to where the Princess Margaret, a vain, precocious girl, was smoothing down her dress and pushing back her headdress before going into the hall.

‘Soon you will be married and going away, as I have done,’ Catalina remarked pleasantly in French. ‘I do hope it brings you happiness.’

The younger girl looked at her boldly. ‘Not as you have done, for you have come to the finest kingdom in Europe, whereas I have to go far away into exile,’ she said.

‘England may be fine to you; but it is still strange to me,’ Catalina said, trying not to flare up at the rudeness of the girl. ‘And if you had seen my home in Spain you would be surprised at how fine our palace is there.’

‘There is nowhere better than England,’ Margaret said with the serene conviction of one of the spoiled Tudor children. ‘But it will be good to be queen. While you are still only a princess, I shall be queen. I shall be the equal of my mother.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Indeed, I shall be the equal of your mother.’

The colour rushed into Catalina’s face. ‘You would never be the equal of my mother,’ she snapped. ‘You are a fool to even say it.’

Margaret gasped.

‘Now, now, Your Royal Highnesses,’ the duke interrupted quickly. ‘Your father is ready to take his place. Will you please to follow him into the hall?’

Margaret turned and flounced away from Catalina.

‘She is very young,’ the duke said soothingly. ‘And although she would never admit to it, she is afraid to leave her mother and her father and go so far away.’

‘She has a lot to learn,’ Catalina said through gritted teeth. ‘She should learn the manners of a queen if she is going to be one.’ She turned to find Arthur at her side, ready to conduct her into the hall behind his parents.

The royal family took their seats. The king and his two sons sat at the high table under the canopy of state, facing out over the hall, to their right sat the queen and the princesses. My Lady, the King’s Mother, Margaret Beaufort, was seated beside the king, between him and his wife.

‘Margaret and Catalina were having cross words as they came in,’ she observed to him with grim satisfaction. ‘I thought that the Infanta would irritate our Princess Margaret. She cannot bear to have too much attention shown to another, and everyone makes such a fuss over Catalina.’

‘Margaret will soon be gone,’ Henry said shortly. ‘Then she can have her own court, and her own honeymoon.’

‘Catalina has become the very centre of the court,’ his mother complained. ‘The palace is crowded out with people coming to watch her dine. Everyone wants to see her.’

‘She’s a novelty only, a seven-day wonder. And anyway, I want people to see her.’

‘She has charm of a sort,’ the older woman noted. The groom of the ewer presented a golden bowl filled with scented water and Lady Margaret dipped her fingertips and then wiped them on the napkin.

‘I think her very pleasing,’ Henry said as he dried his own hands. ‘She went through the wedding without one wrong step, and the people like her.’

His mother made a small, dismissive gesture. ‘She is sick with her own vanity, she has not been brought up as I would bring up a child of mine. Her will has not been broken to obedience. She thinks that she is something special.’

Henry glanced across at the princess. She had bent her head to listen to something being said by the youngest Tudor princess, Princess Mary; and he saw her smile and reply. ‘D’you know? I think she is something special,’ he said.

The celebrations continued for days and days, and then the court moved on to the new-built, glamorous palace of Richmond, set in a great and beautiful park. To Catalina, in a swirl of strange faces and introductions, it felt as if one wonderful joust and fete merged into another, with herself at the very centre of it all, a queen as celebrated as any sultana with a country devoted to her amusement. But after a week the party was concluded with the king coming to the princess and telling her that it was time for her Spanish companions to go home.

Catalina had always known that the little court which had accompanied her through storms and near-shipwreck to present her to her new husband would leave her once the wedding was done and the first half of the dowry paid; but it was a gloomy couple of days while they packed their bags and said goodbye to the princess. She would be left with her small domestic household, her ladies, her chamberlain, her treasurer, and her immediate servants, but the rest of her entourage must leave. Even knowing as she did that this was the way of the world, that the wedding party always left after the wedding, did not make her feel any less bereft. She sent them with messages to everyone in Spain and with a letter for her mother.

From her daughter, Catalina, Princess of Wales, to Her Royal Highness of Castile and Aragon, and most dearest Madre,

Oh, Madre!

As these ladies and gentlemen will tell you, the prince and I have a good house near the river. It is called Baynard’s Castle although it is not a castle but a palace and newly built. There are no bath houses, for either ladies or men. I know what you are thinking. You cannot imagine it.

Dona Elvira has had the blacksmith make a great cauldron which they heat up on the fire in the kitchen and six serving men heave it to my room for my bath. Also, there are no pleasure gardens with flowers, no streams, no fountains, it is quite extraordinary. It all looks as if it is not yet built. At best, they have a tiny court which they call a knot garden where you can walk round and round until you are dizzy. The food is not good and the wine very sour. They eat nothing but preserved fruit and I believe they have never heard of vegetables.

You must not think that I am complaining, I wanted you to know that even with these small difficulties I am content to be the princess. Prince Arthur is kind and considerate to me when we meet, which is generally at dinner. He has given me a very beautiful mare of Barbary stock mixed with English, and I ride her every day. The gentlemen of the court joust (but not the princes); my champion is often the Duke of Buckingham who is very kind to me, he advises me as to the court and tells me how to go on. We all often dine in the English style, men and women together. The women have their own rooms but men visitors and male servants come and go out of them as if they were public, there is no seclusion for women at all. The only place I can be sure to be alone is if I lock myself in the necessary house – otherwise there are people everywhere.

Queen Elizabeth, though very quiet, is very kind to me when we meet and I like being in her company. My Lady the King’s Mother is very cold; but I think she is like that with everyone except the king and the princes. She dotes on her son and grandsons. She rules the court as if she were queen herself. She is very devout and very serious. I am sure she is very admirable in every way.

