She looked up at him. ‘Good God,’ he thought. ‘It would be a man of stone who did not want this little flower in his bed. I swear that I could make her smile, and at any rate, I would enjoy trying.’

‘Have you?’

Henry gestured to the man who flapped out a cloth of maroon velvet from his pocket, and then spilled the contents of his knapsack on to the scarlet background. A tumble of jewels, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, chains, lockets, earrings and brooches was swiftly spread before Catalina’s widening gaze.

‘You shall have your pick,’ Henry said, his voice warm and intimate. ‘It is my private gift to you, to bring the smile back to your pretty face.’

She hardly heard him, she was at the table in a moment, the goldsmith holding up one rich item after another. Henry watched her indulgently. So she might be a princess with a pure blood line of Castilian aristocrats, while he was the grandson of a working man; but she was a girl as easily bought as any other. And he had the means to please her.

‘Silver?’ he asked.

She turned a bright face to him. ‘Not silver,’ she said decisively.

Henry remembered that this was a girl who had seen the treasure of the Incas cast at her feet.

‘Gold then?’

‘I do prefer gold.’

‘Pearls?’

She made a little moue with her mouth.

‘My God, she has a kissable mouth,’ he thought. ‘Not pearls?’ he asked aloud.

‘They are not my greatest favourite,’ she confided. She smiled up at him. ‘What is your favourite stone?’

‘Why, she is flirting with me,’ he said to himself, stunned at the thought. ‘She is playing me like she would an indulgent uncle. She is reeling me in like a fish.’

‘Emeralds?’

She smiled again.

‘No. This,’ she said simply.

She had picked out, in a moment, the most expensive thing in the jeweller’s pack, a collar of deepest blue sapphires with a matching pair of earrings. Charmingly, she held the collar against her smooth cheeks so that he could look from the jewels to her eyes. She took a step closer towards him so that he could smell the scent on her hair, orange-blossom water from the gardens of the Alhambra. She smelled as if she were an exotic flower herself. ‘Do they match my eyes?’ she asked him. ‘Are my eyes as blue as sapphires?’

He took a little breath, surprised at the violence of his response. ‘They are. You shall have them,’ he said, almost choking on his desire for her. ‘You shall have this and anything else you like. You shall name your … your … wish.’

The look she threw up at him was of pure delight. ‘And my ladies too?’

‘Call your ladies, they shall have their pick.’

She laughed with pleasure and ran to the door. He let her go. He did not trust himself to stay in the room without chaperones. Hastily, he took himself out into the hall and met his mother, returning from hearing Mass.

He kneeled and she put her fingers on his head in her blessing. ‘My son.’

‘My lady mother.’

He rose to his feet. She quickly took in the flush of his face and his suppressed energy. ‘Has something troubled you?’

‘No!’

She sighed. ‘Is it the queen? Is it Elizabeth?’ she asked wearily. ‘Is she complaining about the Scots’ marriage for Margaret again?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not seen her today.’

‘She will have to accustom herself,’ she said. ‘A princess cannot choose whom she marries and when she leaves home. Elizabeth would know that if she had been properly brought up. But she was not.’

He gave his crooked smile. ‘That is hardly her fault.’

His mother’s disdain was apparent. ‘No good would ever have come from her mother,’ she said shortly. ‘Bad breeding, the Woodvilles.’

Henry shrugged and said nothing. He never defended his wife to his mother – her malice was so constant and so impenetrable that it was a waste of time to try to change her mind. He never defended his mother to his wife; he never had to. Queen Elizabeth never commented on her difficult mother-in-law or her demanding husband. She took him, his mother, his autocratic rule, as if they were natural hazards, as unpleasant and as inevitable as bad weather.

‘You should not let her disturb you,’ his mother said.

‘She has never disturbed me,’ he said, thinking of the princess who did.

I am certain now that the king likes me, above all his daughters, and I am so glad of it. I am used to being the favourite daughter, the baby of the family. I like it when I am the favourite of the king, I like to feel special.

When he saw that I was sad at my court going back to Spain and leaving me in England he spent the afternoon with me, showing me his library, talking about his maps, and finally, giving me an exquisite collar of sapphires. He let me pick out exactly what I wanted from the goldsmith’s pack, and he said that the sapphires were the colour of my eyes.

I did not like him very well at first, but I am becoming accustomed to his abrupt speech and his quick ways. He is a man whose word is law in this court and in this land and he owes thanks to no-one for anything, except perhaps his Lady Mother. He has no close friends, no intimates but her and the soldiers who fought with him, who are now the great men of his court. He is not tender to his wife nor warm to his daughters, but I like it that he attends to me. Perhaps I will come to love him as a daughter. Already I am glad when he singles me out. In a court such as this, which revolves around his approval, it makes me feel like a princess indeed when he praises me, or spends time with me.

