Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (22 page)

He was entranced. “How glorious.”

She smiled up at him. “Now it is your turn. You tell me a story.”

“I have no stories like that. It is all fighting and winning.”

“Those are the stories you like best when I tell them,” she pointed out.

“I do. And now your father is going to war again.”

“He is?”

“Did you not know?”

Catalina shook her head. “The Spanish ambassador sometimes sends me a note with the news, but he has told me nothing. Is it a crusade?”

“You are a bloodthirsty soldier of Christ. I should think the infidels shake in their sandals. No, it is not a crusade. It is a far less heroic cause. Your father, rather surprisingly to us, has made an alliance with King
Louis of France. Apparently they plan to invade Italy together and share the spoils.”

“King Louis?” she asked in surprise. “Never! I had thought they would be enemies until death.”

“Well, it seems that the French king does not care who he allies with. First the Turks and now your father.”

“Well, better that King Louis makes alliance with my father than with the Turks,” she said stoutly. “Anything is better than they are invited in.”

“But why would your father join with our enemy?”

“He has always wanted Naples,” she confided to him. “Naples and Navarre. One way or another he will have them. King Louis may think he has an ally but there will be a high price to pay. I know him. He plays a long game but he usually gets his own way. Who sent you the news?”

“My father. I think he is vexed not to be in their counsel. He fears the French worse only than the Scots. It is a disappointment for us that your father would ally with them on anything.”

“On the contrary, your father should be pleased that my father is keeping the French busy in the south. My father is doing him a service.”

He laughed at her. “You are a great help.”

“Will your father not join with them?”

Arthur shook his head. “Perhaps, but his one great desire is to keep England at peace. War is a terrible thing for a country. You are a soldier’s daughter and you should know. My father says it is a terrible thing to see a country at war.”

“Your father only fought one big battle,” she said. “Sometimes you have to fight. Sometimes you have to beat your enemy.”

“I wouldn’t fight to gain land,” he said. “But I would fight to defend our borders. And I think we will have to fight against the Scots unless my sister can change their very nature.”

“And is your father prepared for war?”

“He has the Howard family to keep the north for him,” he said. “And he has the trust of every northern landlord. He has reinforced the castles and he keeps the Great North Road open so that he can get his soldiers up there if needs be.”

Catalina looked thoughtful. “If he has to fight he would do better to invade them,” she said. “Then he can choose the time and the place to fight and not be forced into defense.”

“Is that the better way?”

She nodded. “My father would say so. It is everything to have your army moving forwards and confident. You have the wealth of the country ahead of you, for your supplies; you have the movement forwards: soldiers like to feel that they are making progress. There is nothing worse than being forced to turn and fight.”

“You are a tactician,” he said. “I wish to God I had your childhood and knew the things you know.”

“You do have,” she said sweetly. “For everything I know is yours, and everything I am is yours. And if you and our country ever need me to fight for you, then I will be there.”

*     *     *

It has become colder and colder and the long week of rain has turned into showers of hail and now snow. Even so, it is not bright, cold wintry weather but a low, damp mist with swirling cloud and flurries of slush which clings in clumps to trees and turrets and sits in the river like old sherbet.

When Arthur comes to my room he slips along the battlements like a skater and this morning, as he went back to his room, we were certain we would be discovered because he slid on fresh ice and fell and cursed so loudly that the sentry on next tower put his head out and shouted, “Who goes there?” and I had to call back that it was only me, feeding the winter birds. So Arthur whistled at me and told me it was the call of a robin and we both laughed so much that we could barely stand. I am certain that the sentry knew anyway, but it was so cold he did not come out.

Now today Arthur has gone out riding with his council, who want to look at a site for a new corn mill while the river is in spate and partly blocked by snow and ice, and Lady Margaret and I are staying at home and playing cards.

It is cold and gray, it is wet all the time—even the walls of the castle weep with icy moisture—but I am happy. I love him, I would live with him anywhere, and spring will come and then summer. I know we will be happy then too.