You will want to know if I am with child. There are no signs yet. You will want to know that I read my Bible or holy books for two hours every day, as you ordered, and that I go to Mass three times a day and I take communion every Sunday also. Father Alessandro Geraldini is well, and as great a spiritual guide and advisor in England as he was in Spain, and I trust to him and to God to keep me strong in the faith to do God’s work in England as you do in Spain. Dona Elvira keeps my ladies in good order and I obey her as I would you. Maria de Salinas is my best friend, here as at home, though nothing here is like Spain, and I cannot bear her to talk of home at all.

I will be the princess that you want me to be. I shall not fail you or God. I will be queen and I will defend England against the Moors.

Please write to me soon and tell me how you are. You seemed so sad and low when I left, I hope that you are better now. I am sure that the darkness that you saw in your mother will pass over you, and not rest on your life as it did on hers. Surely, God would not inflict sadness on you, who has always been His favourite? I pray for you and for Father every day. I hear your voice in my head, advising me all the time. Please write soon to your daughter who loves you so much,

Catalina

PS Although I am glad to be married, and to be called to do my duty for Spain and God, I miss you very much. I know you are a queen before a mother but I would be so glad to have one letter from you. C

The court bade a cheerful farewell to the Spanish but Catalina found it hard to smile and wave. After they had gone she went down to the river to see the last of the barges shrink and then disappear in the distance and King Henry found her there, a lonely figure, on the pier looking downstream, as if she wished she were going too.

He was too skilled with women to ask her what was wrong. He knew very well what was wrong: loneliness, and homesickness natural enough in a young woman of nearly sixteen years old. He had been an exile from England for almost all his own life, he knew very well the rise and fall of yearning that comes with an unexpected scent, the change of seasons, a farewell. To invite an explanation would only trigger a flood of tears and achieve nothing. Instead, he tucked her cold little hand under his arm and said that she must see his library which he had newly assembled at the palace and she could borrow books to read at any time. He threw an order over his shoulder to one of his pages as he led the princess to the library and walked her round the beautiful shelves, showing her not only the classical authors and the histories that were his own interest, but also the stories of romance and heroism which he thought more likely to divert her.

She did not complain, he noticed with pleasure, and she had rubbed her eyes dry as soon as she had seen him coming towards her. She had been raised in a hard school. Isabella of Spain had been a soldier’s wife and a soldier herself, she did not raise any of her girls to be self-indulgent. He thought there was not a young woman in England who could match this girl for grit. But there were shadows under the princess’s blue eyes and though she took the proffered volumes with a word of thanks she still did not smile.

‘And do you like maps?’ he asked her.

She nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘In my father’s library we have maps of the whole world, and Cristóbal Colón made him a map to show him the Americas.’

‘Does your father have a large library?’ he asked, jealous of his reputation as a scholar.

Her polite hesitation before she replied told him everything, told him that his library here, of which he had been so proud, was nothing to the learning of the Moors of Spain. ‘Of course my father has inherited many books, they are not all his own collection,’ Catalina said tactfully. ‘Many of them are Moorish authors, from Moorish scholars. You know that the Arabs translated the Greek authors before they were ever made into French or Italian, or English. The Arabs had all the sciences and all the mathematics when they were forgotten in Christendom. He has all the Moorish translations of Aristotle and Sophocles and everyone.’

He could feel his longing for the new learning like a hunger. ‘He has many books?’

‘Thousands of volumes,’ she said. ‘Hebrew and Arabic, Latin, and all the Christian languages too. But he doesn’t read them all, he has Arab scholars to study them.’

‘And the maps?’ he asked.

‘He is advised mostly by Arab navigators and map-makers,’ she said. ‘They travel so far overland, they understand how to chart their way by the stars. The sea voyages are just the same to them as a journey through the desert. They say that a watery waste is the same as a plain of sand, they use the stars and the moon to measure their journey in both.’

‘And does your father think that much profit will come from his discoveries?’ the king asked curiously. ‘We have all heard of these great voyages of Cristóbal Colón and the treasures he has brought back.’

He admired how her eyelashes swept down to hide the gleam. ‘Oh, I could not say.’ Cleverly, she avoided the question. ‘Certainly, my mother thinks that there are many souls to save for Jesus.’

Henry opened the great folder with his collection of maps and spread them before her. Beautifully illuminated sea monsters frolicked in the corners. He traced for her the coastline of England, the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, the handful of regions of France, the new widening borders of her own country of Spain and the papal lands in Italy. ‘You see why your father and I have to be friends,’ he said to her. ‘We both face the power of France on our doorstep. We cannot even trade with each other unless we can keep France out of the narrow seas.’

‘If Juana’s son inherits the Hapsburg lands then he will have two kingdoms,’ she indicated. ‘Spain and also the Netherlands.’

‘And your son will have all of England, an alliance with Scotland, and all our lands in France,’ he said, making a sweep with his spread palm. ‘They will be a powerful pair of cousins.’

She smiled at the thought of it, and Henry saw the ambition in her. ‘You would like to have a son who would rule half of Christendom?’

‘What woman would not?’ she said. ‘And my son and Juana’s son could surely defeat the Moors, could drive them back and back beyond the Mediterranean Sea?’

‘Or perhaps you might find a way to live in peace,’ he suggested. ‘Just because one man calls Him Allah, and another calls him God is no reason for believers to be enemies, surely?’

At once Catalina shook her head. ‘It will have to be a war forever, I think. My mother says that it is the great battle between Good and Evil which will go on until the end of time.’

‘Then you will be in danger forever,’ he started, when there was a tap on the great wooden door of the library. It was the page that Henry had sent running, bringing a flustered goldsmith who had been waiting for days to show his work to the king and was rather surprised to be summoned in a moment.

‘Now,’ Henry said to his daughter-in-law, ‘I have a treat for you.’

She looked up at him. ‘Good God,’ he thought. ‘It would be a man of stone who did not want this little flower in his bed. I swear that I could make her smile, and at any rate, I would enjoy trying.’

‘Have you?’

Henry gestured to the man who flapped out a cloth of maroon velvet from his pocket, and then spilled the contents of his knapsack on to the scarlet background. A tumble of jewels, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, chains, lockets, earrings and brooches was swiftly spread before Catalina’s widening gaze.

