‘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.’