*     *     *

The tap on the door came late at night. She threw it open.

“Ah love, my love! Where have you been?”

He stepped into the room and kissed her. She could taste the wine on his breath. “They would not leave,” he said. “I have been trying to get away to be with you for three hours at the very least.”

He picked her up off her feet and carried her to the bed.

“But, Arthur, don’t you want . . . ?”

“I want you.”

*     *     *

“Tell me a story.”

“Are you not sleepy now?”

“No. I want you to sing me the song about the Moors losing the Battle of Málaga.”

Catalina laughed. “It was the Battle of Alhama. I shall sing you some of the verses; but it goes on and on.”

“Sing me all of them.”

“We would need all night,” she protested.

“We have all night, thank God,” he said, his joy in his voice. “We have all night and we have every night for the rest of our lives, thank God for it.”

“It is a forbidden song,” she said. “Forbidden by my mother herself.”

“So how did you learn it?” Arthur demanded, instantly diverted.

“Servants,” she said carelessly. “I had a nursemaid who was a Morisco and she would forget who I was, and who she was, and sing to me.”

“What’s a Morisco? And why was the song banned?” he asked curiously.

“A Morisco means ‘little Moor’ in Spanish,” she explained. “It’s what we call the Moors who live in Spain. They are not really Moors like those in Africa. So we call them little Moors, or Moros. As I left, they were starting to call themselves Mudajjan—‘one allowed to remain.’ ”

“One allowed to remain?” he asked. “In their own land?”

“It’s not their land,” she said instantly. “It’s ours. Spanish land.”

“They had it for seven hundred years,” he pointed out. “When you Spanish were doing nothing but herding goats in the mountains, they were building roads and castles and universities. You told me so yourself.”

“Well, it’s ours now,” she said flatly.

He clapped his hands like a sultan. “Sing the song, Scheherazade. And sing it in French, you barbarian, so I can understand it.”

Catalina put her hands together like a woman about to pray and bowed low to him.

“Now that is good,” Arthur said, reveling in her. “Did you learn that in the harem?”

She smiled at him and tipped up her head and sang.

“An old man cries to the king: Why comes this sudden calling?—Alas! Alhama!

Alas my friends, Christians have won Alhama—Alas! Alhama!

A white-bearded imam answers: This has thou merited, O King!—Alas! Alhama!

In an evil hour thou slewest the Abencerrages, flower of Granada—Alas! Alhama!

Not Granada, not kingdom, not thy life shall long remain—Alas! Alhama!”

She fell silent. “And it was true,” she said. “Poor Boabdil came out of the Alhambra Palace, out of the red fort that they said would never fall, with the keys on a silk cushion, bowed low and gave them to my mother and my father and rode away. They say that at the mountain pass he looked back at his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom, and wept, and his mother told him to weep like a woman for what he could not hold as a man.”

Arthur let out a boyish crack of laughter. “She said what?”

Catalina looked up, her face grave. “It was very tragic.”

“It is just the sort of thing my grandmother would say,” he said delightedly. “Thank God my father won his crown. My grandmother would be just as sweet in defeat as Boabdil’s mother. Good God: “weep like a woman for what you cannot hold as a man.” What a thing to say to a man as he walks away in defeat!”

Catalina laughed too. “I never thought of it like that,” she said. “It isn’t very comforting.”

“Imagine going into exile with your mother, and she so angry with you!”

“Imagine losing the Alhambra, never going back there!”

He pulled her to him and kissed her face. “No regrets!” he commanded.

At once she smiled for him. “Then divert me,” she ordered. “Tell me about your mother and father.”

He thought for a moment. “My father was born an heir to the Tudors, but there were dozens in line for the throne before him,” he said. “His father wanted him called Owen, Owen Tudor, a good Welsh name,
but his father died before his birth, in the war. My grandmother was only a child of twelve when he was born, but she had her way and called him Henry—a royal name. You can see what she was thinking even then, even though she was little more than a child herself, and her husband was dead.