‘You shall have your pick,’ Henry said, his voice warm and intimate. ‘It is my private gift to you, to bring the smile back to your pretty face.’

She hardly heard him, she was at the table in a moment, the goldsmith holding up one rich item after another. Henry watched her indulgently. So she might be a princess with a pure blood line of Castilian aristocrats, while he was the grandson of a working man; but she was a girl as easily bought as any other. And he had the means to please her.

‘Silver?’ he asked.

She turned a bright face to him. ‘Not silver,’ she said decisively.

Henry remembered that this was a girl who had seen the treasure of the Incas cast at her feet.

‘Gold then?’

‘I do prefer gold.’

‘Pearls?’

She made a little moue with her mouth.

‘My God, she has a kissable mouth,’ he thought. ‘Not pearls?’ he asked aloud.

‘They are not my greatest favourite,’ she confided. She smiled up at him. ‘What is your favourite stone?’

‘Why, she is flirting with me,’ he said to himself, stunned at the thought. ‘She is playing me like she would an indulgent uncle. She is reeling me in like a fish.’

‘Emeralds?’

She smiled again.

‘No. This,’ she said simply.

She had picked out, in a moment, the most expensive thing in the jeweller’s pack, a collar of deepest blue sapphires with a matching pair of earrings. Charmingly, she held the collar against her smooth cheeks so that he could look from the jewels to her eyes. She took a step closer towards him so that he could smell the scent on her hair, orange-blossom water from the gardens of the Alhambra. She smelled as if she were an exotic flower herself. ‘Do they match my eyes?’ she asked him. ‘Are my eyes as blue as sapphires?’

He took a little breath, surprised at the violence of his response. ‘They are. You shall have them,’ he said, almost choking on his desire for her. ‘You shall have this and anything else you like. You shall name your … your … wish.’

The look she threw up at him was of pure delight. ‘And my ladies too?’

‘Call your ladies, they shall have their pick.’

She laughed with pleasure and ran to the door. He let her go. He did not trust himself to stay in the room without chaperones. Hastily, he took himself out into the hall and met his mother, returning from hearing Mass.

He kneeled and she put her fingers on his head in her blessing. ‘My son.’

‘My lady mother.’

He rose to his feet. She quickly took in the flush of his face and his suppressed energy. ‘Has something troubled you?’

‘No!’

She sighed. ‘Is it the queen? Is it Elizabeth?’ she asked wearily. ‘Is she complaining about the Scots’ marriage for Margaret again?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not seen her today.’

‘She will have to accustom herself,’ she said. ‘A princess cannot choose whom she marries and when she leaves home. Elizabeth would know that if she had been properly brought up. But she was not.’

He gave his crooked smile. ‘That is hardly her fault.’

His mother’s disdain was apparent. ‘No good would ever have come from her mother,’ she said shortly. ‘Bad breeding, the Woodvilles.’

Henry shrugged and said nothing. He never defended his wife to his mother – her malice was so constant and so impenetrable that it was a waste of time to try to change her mind. He never defended his mother to his wife; he never had to. Queen Elizabeth never commented on her difficult mother-in-law or her demanding husband. She took him, his mother, his autocratic rule, as if they were natural hazards, as unpleasant and as inevitable as bad weather.

‘You should not let her disturb you,’ his mother said.

‘She has never disturbed me,’ he said, thinking of the princess who did.

I am certain now that the king likes me, above all his daughters, and I am so glad of it. I am used to being the favourite daughter, the baby of the family. I like it when I am the favourite of the king, I like to feel special.

When he saw that I was sad at my court going back to Spain and leaving me in England he spent the afternoon with me, showing me his library, talking about his maps, and finally, giving me an exquisite collar of sapphires. He let me pick out exactly what I wanted from the goldsmith’s pack, and he said that the sapphires were the colour of my eyes.

I did not like him very well at first, but I am becoming accustomed to his abrupt speech and his quick ways. He is a man whose word is law in this court and in this land and he owes thanks to no-one for anything, except perhaps his Lady Mother. He has no close friends, no intimates but her and the soldiers who fought with him, who are now the great men of his court. He is not tender to his wife nor warm to his daughters, but I like it that he attends to me. Perhaps I will come to love him as a daughter. Already I am glad when he singles me out. In a court such as this, which revolves around his approval, it makes me feel like a princess indeed when he praises me, or spends time with me.

If it were not for him then I think I would be even more lonely than I am. The prince my husband treats me as if I were a table or a chair. He never speaks to me, he never smiles at me, he never starts a conversation, it is all he can do to find a reply. I think I was a fool when I thought he looked like a troubadour. He looks like a milksop and that is the truth. He never raises his voice above a whisper, he never says anything of any interest. He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they? We live as strangers and if he did not come to my bedchamber at night, once a week as if on duty, I would not know I was married at all.

I show the sapphires to his sister, the Princess Margaret, and she is eaten up with jealousy. I shall have to confess to the sin of vanity and of pride. It is not right for me to flaunt them before her; but if she had ever been kind to me by word or deed then I would not have showed her. I want her to know that her father values me, even if she and her grandmother and her brother do not. But now all I have done is upset her and put myself in the wrong, and I will have to confess and make a penance.

Worst of all, I did not behave with the dignity that a princess of Spain should always show. If she were not such a fishwife’s apprentice then I could have been better. This court dances around the king as if nothing matters more in the world than his favour, and I should know better than to join in. At the very least I should not be measuring myself against a girl four years younger than me and only a princess of England, even if she calls herself Queen of Scotland at every opportunity.

The young Prince and Princess of Wales finished their visit to Richmond and started to make their own royal household in Baynard’s Castle. Catalina had her rooms at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens and the river, with her household, her Spanish ladies, her Spanish chaplain, and duenna, and Arthur’s rooms overlooked the City, with his household, his chaplain, and his tutor. They met formally only once a day for dinner, when the two households sat at opposite sides of the hall and stared at each other with mutual suspicion, more like enemies in the middle of a forced truce than members of a united home.

