I came to you, and the house was so quiet that it was as if we were the only people alive in the whole world.’
She snuggled closer into his arms. “And I told you my first story,’ she said. ‘But do you remember what it was?’
‘It was the story of the fire at Santa Fe,’ he said. ‘When the luck was against the Spanish for once.’
She nodded. ‘Normally, it was us who brought fire and the sword. My father has a reputation of being merciless.’
‘Your father was merciless? Though it was land he was claiming for his own? How did he hope to bring the people to his will?’
‘By fear,’ she said simply. ‘And anyway, it was not his will. It was God’s will, and sometimes God is merciless. This was not an ordinary war, it was a crusade. Crusades are cruel.’
He nodded.
‘They had a song about my father’s advance. The Moors had a song.’
She threw back her head and in a haunting, low voice, translating the words into French, she sang to him:
‘Riders gallop through the Elvira gate, up to the Alhambra,Fearful tidings they bring the king,Ferdinand himself leads an army, flower of Spain,Along the banks of the Jenil; with him comesIsabel, Queen with the heart of a man.’
Arthur was delighted. ‘Sing it again!’
She laughed and sang again.
‘And they really called her that: “Queen with the heart of a man”?’
‘Father says that when she was in camp it was better than two battalions for strengthening our troops and frightening the Moors. In all the battles they fought, she was never defeated. The army never lost a battle when she was there.’
‘To be a king like that! To have them write songs about you.’
‘I know,’ Catalina said. ‘To have a legend for a mother! It’s not surprising I miss her. In those days she was never afraid of anything. When the fire would have destroyed us, she was not afraid then. Not of the flames in the night and not of defeat. Even when my father and all the advisors agreed that we would have to pull back to Toledo and re-arm, come again next year, my mother said no.’
‘Does she argue with him in public?’ Arthur asked, fascinated at the thought of a wife who was not a subject.
‘She does not exactly argue,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘She would never contradict him or disrespect him. But he knows very well when she doesn’t agree with him. And mostly, they do it her way.’
He shook his head.
‘I know what you’re thinking, a wife should obey. She would say so herself. But the difficulty is that she’s always right,’ said her daughter. ‘All the times I can think of, whenever it has been a great question as to whether the army should go on, or whether something can be done. It’s as if God advises her, it really is; she knows best what should be done. Even Father knows that she knows best.’
‘She must be an extraordinary woman.’
‘She is queen,’ Catalina said simply. ‘Queen in her own right. Not a mere queen by marriage, not a commoner raised to be queen. She was born a princess of Spain like me. Born to be a queen. Saved by God from the most terrible dangers to be Queen of Spain. What else should she do but command her kingdom?’
That night I dream I am a bird, an apus, a swift, flying high and fearless over the kingdom of new Castile, south from Toledo, over Cordoba, south to the kingdom of Granada; the ground below me laid out like a tawny carpet, woven from the gold-fleeced sheep of the Berbers, the brass earth pierced by bronze cliffs, the hills so high that not even olive trees can cling to their steep slopes. On I fly, my little bird-heart thudding until I see the rosy walls of the Alcazar, the great fort which encloses the palace of the Alhambra, and flying low and fast, I skim the brutal squareness of the watchtower where the flag of the sickle moon once waved, to plunge down towards the Court of Myrtles to fly round and around in the warm air, enclosed by dainty buildings of stucco and tile, looking down on the mirror of water, and seeing at last the one I am looking for: my mother, Isabella of Spain, walking in the warm evening air, and thinking of her daughter in faraway England.
Ludlow Castle, March 1502
‘I want to ask you to meet a lady who is a good friend of mine and is ready to be a friend of yours,’ Arthur said, choosing his words with care.
Catalina’s ladies-in-waiting, bored on a cold afternoon with no entertainment, craned forwards to listen while trying to appear engaged in their needlework.
At once she blanched as white as the linen she was embroidering. ‘My lord?’ she asked anxiously. He had said nothing of this in the early hours of the morning when they had woken and made love. She had not expected to see him until dinner. His arrival in her rooms signalled that something had happened. She was wary, waiting to know what was going on.
“A lady? Who is she?’
‘You may have heard of her from others, but I beg you to remember that she is eager to be your friend, and she has always been a good friend to me.’
Catalina’s head flew up, she took a breath. For a moment, for a dreadful moment, she thought that he was introducing a former mistress into her court, begging a place among ladies-in-waiting for some woman who had been his lover, so that they might continue their affair.
If this is what he is doing, I know what part I must play. I have seen my mother haunted by the pretty girls that my father, God forgive him, cannot resist. Again and again we would see him pay attention to some new face at court. Each time my mother behaved as if she had noticed nothing, dowered the girl handsomely, married her off to an eligible courtier, and encouraged him to take his new bride far, far away. It was such a common occurrence that it became a joke: that if a girl wanted to marry well with the queen’s blessing, and travel to some remote province, all she had to do was to catch the eye of the king, and in no time she would find herself riding away from the Alhambra on a fine new horse with a set of new clothes.
I know that a sensible woman looks the other way and tries to bear her hurt and humiliation when her husband chooses to take another woman to his bed. What she must not do, what she absolutely must never do, is behave like my sister Juana, who shames herself and all of us by giving way to screaming fits, hysterical tears, and threats of revenge.
‘It does no good,’ my mother once told me when one of the ambassadors relayed to us some awful scene at Philip’s court in the Netherlands: Juana threatening to cut off the woman’s hair, attacking her with a pair of scissors, and then swearing she would stab herself.
‘It only makes it worse to complain. If a husband goes astray you will have to take him back into your life and into your bed, whatever he has done;