If it were not for him then I think I would be even more lonely than I am. The prince my husband treats me as if I were a table or a chair. He never speaks to me, he never smiles at me, he never starts a conversation, it is all he can do to find a reply. I think I was a fool when I thought he looked like a troubadour. He looks like a milksop and that is the truth. He never raises his voice above a whisper, he never says anything of any interest. He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they? We live as strangers and if he did not come to my bedchamber at night, once a week as if on duty, I would not know I was married at all.

I show the sapphires to his sister, the Princess Margaret, and she is eaten up with jealousy. I shall have to confess to the sin of vanity and of pride. It is not right for me to flaunt them before her; but if she had ever been kind to me by word or deed then I would not have showed her. I want her to know that her father values me, even if she and her grandmother and her brother do not. But now all I have done is upset her and put myself in the wrong, and I will have to confess and make a penance.

Worst of all, I did not behave with the dignity that a princess of Spain should always show. If she were not such a fishwife’s apprentice then I could have been better. This court dances around the king as if nothing matters more in the world than his favour, and I should know better than to join in. At the very least I should not be measuring myself against a girl four years younger than me and only a princess of England, even if she calls herself Queen of Scotland at every opportunity.

The young Prince and Princess of Wales finished their visit to Richmond and started to make their own royal household in Baynard’s Castle. Catalina had her rooms at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens and the river, with her household, her Spanish ladies, her Spanish chaplain, and duenna, and Arthur’s rooms overlooked the City, with his household, his chaplain, and his tutor. They met formally only once a day for dinner, when the two households sat at opposite sides of the hall and stared at each other with mutual suspicion, more like enemies in the middle of a forced truce than members of a united home.

The castle was run according to the commands of Lady Margaret, the king’s mother. The feast days and fast days, the entertainments and the daily timetable were all commanded by her. Even the nights when Arthur was to visit his wife in her bedchamber had been appointed by her. She did not want the young people becoming exhausted, nor did she want them neglecting their duties. So once a week the prince’s household and friends solemnly escorted him to the princess’s rooms and left him there overnight. For both young people the experience was an ordeal of embarrassment. Arthur became no more skilled, Catalina endured his silent determination as politely as she could. But then, one day in early December, Catalina’s monthly course started and she told Dona Elvira. The duenna at once told the prince’s groom of the bedchamber that the prince could not come to the Infanta’s bed for a week; the Infanta was indisposed. Within half an hour, everyone from the king at Whitehall to the spit boy at Baynard’s Castle knew that the Princess of Wales was having her course and so no child had yet been conceived; and everyone from the king to the spit boy wondered, since the girl was lusty and strong and since she was bleeding – obviously fertile – if Arthur was capable of doing his side of their duty.

In the middle of December, when the court was preparing for the great twelve-day feast of Christmas, Arthur was summoned by his father and ordered to prepare to leave for his castle at Ludlow.

‘I suppose you’ll want to take your wife with you,’ the king said, smiling at his son in an effort to seem unconcerned.

‘As you wish, sir,’ Arthur replied carefully.

‘What would you wish?’

After enduring a week’s ban from Catalina’s bed, with everyone remarking among themselves that no child had been made – but to be sure, it was early days yet, and it might be nobody’s fault – Arthur felt embarrassed and discouraged. He had not gone back to her bedroom and she had sent no message to invite him. He could not expect an invitation – he knew that was ridiculous – a princess of Spain could hardly send for the prince of England; but she had not smiled or encouraged him in any way at all. He had received no message to tell him to resume his visits, and he had no idea how long these mysteries usually took. There was no-one that he could ask, and he did not know what he should do.

‘She does not seem very merry,’ Arthur observed.

‘She’s homesick,’ his father said briskly. ‘It’s up to you to divert her. Take her to Ludlow with you. Buy her things. She’s a girl like any other. Praise her beauty. Tell her jokes. Flirt with her.’

Arthur looked quite blank. ‘In Latin?’

His father barked his harsh laugh. ‘Lad. You can do it in Welsh if your eyes are smiling and your cock is hard. She’ll know what you mean. I swear it. She’s a girl who knows well enough what a man means.’

There was no answering brightness from his son. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘If you don’t want her with you, you’re not obliged to take her this year, you know. You were supposed to marry and then spend the first year apart.’

‘That was when I was fourteen.’

‘Only a year ago.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘So you do want her with you?’