The castle was run according to the commands of Lady Margaret, the king’s mother. The feast days and fast days, the entertainments and the daily timetable were all commanded by her. Even the nights when Arthur was to visit his wife in her bedchamber had been appointed by her. She did not want the young people becoming exhausted, nor did she want them neglecting their duties. So once a week the prince’s household and friends solemnly escorted him to the princess’s rooms and left him there overnight. For both young people the experience was an ordeal of embarrassment. Arthur became no more skilled, Catalina endured his silent determination as politely as she could. But then, one day in early December, Catalina’s monthly course started and she told Dona Elvira. The duenna at once told the prince’s groom of the bedchamber that the prince could not come to the Infanta’s bed for a week; the Infanta was indisposed. Within half an hour, everyone from the king at Whitehall to the spit boy at Baynard’s Castle knew that the Princess of Wales was having her course and so no child had yet been conceived; and everyone from the king to the spit boy wondered, since the girl was lusty and strong and since she was bleeding – obviously fertile – if Arthur was capable of doing his side of their duty.

In the middle of December, when the court was preparing for the great twelve-day feast of Christmas, Arthur was summoned by his father and ordered to prepare to leave for his castle at Ludlow.

‘I suppose you’ll want to take your wife with you,’ the king said, smiling at his son in an effort to seem unconcerned.

‘As you wish, sir,’ Arthur replied carefully.

‘What would you wish?’

After enduring a week’s ban from Catalina’s bed, with everyone remarking among themselves that no child had been made – but to be sure, it was early days yet, and it might be nobody’s fault – Arthur felt embarrassed and discouraged. He had not gone back to her bedroom and she had sent no message to invite him. He could not expect an invitation – he knew that was ridiculous – a princess of Spain could hardly send for the prince of England; but she had not smiled or encouraged him in any way at all. He had received no message to tell him to resume his visits, and he had no idea how long these mysteries usually took. There was no-one that he could ask, and he did not know what he should do.

‘She does not seem very merry,’ Arthur observed.

‘She’s homesick,’ his father said briskly. ‘It’s up to you to divert her. Take her to Ludlow with you. Buy her things. She’s a girl like any other. Praise her beauty. Tell her jokes. Flirt with her.’

Arthur looked quite blank. ‘In Latin?’

His father barked his harsh laugh. ‘Lad. You can do it in Welsh if your eyes are smiling and your cock is hard. She’ll know what you mean. I swear it. She’s a girl who knows well enough what a man means.’

There was no answering brightness from his son. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘If you don’t want her with you, you’re not obliged to take her this year, you know. You were supposed to marry and then spend the first year apart.’

‘That was when I was fourteen.’

‘Only a year ago.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘So you do want her with you?’

His son flushed. The father regarded the boy with sympathy. ‘You want her, but you are afraid she will make a fool of you?’ he suggested.

The blond head drooped, nodded.

‘And you think if you and she are far from court and from me, then she will be able to torment you.’

Another small nod. ‘And all her ladies. And her duenna.’

‘And time will hang heavy on your hands.’

The boy looked up, his face a picture of misery.

‘And she will be bored and sulky and she will make your little court at Ludlow a miserable prison for both of you.’

‘If she dislikes me …’ he started, his voice very low.

Henry rested a heavy hand on his boy’s shoulder. ‘Oh, my son. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps your mother was not my choice, perhaps I was not hers. When a throne is involved the heart comes in second place if it ever matters at all. She knows what she has to do; and that is all that counts.’

‘Oh, she knows all about it!’ the boy burst out resentfully. ‘She has no …’

His father waited. ‘No … what?’

‘No shame at all.’

Henry caught his breath. ‘She is shameless? She is passionate?’ He tried to keep the desire from his voice, a sudden lascivious picture of his daughter-in-law, naked and shameless, in his mind.

‘No! She goes at it like a man harnessing a horse,’ Arthur said miserably. ‘A task to be done.’

Henry choked down a laugh. ‘But at least she does it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to beg her, or persuade her. She knows what she has to do?’

Arthur turned from him to the window and looked out of the arrow slit to the cold river Thames below. ‘I don’t think she likes me. She only likes her Spanish friends, and Mary, and perhaps Henry. I see her laughing with them and dancing with them as if she were very merry in their company. She chatters away with her own people, she is courteous to everyone who passes by. She has a smile for everyone. I hardly ever see her, and I don’t want to see her, either.’

Henry dropped his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘My boy, she doesn’t know what she thinks of you,’ he assured him. ‘She’s too busy in her own little world of dresses and jewels and those damned gossipy Spanish women. The sooner you and she are alone together, the sooner you two will come to terms. You can take her with you to Ludlow and you can get acquainted.’

The boy nodded, but he did not look convinced. ‘If it is your wish, sire,’ he said formally.

‘Shall I ask her if she wants to go?’

The colour flooded into the young man’s cheeks. ‘What if she says no?’ he asked anxiously.

His father laughed. ‘She won’t,’ he promised. ‘You’ll see.’

Henry was right. Catalina was too much of a princess to say either yes or no to a king. When he asked her if she would like to go to Ludlow with the prince she said that she would do whatever the king wished.

‘Is Lady Margaret Pole still at the castle?’ she asked, her voice a little nervous.

He scowled at her. Lady Margaret was now safely married to Sir Richard Pole, one of the solid Tudor warhorses, and warden of Ludlow Castle. But Lady Margaret had been born Margaret Plantagenet, beloved daughter of the Duke of Clarence, cousin to King Edward and sister to Edward of Warwick whose claim to the throne had been so much greater than Henry’s own.

‘What of it?’

‘Nothing,’ she said hastily.

‘You have no cause to avoid her,’ he said gruffly. ‘What was done, was done in my name, by my order. You don’t bear any blame for it.’

She flushed as if they were talking of something shameful. ‘I know.’

