dinner already.’
‘Then can I offer you a drink? Or somewhere to wash and change your clothes before you dine?’ She examined the long, lean length of him consideringly, from the mud spattering his pale, lined face to his dusty boots. The English were a prodigiously dirty nation, not even a great house such as this one had an adequate hammam or even piped water. ‘Or perhaps you don’t like to wash?’
A harsh chuckle was forced from the king. ‘You can order me a cup of ale and have them send fresh clothes and hot water to the best bedroom and I’ll change before dinner.’ He raised a hand. ‘You needn’t take it as a compliment to you. I always wash before dinner.’
Arthur saw her nip her lower lip with little white teeth as if to refrain from some sarcastic reply. ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ she said pleasantly. ‘As you wish.’ She summoned her lady-in-waiting to her side and gave her low-voiced orders in rapid Spanish. The woman curtseyed and led the king from the room.
The princess turned to Prince Arthur.
‘Et tu?’ she asked in Latin. ‘And you?’
‘I? What?’ he stammered.
He felt that she was trying not to sigh with impatience.
‘Would you like to wash and change your coat also?’
‘I’ve washed,’ he said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he could have bitten off his own tongue. He sounded like a child being scolded by a nurse, he thought. ‘I’ve washed,’ indeed. What was he going to do next? Hold out his hands palms-upwards so that she could see he was a good boy?
‘Then will you take a glass of wine? Or ale?’
Catalina turned to the table, where the servants were hastily laying cups and flagons.
‘Wine.’
She raised a glass and a flagon and the two chinked together, and then chink-chink-chinked again. In amazement, he saw that her hands were trembling.
She poured the wine quickly and held it to him. His gaze went from her hand and the slightly rippled surface of the wine to her pale face.
She was not laughing at him, he saw. She was not at all at ease with him. His father’s rudeness had brought out the pride in her, but alone with him she was just a girl, some months older than him, but still just a girl. The daughter of the two most formidable monarchs in Europe; but still just a girl with shaking hands.
‘You need not be frightened,’ he said very quietly. ‘I am sorry about all this.’
He meant – your failed attempt to avoid this meeting, my father’s brusque informality, my own inability to stop him or soften him, and, more than anything else, the misery that this business must be for you: coming far from your home among strangers and meeting your new husband, dragged from your bed under protest.
She looked down. He stared at the flawless pallor of her skin, at the fair eyelashes and pale eyebrows.
Then she looked up at him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I have seen far worse than this, I have been in far worse places than this, and I have known worse men than your father. You need not fear for me. I am afraid of nothing.’
No-one will ever know what it cost me to smile, what it cost me to stand before your father and not tremble. I am not yet sixteen, I am far from my mother, I am in a strange country, I cannot speak the language and I know nobody here. I have no friends but the party of companions and servants that I have brought with me, and they look to me to protect them. They do not think to help me.
I know what I have to do. I have to be a Spanish princess for the English, and an English princess for the Spanish. I have to seem at ease where I am not, and assume confidence when I am afraid. You may be my husband, but I can hardly see you, I have no sense of you yet. I have no time to consider you, I am absorbed in being the princess that your father has bought, the princess that my mother has delivered, the princess that will fulfil the bargain and secure a treaty between England and Spain.
No-one will ever know that I have to pretend to ease, pretend to confidence, pretend to grace. Of course I am afraid. But I will never, never show it. And, when they call my name I will always step forwards.
The king, having washed and taken a couple of glasses of wine before he came to his dinner, was affable with the young princess, determined to overlook their introduction. Once or twice she caught him glancing at her sideways, as if to get the measure of her, and she turned to look at him, full on, one sandy eyebrow slightly raised as if to interrogate him.
‘Yes?’ he demanded.
‘I beg your pardon,’ she said equably. ‘I thought Your Grace needed something. You glanced at me.’
‘I was thinking you’re not much like your portrait,’ he said.
She flushed a little. Portraits were designed to flatter the sitter, and when the sitter was a royal princess on the marriage market, even more so.
‘Better-looking,’ Henry said begrudgingly, to reassure her. ‘Younger, softer, prettier.’
She did not warm to the praise as he expected her to do. She merely nodded as if it were an interesting observation.
‘You had a bad voyage,’ Henry remarked.
‘Very bad,’ she said. She turned to Prince Arthur. ‘We were driven back as we set out from Corunna in August and we had to wait for the storms to pass. When we finally set sail it was still terribly rough, and then we were forced into Plymouth. We couldn’t get to Southampton at all. We were all quite sure we would be drowned.’
‘Well, you couldn’t have come overland,’ Henry said flatly, thinking of the parlous state of France and the enmity of the French king. ‘You’d be a priceless hostage for a king who was heartless enough to take you. Thank God you never fell into enemy hands.’
She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Pray God I never do.’
‘Well, your troubles are over now,’ Henry concluded. ‘The next boat you are on will be the royal barge when you go down the Thames. How shall you like to become Princess of Wales?’
‘I have been the Princess of Wales ever since I was three years old,’ she corrected him. ‘They always called me Catalina, the Infanta, Princess of Wales. I knew it was my destiny.’ She looked at Arthur, who still sat silently observing the table. ‘I have known we would be married all my life. It was kind of you to write to me so often. It made me feel that we were not complete strangers.’
He flushed. ‘I was ordered to write to you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘As part of my studies. But I liked getting your replies.’
‘Good God, boy, you don’t exactly sparkle, do you?’ asked his father critically.
Arthur flushed scarlet to his ears.
‘There was no need to tell her that you were ordered to write,’ his father ruled. ‘Better to let her think that you were writing of your own choice.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Catalina said quietly. ‘I was ordered to reply. And, as it happens, I should like us always to speak the truth to each other.’
The king barked out a laugh. ‘Not in a year’s time you won’t,’ he predicted. ‘You will be all in favour of the polite lie then. The great saviour of a marriage is mutual ignorance.’
Arthur nodded obediently, but Catalina merely smiled, as if his observations were of interest, but not necessarily true. Henry found himself piqued by the girl, and still aroused by her prettiness.
‘I daresay your father does not tell your mother every thought that crosses his mind,’ he said, trying to make her look at him again.
He succeeded. She gave him a long, slow, considering gaze from her