Catalina


P.S. 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 mapmakers,” 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 onto 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 bloodline of Castilian aristocrats, while he was the grandson of a workingman; 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 favorite,” she confided. She smiled up at him. “What is your favorite 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 jeweler’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.