‘I can’t have anyone challenging my right to the throne,’ he said abruptly. ‘There are too many of them, Yorks and Beauforts, and Lancasters too, and endless others who fancy their chances as pretenders. You don’t know this country. We’re all married and intermarried like so many coneys in a warren.’ He paused to see if she would laugh, but she was frowning, following his rapid French. ‘I can’t have anyone claiming by their pretended right what I have won by conquest,’ he said. ‘And I won’t have anyone else claiming by conquest either.’

‘I thought you were the true king,’ Catalina said hesitantly.

‘I am now,’ said Henry Tudor bluntly. ‘And that’s all that matters.’

‘You were anointed.’

‘I am now,’ repeated with a grim smile.

‘But you are of the royal line?’

‘I have royal blood in my veins,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘No need to measure how much or how little. I picked up my crown off the battlefield, literally, it was at my feet in the mud. So I knew; everyone knew – everyone saw God give me the victory because I was his chosen king. The archbishop anointed me because he knew that too. I am as much king as any in Christendom, and more than most because I did not just inherit as a baby, the fruit of another man’s struggle – God gave me my kingdom when I was a man. It is my just desert.’

‘But you had to claim it …’

‘I claimed my own,’ he said finally. ‘I won my own. God gave my own to me. That’s an end to it.’

She bowed her head to the energy in his words. ‘I know, sire.’

Her submissiveness, and the pride that was hidden behind it, fascinated him. He thought that there had never been a young woman whose smooth face could hide her thoughts like this one.

‘D’you want to stay here with me?’ Henry asked softly, knowing that he should not ask her such a thing, praying, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, that she would say ‘no’ and silence his secret desire for her.

‘Why, I wish whatever Your Majesty wishes,’ she said coolly.

‘I suppose you want to be with Arthur?’ he asked, daring her to deny it.

‘As you wish, sire,’ she said steadily.

‘Tell me! Would you like to go to Ludlow with Arthur, or would you rather stay here with me?’

She smiled faintly, and would not be drawn. ‘You are the king,’ she said quietly. ‘I must do whatever you command.’

Henry knew he should not keep her at court beside him but he could not resist playing with the idea. He consulted her Spanish advisors, and found them hopelessly divided and squabbling among themselves. The Spanish ambassador, who had worked so hard to deliver the intractable marriage contract, insisted that the princess should go with her new husband, and that she should be seen to be a married woman in every way. Her confessor, who alone of all of them seemed to have a tenderness for the little princess, urged that the young couple should be allowed to stay together. Her duenna, the formidable and difficult Dona Elvira, preferred not to leave London. She had heard that Wales was a hundred miles away, a mountainous and rocky land. If Catalina stayed in Baynard’s Castle and the household was rid of Arthur, then they would make a little Spanish enclave in the heart of the City, and the duenna’s power would be unchallenged, she would rule the princess and the little Spanish court.

The queen volunteered her opinion that Catalina would find Ludlow too cold and lonely in mid-December and suggested that perhaps the young couple could stay together in London until spring.

‘You just hope to keep Arthur with you, but he has to go,’ Henry said brusquely to her. ‘He has to learn the business of kingship and there is no better way to learn to rule England than to rule the Principality.’

‘He’s still young, and he is shy with her.’

‘He has to learn to be a husband too.’

‘They will have to learn to deal together.’

‘Better that they learn in private then.’

In the end, it was the king’s mother who gave the decisive advice. ‘Send her,’ she said to her son. ‘We need a child off her. She won’t make one on her own in London. Send her with Arthur to Ludlow.’ She laughed shortly. ‘God knows, they’ll have nothing else to do there.’

‘Elizabeth is afraid that she will be sad and lonely,’ the king remarked. ‘And Arthur is afraid that they will not deal well together.’

‘Who cares?’ his mother asked. ‘What difference does that make? They are married and they have to live together and make an heir.’

He shot her a swift smile. ‘She is only just sixteen,’ he said, ‘and the baby of her family, still missing her mother. You don’t make any allowances for her youth, do you?’

‘I was married at twelve years old, and gave birth to you in the same year,’ she returned. ‘No-one made any allowances for me. And yet I survived.’

‘I doubt you were happy.’

‘I was not. I doubt that she is. But that, surely, is the last thing that matters?’

Dona Elvira told me that I must refuse to go to Ludlow. Father Geraldini said that it was my duty to go with my husband. Dr de Puebla said that for certain my mother would want me to live with my husband, to do everything to show that the marriage is complete in word and deed. Arthur, the hopeless beanpole, said nothing, and his father seems to want me to decide; but he is a king and I don’t trust him.

All I really want to do is to go home to Spain. Whether we are in London or whether we live in Ludlow it will be cold, and it will rain all the time, the very air feels wet, I cannot get anything good to eat, and I cannot understand a word anybody says.

I know I am Princess of Wales and I will be Queen of England. That is true, and it will be true. But, this day, I cannot feel very glad about it.

‘We are to go to my castle at Ludlow,’ Arthur remarked awkwardly to Catalina. They were seated side by side at dinner, the hall below them, the gallery above and the wide doors crowded with people who had come from the City for the free entertainment of watching the court dine. Most people were observing the Prince of Wales and his young bride.

She bowed her head but did not look at him. ‘Is it your father’s command?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I shall be happy to go,’ she said.

‘We will be alone, but for the warden of the castle and his wife,’ Arthur went on. He wanted to say that he hoped she would not mind, that he hoped she would not be bored, or sad or – worst of all – angry with him.

She looked at him without a smile. ‘And so?’

‘I hope you will be content,’ he stumbled.

‘Whatever your father wishes,’ she said steadily, as if to remind him that they were merely prince and princess and had no rights and no power at all.

He cleared his throat. ‘I shall come to your room tonight,’ he asserted.

She gave him a look from eyes as blue and hard as the sapphires around her neck. ‘Whatever you wish,’ she said in the same neutral tone.

