they would rather have been together. Ludlow Castle was a small reproduction of the formality of the king’s court. The king’s mother had commanded that after breakfast Arthur must work with his tutor at his books or at sports as the weather allowed; and Catalina must work with her tutor, sew, or read, or walk in the garden.
‘A garden!’ Catalina whispered under her breath in the little patch of green with the sodden turf bench on one side of a thin border, set in the corner of the castle walls. ‘I wonder if she has ever seen a real garden?’
In the afternoon they might ride out together to hunt in the woods around the castle. It was a rich countryside, the river fast-flowing through a wide valley with old thick woodlands on the sides of the hills. Catalina thought she would grow to love the pasture lands around the River Teme and, on the horizon, the way the darkness of the hills gave way to the sky. But in the mid-winter weather it was a landscape of grey and white, only the frost or the snow bringing brightness to the blackness of the cold woods. The weather was often too bad for the princess to go out at all. She hated the damp fog or when it drizzled with icy sleet. Arthur often rode alone.
‘Even if I stayed behind I would not be allowed to be with you,’ he said mournfully. ‘My grandmother would have set me something else to do.’
‘So go!’ she said, smiling, though it seemed a long, long time until dinner and she had nothing to do but to wait for the hunt to come home.
They went out into the town once a week, to go to St Laurence’s Church for Mass, or to visit the little chapel by the castle wall, to attend a dinner organised by one of the great guilds, or to see a cockfight, a bull baiting, or players. Catalina was impressed by the neat prettiness of the town; the place had escaped the violence of the wars between York and Lancaster that had finally been ended by Henry Tudor.
‘Peace is everything to a kingdom,’ she observed to Arthur.
‘The only thing that can threaten us now is the Scots,’ he said. ‘The Yorkist line are my forebears, the Lancasters too, so the rivalry ends with me. All we have to do is keep the north safe.’
‘And your father thinks he has done that with Princess Margaret’s marriage?’
‘Pray God he is right, but they are a faithless lot. When I am king I shall keep the border strong. You shall advise me, we’ll go out together and make sure the border castles are repaired.’
‘I shall like that,’ she said.
‘Of course, you spent your childhood with an army fighting for border lands, you would know better than I what to look for.’
She smiled. ‘I am glad it is a skill of mine that you can use. My father always complained that my mother was making Amazons, not princesses.’
They dined together at dusk, and thankfully, dusk came very early on those cold winter nights. At last they could be close, seated side by side at the high table looking down the hall of the castle, the great hearth heaped with logs on the side wall. Arthur always put Catalina on his left, closest to the fire, and she wore a cloak lined with fur, and had layer upon layer of linen shifts under her ornate gown. Even so, she was still cold when she came down the icy stairs from her warm rooms to the smoky hall. Her Spanish ladies, Maria de Salinas, her duenna Dona Elvira and a few others, were seated at one table, the English ladies who were supposed to be her companions at another and her retinue of Spanish servants were seated at another. The great lords of Arthur’s council, his chamberlain, Sir Richard Pole, warden of the castle, Bishop William Smith of Lincoln, his physician, Dr Bereworth, his treasurer Sir Henry Vernon, the steward of his household, Sir Richard Croft, his groom of the privy chamber, Sir William Thomas of Carmarthen, and all the leading men of the Principality, were seated in the body of the hall. At the back and in the gallery every nosy parker, every busybody in Wales could pile in to see the Spanish princess take her dinner, and speculate if she pleased the young prince or no.
There was no way to tell. Most of them thought that he had failed to bed her. For see! The Infanta sat like a stiff little doll and rarely leaned towards her young husband. The Prince of Wales spoke to her as if by rote, every ten minutes. They were little patterns of good behaviour, and they scarcely even looked at each other. The gossips said that he went to her rooms, as ordered, but only once a week and never of his own choice. Perhaps the young couple did not please each other. They were young, perhaps too young for marriage.
No-one could tell that Catalina’s hands were gripped tight in her lap to stop herself from touching her husband, nor that every half-hour or so he glanced at her, apparently indifferent, and whispered so low that only she could hear: ‘I want you right now.’
After dinner there would be dancing and perhaps mummers or a storyteller, a Welsh bard or strolling players to watch. Sometimes the poets would come in from the high hills and tell old, strange tales in their own tongue that Arthur could follow only with difficulty, but which he would try to translate for Catalina.
‘When the long yellow summer comes and victory comes to us,And the spreading of the sails of Brittany,And when the heat comes and when the fever is kindledThere are portents that victory will be given to us.’
‘What is that about?’ she asked him.
‘The long yellow summer is when my father decided to invade from Brittany. His road took him to Bosworth and victory.’
She nodded.
‘It was hot, that year, and the troops came with the Sweat, a new disease, which now curses England as it does Europe with the heat of every summer.’
She nodded again. A new poet came forwards, played a chord on his harp and sang.
‘And this?’
‘It’s about a red dragon that flies over the Principality,’ he said. ‘It kills the boar.’
‘What does it mean?’ Catalina asked.
‘The dragon is the Tudors: us,’ he said. ‘You’ll have seen the red dragon on our standard. The boar is the usurper, Richard. It’s a compliment to my father, based on an old tale. All their songs are ancient songs. They probably sang them in the ark.’ He grinned. ‘Songs of Noah.’
‘Do they give you Tudors credit for surviving the flood? Was Noah a Tudor?’
‘Probably. My grandmother would take credit for the Garden of Eden itself,’ he returned. ‘This is the Welsh border, we come from Owen ap Tudor, from Glendower, we are happy to take the credit for everything.’
As Arthur predicted, when the fire burned low they would sing the old Welsh songs of magical doings in dark woods that no man could know. And they would tell of battles and glorious victories won by skill and courage. In their strange tongue they would tell stories of Arthur and Camelot, and Merlin the prince, and Guinevere: the queen who betrayed her husband for a guilty love.
‘I should die if you took a lover,’ he whispered to her as a page shielded them from the hall and poured wine.
‘I can never even see anyone else when you are here,’ she assured him. ‘All I see is you.’
Every evening there was music or some entertainment for the Ludlow court. The king’s mother had ruled that the prince should keep a merry house – it was a reward for the loyalty of Wales that had put her son Henry Tudor on an uncertain throne. Her grandson must pay the men who had come
