Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1: The Constant Princess, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Boleyn Inheritance. Philippa GregoryЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 out of the hills to fight for the Tudors and remind them that he was a Welsh prince, and he would go on counting on their support to rule the English, whom no-one could count on at all. The Welsh must join with England and together, the two of them could keep out the Scots, and manage the Irish.
When the musicians played the slow formal dances of Spain, Catalina would dance with one of her ladies, conscious of Arthur’s gaze on her, keeping her face prim, like a little mummer’s mask of respectability; though she longed to twirl around and swing her hips like a woman in the seraglio, like a Moorish slave girl dancing for a sultan. But My Lady the King’s Mother’s spies watched everything, even in Ludlow, and would be quick to report any indiscreet behaviour by the young princess. Sometimes, Catalina would slide a glance at her husband and see his eyes on her, his look that of a man in love. She would snap her fingers as if part of the dance, but in fact to warn him that he was staring at her in a way that his grandmother would not like; and he would turn aside and speak to someone, tearing his gaze away from her.
Even after the music was over and the entertainers gone away, the young couple could not be alone. There were always men who sought council with Arthur, who wanted favours or land or influence, and they would approach him and talk low-voiced, in English, which Catalina did not yet fully understand, or in Welsh, which she thought no-one could ever understand. The rule of law barely ran in the border lands, each landowner was like a war-lord in his own domain. Deeper in the mountains there were people who still thought that Richard was on the throne, who knew nothing of the changed world, who spoke no English, who obeyed no laws at all.
Arthur argued, and praised, and suggested that feuds should be forgiven, that trespasses should be made good, that the proud Welsh chieftains should work together to make their land as prosperous as their neighbour England, instead of wasting their time in envy. The valleys and coastal lands were dominated by a dozen petty lords, and in the high hills the men ran in clans like wild tribes. Slowly, Arthur was determined to make the law run throughout the land.
‘Every man has to know that the law is greater than his lord,’ Catalina said. ‘That is what the Moors did in Spain, and my mother and father followed them. The Moors did not trouble themselves to change people’s religions nor their language, they just brought peace and prosperity and imposed the rule of law.’
‘Half of my lords would think that was heresy,’ he teased her. ‘And your mother and father are now imposing their religion, they have driven out the Jews already, the Moors will be next.’
She frowned. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘And there is much suffering. But their intention was to allow people to practise their own religion. When they won Granada that was their promise.’
‘D’you not think that to make one country, the people must always be of one faith?’ he asked.
‘Heretics can live like that,’ she said decidedly. ‘In al Andalus the Moors and Christians and Jews lived in peace and friendship alongside one another. But if you are a Christian king, it is your duty to bring your subjects to God.’
Catalina would watch Arthur as he talked with one man and then another, and then, at a sign from Dona Elvira, she would curtsey to her husband and withdraw from the hall. She would read her evening prayers, change into her robe for the night, sit with her ladies, go to her bedroom and wait, and wait and wait.
‘You can go, I shall sleep alone tonight,’ she said to Dona Elvira.
‘Again?’ The duenna frowned. ‘You have not had a bed companion since