He came when she was in bed and Dona Elvira admitted him to the room, her face like a stone, disapproval in every gesture. Catalina sat up in bed and watched as his groom of the bedchamber took his gown from his shoulders and went quietly out, closing the door behind him.

‘Wine?’ Arthur asked. He was afraid his voice quavered slightly.

‘No, thank you,’ she said.

Awkwardly the young man came to the bed, turned back the sheets, got in beside her. She turned to look at him, and he knew he was blushing beneath her inquiring gaze. He blew out the candle so she could not see his discomfort. A little torchlight from the guard outside flickered through the slats of the shutters, and then was gone as the guard moved on. Arthur felt the bed move as she lay back and pulled her nightdress out of the way. He felt as if he were a thing to her, an object of no importance, something she had to endure in order to be Queen of England.

He threw back the covers and jumped from the bed. ‘I’m not staying here. I’m going to my room,’ he said tersely.

‘What?’

‘I shan’t stay here. I’m not wanted …’

‘Not wanted? I never said you were not …’

‘It is obvious. The way you look …’

‘It’s pitch black! How d’you know how I look? And anyway, you look as if someone forced you here!’

‘I? It isn’t me who sent a message that half the court heard, that I was not to come to your bed.’

He heard her gasp. ‘I did not say you were not to come. I had to tell them to tell you …’ She broke off in embarrassment. ‘It was my time … you had to know …’

‘Your duenna told my steward that I was not to come to your bed. How do you think that made me feel? How d’you think that looked to everyone?’

‘How else was I to tell you?’ she demanded.

‘Tell me yourself!’ he raged. ‘Don’t tell everyone else in the world.’

‘How could I? How could I say such a thing? I should be so embarrassed!’

‘Instead it is me who is made to look a fool!’

Catalina slipped out of bed and steadied herself, holding the tall carved bedpost. ‘My lord, I apologise if I have offended you, I don’t know how such things are done here … In future I will do as you wish …’

He said nothing.

She waited.

‘I’m going,’ he said and went to hammer on the door for his groom to come to him.

‘Don’t!’ The cry was forced out of her.

‘What?’ He turned.

‘Everyone will know,’ she said desperately. ‘Know that there is something wrong between us. Everyone will know that you have just come to me. If you leave at once, everyone will think …’

‘I won’t stay here!’ he shouted.

Her pride rushed up. ‘You will shame us both!’ she cried out. ‘What do you want people to think? That I disgust you, or that you are impotent?’

‘Why not? If both are true?’ He hammered on the door even louder.

She gasped in horror and fell back against the bedpost.

‘Your Grace?’ came a shout from the outer chamber and the door opened to reveal the groom of the bedchamber and a couple of pages, and behind them Dona Elvira and a lady-in-waiting.

Catalina stalked over to the window and turned her back to the room. Uncertainly, Arthur hesitated, glancing back at her for help, for some indication that he could stay after all.

‘For shame!’ Dona Elvira exclaimed, pushing past Arthur and running to throw a gown around Catalina’s shoulders. Once the woman was standing with her arm around Catalina, glaring at him, Arthur could not return to his bride; he stepped over the threshold and went to his own rooms.

I cannot bear him. I cannot bear this country. I cannot live here for the rest of my life. That he should say that I disgust him! That he should dare to speak to me so! Has he run mad like one of their filthy dogs that pant everywhere? Has he forgotten who I am? Has he forgotten himself?

I am so furious with him I should like to take a scimitar and slice his stupid head off. If he thought for a moment he would have known that everyone in the palace, everyone in London, probably everyone in this gross country, will laugh at us. They will say I am ugly and that I cannot please him.

I am crying with temper, it’s not grief. I tuck my head into the pillow of my bed, so that no-one can hear me and tell everyone else that the princess cried herself to sleep because her husband would not bed her. I am choking on tears and temper, I am so angry with him.

After a little while I stop, I wipe my face, I sit up. I am a princess by birth and by marriage, I should not give way. I shall have some dignity even if he has none. He is a young man, a young English man at that – how should he know how to behave? I think of my home in the moonlight, of how the walls and the tracery gleam white and the yellow stone is bleached to cream. That is a palace, where people know how to behave with grace and dignity. I wish with all my heart that I was still there.

I remember that I used to watch a big yellow moon reflected in the water of the sultana’s garden. Like a fool, I used to dream of being married.

Oxford, Christmas 1501

They set off a few days before Christmas. Resolutely, they spoke to each other in public with utter courtesy, and ignored each other completely when no-one was watching. The queen had asked that they might at least stay for the twelve-day feast but My Lady the King’s Mother had ruled that they should take their Christmas at Oxford, it would give the country a chance to see the prince and the new Princess of Wales, and what the king’s mother said was law.

Catalina travelled by litter, jolted mercilessly over the frozen roads, her mules foundering in the fords, chilled to the bone however many rugs and furs they packed around her. The king’s mother had ruled that she should not ride for fear of a fall. The unspoken hope was that Catalina was carrying a child. Catalina herself said nothing to confirm or deny the hope. Arthur was silence itself.

They had separate rooms on the road to Oxford, and separate rooms at Magdalene College when they arrived. The choristers were ready, the kitchens were ready, the extraordinarily rich hospitality of Oxford was ready to make merry; but the Prince and Princess of Wales were as cold and as dull as the weather.

They dined together, seated at the great table facing down the hall, and as many of the citizens of Oxford who could get into the gallery took their seats and watched the princess put small morsels of food in her mouth, and turn her shoulder to her husband, while he looked around the hall for companions and conversation, as if he were dining alone.

They brought in dancers and tumblers, mummers and players. The princess smiled very pleasantly but never laughed, gave small purses of Spanish coins to all the entertainers, thanked them for their attendance; but never once turned to her husband to ask him if he was enjoying the evening. The prince walked around the room, affable and pleasant to the great men of the city. He spoke in English, all the time, and his Spanish-speaking bride had to wait for someone to talk to her in French or Latin, if they would. Instead, they clustered around the prince and chatted and joked and laughed, almost as if they were laughing at her, and did not want her to understand the jest. The princess sat alone, stiffly on her hard, carved wooden chair, her head held high and a small, defiant smile on her lips.

