as my mother and father did in Spain. We can decide how it is to be, and we can make it happen.’
‘Camelot,’ he said simply.
‘Camelot,’ she repeated.
It snowed for a sennight in February, and then came a thaw and the snow turned to slush and now it is raining again. I cannot walk in the garden, nor go out on a horse, nor even ride out into the town by mule. I have never seen such rain in my life before. It is not like our rain that falls on the hot earth and yields a rich, warm smell as the dust is laid and the plants drink up the water. But this is cold rain on cold earth, and there is no perfume and only standing pools of water with dark ice on it like a cold skin.
I miss my home with an ache of longing in these cold dark days. When I tell Arthur about Spain and the Alhambra it makes me yearn that he should see it for himself, and meet my mother and father. I want them to see him, and know our happiness. I keep wondering if his father would not allow him out of England…but I know I am dreaming. No king would ever let his precious son and heir out of his lands.
Then I start to wonder if I might go home for a short visit on my own. I cannot bear to be without Arthur for even a night, but then I think that unless I go to Spain alone I will never see my mother again, and the thought of that, never feeling the touch of her hand on my hair or seeing her smile at me – I don’t know how I would bear to never see her again.
I am glad and proud to be Princess of Wales and the Queen of England-to-be, but I did not think, I did not realise – I know, how silly this is of me – but I did not quite understand that it would mean that I would live here forever, that I would never come home again. Somehow, although I knew I would be married to the Prince of Wales and one day be Queen of England, I did not fully understand that this would be my home now and forever; and that I may never see my mother or my father or my home again.
I expected at least that we would write, I thought I would hear from her often. But it is as she was with Isabel, with Maria, with Juana; she sends instructions through the ambassador, I have my orders as a princess of Spain. But as a mother to her daughter, I hear from her only rarely.
I don’t know how to bear it. I never thought such a thing could happen. My sister Isabel came home to us after she was widowed, though she married again and had to leave again. And Juana writes to me that she will go home on a visit with her husband. It isn’t fair that she should go and I not be allowed to. I am only just sixteen. I am not ready to live without my mother’s advice. I am not old enough to live without a mother. I look for her every day to tell me what I should do – and she is not there.
My husband’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, is a cipher in her own household. She cannot be a mother to me, she cannot command her own time, how should she advise me? It is the king’s mother, Lady Margaret, who rules everything; and she is a most well-thought-of, hard-hearted woman. She cannot be a mother to me, she couldn’t be a mother to anyone. She worships her son because thanks to him she is the mother of the king; but she does not love him, she has no tenderness. She does not even love Arthur and if a woman could not love him she must be utterly without a heart. Actually, I am quite sure that she dislikes me, though I don’t know why she should.
And anyway, I am sure my mother must miss me as I miss her? Surely, very soon, she will write to the king and ask him if I can come home for a visit? Before it gets much colder here? And it is terribly cold and wet already. I am sure I cannot stay here all the long winter. I am sure I will be ill. I am sure she must want me to come home…
Catalina, seated at the table before the window, trying to catch the failing light of a grey February afternoon, took up her letter, asking her mother if she could come for a visit to Spain, and tore it gently in half and then in half again and fed the pieces into the fire in her room. It was not the first letter she had written to her mother asking to come home, but – like the others – it would never be sent. She would not betray her mother’s training by turning tail and running from grey skies and cold rain and people whose language no-one could ever understand and whose joys and sorrows were a mystery.
She was not to know that even if she had sent the letter to the Spanish ambassador in London, then that wily diplomat would have opened it, read it, and torn it up himself, and then reported the whole to the King of England. Rodrigo Gonsalvi de Puebla knew, though Catalina did not yet understand, that her marriage had forged an alliance between the emerging power of Spain and the emerging power of England against the emerging power of France. No homesick princess wanting her mother would be allowed to unbalance that.
‘Tell me a story.’
‘I am like Scheherazade, you want a thousand stories from me.’ ‘Oh yes!’ he said. ‘I will have a thousand and one stories. How many have you told me already?’
‘I have told you a story every night since we were together, that first night, at Burford,’ she said.
‘Forty-nine days,’ he said.
‘Only forty-nine stories. If I was Scheherazade I would have nine hundred and fifty-two to go.’
He smiled at her. ‘Do you know, Catalina, I have been happier in these forty-nine days than ever in my life before?’
She took his hand and put it to her lips.
‘And the nights!’
Her eyes darkened with desire. ‘Yes, the nights,’ she said quietly.
‘I long for every nine hundred and fifty-two more,’ he said. ‘And then I will have another thousand after that.’
‘And a thousand after that?’
‘And a thousand after that forever and ever until we are both dead.’
She smiled. ‘Pray God we have long years together,’ she said tenderly.
‘So what will you tell me tonight?’
She thought. ‘I shall tell you of a Moor’s poem.’
Arthur settled back against the pillows as she leaned forwards and fixed her blue gaze on the curtains of the bed, as if she could see beyond them, to somewhere else.
‘He was born in the deserts of Arabia,’ she explained. ‘So when he came to Spain he missed everything about his home. He wrote this poem.
“A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa,Born in the west, far from the land of palms.I said to it: How like me you are, far away and in exileIn long separation from your family and friends.You have sprung from soil in which you are a strangerAnd I, like you, am far from home.”’
He was silent, taking in the simplicity of the poem. ‘It is not like our poetry,’ he said.
‘No,’