“My father’s fortunes soared up and down with every battle of the civil war. One time he was a son of the ruling family, the next they were on the run. His uncle Jasper Tudor—you remember him—kept faith with my father and with the Tudor cause, but there was a final battle and our cause was lost, and our king executed. Edward came to the throne and my father was the last of the line. He was in such danger that Uncle Jasper broke out of the castle where they were being held and fled with him out of the country to Brittany.”

“To safety?”

“Of a sort. He told me once that he woke every morning expecting to be handed over to Edward. And once King Edward said that he should come home and there would be a kind welcome and a wedding arranged for him. My father pretended to be ill on the road and escaped. He would have come home to his death.”

Catalina blinked. “So he was a pretender too, in his time.”

He grinned at her. “As I said. That is why he fears them so much. He knows what a pretender can do if the luck is with him. If they had caught him, they would have brought him home to his death in the Tower. Just like he did to Warwick. My father would have been put to death the moment King Edward had him. But he pretended to be ill and got away, over the border into France.”

“They didn’t hand him back?”

Arthur laughed. “They supported him. He was the greatest challenge to the peace of England—of course they encouraged him. It suited the French to support him then: when he was not king but pretender.”

She nodded. She was a child of a prince praised by Machiavelli himself. Any daughter of Ferdinand was born to double-dealing. “And then?”

“Edward died young, in his prime, with only a young son to inherit. His brother Richard first held the throne in trust and then claimed it for himself and put his own nephews, Edward’s sons, the little princes, in the Tower of London.”

She nodded. This was a history she had been taught in Spain, and the
greater story—of deadly rivalry for a throne—was a common theme for both young people.

“They went into the Tower and never came out again,” Arthur said bleakly. “God bless their souls, poor boys, no one knows what happened to them. The people turned against Richard and summoned my father from France.”

“Yes?”

“My grandmother organized the great lords one after another, she was an archplotter. She and the Duke of Buckingham put their heads together and had the nobles of the kingdom in readiness. That’s why my father honors her so highly: he owes her his throne. And he waited until he could get a message to my mother to tell her that he would marry her if he won the throne.”

“Because he loved her?” Catalina asked hopefully. “She is so beautiful.”

“Not he. He hadn’t even seen her. He had been in exile for most of his life, remember. It was a marriage cobbled together because his mother knew that if she could get those two married, then everyone would see that the heir of York had married the heir of Lancaster and the war could be over. And her mother saw it as her only way out to safety. The two mothers brokered the deal together like a pair of crones over a cauldron. They’re both women you wouldn’t want to cross.”

“He didn’t love her?” She was disappointed.

Arthur smiled. “No. It’s not a romance. And she didn’t love him. But they knew what they had to do. When my father marched in and beat Richard and picked the crown of England out of the bodies and the wreckage of the battlefield, he knew that he would marry the princess, take the throne, and found a new line.”

“But wasn’t she next heir to the throne anyway?” she asked, puzzled. “Since it was her father who had been King Edward? And her uncle who had died in the battle, and her brothers were dead?”

He nodded. “She was the oldest princess.”

“So why didn’t she claim the throne for herself?”

“Aha, you are a rebel!” he said. He took a handful of her hair and pulled her face towards him. He kissed her mouth, tasting of wine and sweetmeats. “A Yorkist rebel, which is worse.”

“I just thought she should have claimed the throne for herself.”

“Not in this country,” Arthur ruled. “We don’t have reigning queens in England. Girls don’t inherit. They cannot take the throne.”

“But if a king had only a daughter?”

He shrugged. “Then it would be a tragedy for the country. You have to give me a boy, my love. Nothing else will do.”

“But if we only had a girl?”

“She would marry a prince and make him King Consort of England, and he would rule alongside her. England has to have a king. Like your mother did. She reigns alongside her husband.”

“In Aragon she does, but in Castile he rules alongside her. Castile is her country and Aragon his.”