At last it was midnight and the long evening could end. Catalina rose from her seat and watched the court sink into bows and curtseys. She dropped a low Spanish curtsey to her husband, her duenna behind her with a face like flint. ‘I bid you goodnight, Your Grace,’ said the princess in Latin, her voice clear, her accent perfect.

‘I shall come to your room,’ he said. There was a little murmur of approval; the court wanted a lusty prince.

The colour rose in her cheeks at the very public announcement. There was nothing she could say. She could not refuse him; but the way she rose and left the room did not promise him a warm welcome when they were alone. Her ladies dipped their curtseys and followed her in a little offended flurry, swishing off like a many-coloured veil trailing behind her. The court smiled behind their hands at the high spirits of the bride.

Arthur came to her half an hour later, fired up by drink and resentment. He found her still dressed, waiting by the fire, her duenna at her side, her room ablaze with candles, her ladies still talking and playing cards as if it were the middle of the afternoon. Clearly, she was not a young woman on her way to bed.

‘Sire, good evening,’ she said and rose and curtseyed as he entered.

Arthur had to check his backwards step, in retreat at the first encounter. He was ready for bed, in his nightgown with only a robe thrown over his shoulders. He was acutely aware of his bare feet and vulnerable toes. Catalina blazed in her evening finery. The ladies all turned and looked at him, their faces unfriendly. He was acutely conscious of his nightgown and his bare legs and a chuckle of barely suppressed laughter from one of his men behind him.

‘I expected you to be in bed,’ he said.

‘Of course, I can go to bed,’ she returned with glacial courtesy. ‘I was about to go to bed. It is very late. But when you announced so publicly that you would visit me in my rooms I thought you must be planning to bring all the court with you. I thought you were telling everyone to come to my rooms. Why else announce it at the top of your voice so that everybody could hear?’

‘I did not announce it at the top of my voice!’

She raised an eyebrow in wordless contradiction.

‘I shall stay the night,’ he said stubbornly. He marched to her bedroom door. ‘These ladies can go to their beds, it is late.’He nodded to his men. ‘Leave us.’ He went into her room and closed the door behind him.

She followed him and closed the door behind her, shutting out the bright, scandalised faces of the ladies. Her back to the door, she watched him throw off his robe and nightgown so he was naked, and climb into her bed. He plumped up the pillows and leaned back, his arms crossed against his narrow bare chest, like a man awaiting an entertainment.

It was her turn to be discomforted. ‘Your Grace …’

‘You had better get undressed,’ he taunted her. ‘As you say, it’s very late.’

She turned one way, and then the other. ‘I shall send for Dona Elvira.’

‘Do. And send for whoever else undresses you. Don’t mind me, please.’

Catalina bit her lip. He could see her uncertainty. She could not bear to be stripped naked in front of him. She turned and went out of the bedchamber.

There was a rattle of irritable Spanish from the room next door. Arthur grinned, he guessed that she was clearing the room of her ladies and undressing out there. When she came back, he saw that he was right. She was wearing a white gown trimmed with exquisite lace and her hair was in a long plait down her back. She looked more like a little girl than the haughty princess she had been only moments before, and he felt his desire rise up with some other feeling: a tenderness.

She glanced at him, her face unfriendly. ‘I will have to say my prayers,’ she said. She went to the prie-dieu and kneeled before it. He watched her bow her head over her clasped hands and start to whisper. For the first time his irritation left him, and he thought how hard it must be for her. Surely, his unease and fear must be nothing to hers: alone in a strange land, at the beck and call of a boy a few months younger than her, with no real friends and no family, far away from everything and everyone she knew.

The bed was warm. The wine he had drunk to give him courage now made him feel sleepy. He leaned back on the pillow. Her prayers were taking a long time but it was good for a man to have a spiritual wife. He closed his eyes on the thought. When she came to bed he thought he would take her with confidence but with gentleness. It was Christmas, he should be kind to her. She was probably lonely and afraid. He should be generous. He thought warmly of how loving he would be to her, and how grateful she would be. Perhaps they would learn to give each other pleasure, perhaps he would make her happy. His breathing deepened, he gave a tiny little snuffly snore. He slept.

Catalina looked around from her prayers and smiled in pure triumph. Then, absolutely silently, she crept into bed beside him and, carefully arranging herself so that not even the hem of her nightgown could touch him, she composed herself for sleep.

You thought to embarrass me before my women, before all the court. You thought you could shame me and triumph over me. But I am a princess of Spain and I have known things and seen things that you, in this safe little country, in this smug little haven, would never dream of. I am the Infanta, I am the daughter of the two most powerful monarchs in the whole of Christendom who alone have defeated the greatest threat ever to march against it. For seven hundred years the Moors have occupied Spain, an empire mightier than that of the Romans, and who drove them out? My mother! My father! So you needn’t think I am afraid of you – you rose-petal prince, or whatever they call you. I shall never stoop to do anything that a princess of Spain should not do. I shall never be petty or spiteful. But if you challenge me, I shall defeat you.

Arthur did not speak to her in the morning, his boy’s high pride was utterly cut to the quick. She had shamed him at his father’s court by denying him her rooms, and now she had shamed him in private. He felt that she had trapped him, made a fool of him, and was even now laughing at him. He rose up and went out in sullen silence. He went to Mass and did not meet her eyes, he went hunting and was gone all day. He did not speak to her at night. They watched a play, seated side by side, and not one word was exchanged all evening. A whole week they stayed at Oxford and they did not say more than a dozen words to each other every day. He swore a private bitter oath to himself that he would never, ever speak to her again. He would get a child on her, if he could, he would humiliate her in every way that he could, but he would never say one direct word to her, and he would never, never, never sleep again in her bed.

When the morning came for them to move on to Ludlow the sky was grey with clouds, fat-bellied with snow. Catalina came out of the doorway of the college and recoiled as the icy, damp air hit her in the face. Arthur ignored her.

She stepped out into the yard where the train was all drawn up and waiting for her. She hesitated before the litter. It struck him that she was like a prisoner, hesitating before a cart. She could not choose.

‘Will it not be very cold?’ she asked.

He turned a hard face to her. ‘You will have to get used to the cold, you’re not in Spain now.’

‘So I see.’

She drew back the curtains of the litter. Inside there were rugs for her to wrap around herself and cushions for her to rest on, but it did not look very cosy.

‘It gets far worse than this,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Far colder, it rains or sleets or snows, and it gets darker. In February we have only a couple of hours of daylight at best, and then there are the freezing fogs which turn day into night so it is forever grey.’

She turned and looked up at him. ‘Could we not set out another day?’

‘You agreed to come,’ he taunted her. ‘I would have been happy to leave you at Greenwich.’

‘I did as I was told.’

‘So here we are. Travelling on as we have been ordered to do.’

‘At least you can move about and keep warm,’ she said plaintively. ‘Can I not ride?’

‘My Lady the King’s Mother said you could not.’

She made a little face but she did not argue.

‘It’s your choice. Shall I leave you here?’ he asked briskly, as if he had little time for these uncertainties.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not,’ and climbed into the litter and pulled the rugs over her feet and up around her shoulders.

Arthur led the way out of Oxford, bowing and smiling at the people who had turned out to cheer him. Catalina drew the curtains of her litter against the cold wind and the curious stares, and would not show her face.

They stopped for dinner at a great house on the way and Arthur went in to dine without even waiting to help her from the litter. The lady of the house, flustered, went out to the litter and found Catalina stumbling out, white-faced and with red eyes.

‘Princess, are you all right?’ the woman asked her.

‘I am cold,’ Catalina said miserably. ‘I am freezing cold. I think I have never been so cold.’

She hardly ate any dinner, they could not make her take any wine. She looked ready to drop with exhaustion; but as soon as they had eaten Arthur wanted to push on, they had twenty more miles to go before the early dusk of winter.

‘Can’t you refuse?’ Maria de Salinas asked her in a quick whisper.

‘No,’ the princess said. She rose from her seat without another word. But when they opened the great wooden door to go out into the courtyard, small flakes of snow swirled in around them.

‘We cannot travel in this, it will soon be dark and we shall lose the road!’ Catalina exclaimed.

‘I shall not lose the road,’ Arthur said, and strode out to his horse. ‘You shall follow me.’

The lady of the house sent a servant flying for a heated stone to put in the litter at Catalina’s feet. The princess climbed in, hunched the rugs around her shoulders, and tucked her hands in deep.

‘I am sure that he is impatient to get you to Ludlow to show you his castle,’ the woman said, trying to put the best aspect on a miserable situation.

‘He is impatient to show me nothing but neglect,’ Catalina snapped; but she took care to say it in Spanish.

They left the warmth and lights of the great house and heard the doors bang behind them as they turned the horses’ heads to the west, and to the white sun which was sinking low on the horizon. It was two hours past noon but the sky was so filled with snow clouds that there was an eerie grey glow over the rolling landscape. The road snaked ahead of them, brown tracks against brown fields, both of them bleaching to whiteness under the haze of swirling snow. Arthur rode ahead, singing merrily, Catalina’s litter laboured along behind. At every step the mules threw the litter to one side and then the other, she had to keep a hand on the edge to hold herself in place, and her fingers became chilled and then cramped, blue from cold. The curtains kept out the worst of the snowflakes but not the insistent, penetrating draughts. If she drew back a corner to look out at the country she saw a whirl of whiteness as the snowflakes danced and circled the road, the sky seeming greyer every moment.

The sun set white in a white sky and the world grew more shadowy. Snow and clouds closed down around the little cavalcade which wound its way across a white land under a grey sky.

Arthur’s horse cantered ahead, the prince riding easily in the saddle, one gloved hand on the reins, the other on his whip. He had stout woollen undergarments under his thick leather jerkin and soft, warm leather boots. Catalina watched him ride forwards. She was too cold and too miserable even to resent him. More than anything else she wished he would ride back to tell her that the journey was nearly over, that they were there.

An hour passed, the mules walked down the road, their heads bowed low against the wind that whirled flakes around their ears and into the litter. The snow was getting thicker now, filling the air and drifting into the ruts of the lane. Catalina had hunched up under the covers, lying like a child, the rapidly cooling stone at her belly, her knees drawn up, her cold hands tucked in, her face ducked down, buried in the furs and rugs. Her feet were freezing cold, there was a gap in the rugs at her back and now and then she shivered at a fresh draught of icy air.

All around, outside the litter, she could hear men chattering and laughing about the cold, swearing that they would eat well when the train got into Burford. Their voices seemed to come from far away; Catalina drifted into a sleep from coldness and exhaustion.

Groggily, she woke when the litter bumped down to the ground and the curtains were swept back. A wave of icy air washed over her and she ducked her head down and cried out in discomfort.

‘Infanta?’ Dona Elvira asked. The duenna had been riding her mule, the exercise had kept her warm. ‘Infanta? Thank God, at last we are here.’

Catalina would not lift her head.

‘Infanta, they are waiting to greet you.’

Still Catalina would not look up.

‘What’s this?’ It was Arthur’s voice, he had seen the litter put down and the duenna bending over it. He saw that the heap of rugs made no movement. For a moment, with a pang of dismay, he thought that the princess might have been taken ill. Maria de Salinas gave him a reproachful look. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘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.’

He reached his hand out to her. ‘Can I comfort you?’

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

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

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

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

Ludlow Castle, January 1502

The winter sun was low and red over the rounded hills as they rattled through the great gate that pierced the stone wall around Ludlow. Arthur, who had been riding beside the litter, shouted to Catalina over the noise of the hooves on the cobbles. ‘This is Ludlow, at last!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At once he was aghast. ‘Did you expect more? What were you expecting?’

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

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

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