His son flushed. The father regarded the boy with sympathy. ‘You want her, but you are afraid she will make a fool of you?’ he suggested.

The blond head drooped, nodded.

‘And you think if you and she are far from court and from me, then she will be able to torment you.’

Another small nod. ‘And all her ladies. And her duenna.’

‘And time will hang heavy on your hands.’

The boy looked up, his face a picture of misery.

‘And she will be bored and sulky and she will make your little court at Ludlow a miserable prison for both of you.’

‘If she dislikes me …’ he started, his voice very low.

Henry rested a heavy hand on his boy’s shoulder. ‘Oh, my son. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps your mother was not my choice, perhaps I was not hers. When a throne is involved the heart comes in second place if it ever matters at all. She knows what she has to do; and that is all that counts.’

‘Oh, she knows all about it!’ the boy burst out resentfully. ‘She has no …’

His father waited. ‘No … what?’

‘No shame at all.’

Henry caught his breath. ‘She is shameless? She is passionate?’ He tried to keep the desire from his voice, a sudden lascivious picture of his daughter-in-law, naked and shameless, in his mind.

‘No! She goes at it like a man harnessing a horse,’ Arthur said miserably. ‘A task to be done.’

Henry choked down a laugh. ‘But at least she does it,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to beg her, or persuade her. She knows what she has to do?’

Arthur turned from him to the window and looked out of the arrow slit to the cold river Thames below. ‘I don’t think she likes me. She only likes her Spanish friends, and Mary, and perhaps Henry. I see her laughing with them and dancing with them as if she were very merry in their company. She chatters away with her own people, she is courteous to everyone who passes by. She has a smile for everyone. I hardly ever see her, and I don’t want to see her, either.’

Henry dropped his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘My boy, she doesn’t know what she thinks of you,’ he assured him. ‘She’s too busy in her own little world of dresses and jewels and those damned gossipy Spanish women. The sooner you and she are alone together, the sooner you two will come to terms. You can take her with you to Ludlow and you can get acquainted.’

The boy nodded, but he did not look convinced. ‘If it is your wish, sire,’ he said formally.

‘Shall I ask her if she wants to go?’

The colour flooded into the young man’s cheeks. ‘What if she says no?’ he asked anxiously.

His father laughed. ‘She won’t,’ he promised. ‘You’ll see.’

Henry was right. Catalina was too much of a princess to say either yes or no to a king. When he asked her if she would like to go to Ludlow with the prince she said that she would do whatever the king wished.

‘Is Lady Margaret Pole still at the castle?’ she asked, her voice a little nervous.

He scowled at her. Lady Margaret was now safely married to Sir Richard Pole, one of the solid Tudor warhorses, and warden of Ludlow Castle. But Lady Margaret had been born Margaret Plantagenet, beloved daughter of the Duke of Clarence, cousin to King Edward and sister to Edward of Warwick whose claim to the throne had been so much greater than Henry’s own.

‘What of it?’

‘Nothing,’ she said hastily.

‘You have no cause to avoid her,’ he said gruffly. ‘What was done, was done in my name, by my order. You don’t bear any blame for it.’

She flushed as if they were talking of something shameful. ‘I know.’

‘I can’t have anyone challenging my right to the throne,’ he said abruptly. ‘There are too many of them, Yorks and Beauforts, and Lancasters too, and endless others who fancy their chances as pretenders. You don’t know this country. We’re all married and intermarried like so many coneys in a warren.’ He paused to see if she would laugh, but she was frowning, following his rapid French. ‘I can’t have anyone claiming by their pretended right what I have won by conquest,’ he said. ‘And I won’t have anyone else claiming by conquest either.’

‘I thought you were the true king,’ Catalina said hesitantly.

‘I am now,’ said Henry Tudor bluntly. ‘And that’s all that matters.’

‘You were anointed.’

‘I am now,’ repeated with a grim smile.

‘But you are of the royal line?’

‘I have royal blood in my veins,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘No need to measure how much or how little. I picked up my crown off the battlefield, literally, it was at my feet in the mud. So I knew; everyone knew – everyone saw God give me the victory because I was his chosen king. The archbishop anointed me because he knew that too. I am as much king as any in Christendom, and more than most because I did not just inherit as a baby, the fruit of another man’s struggle – God gave me my kingdom when I was a man. It is my just desert.’

‘But you had to claim it …’

‘I claimed my own,’ he said finally. ‘I won my own. God gave my own to me. That’s an end to it.’

She bowed her head to the energy in his words. ‘I know, sire.’

Her submissiveness, and the pride that was hidden behind it, fascinated him. He thought that there had never been a young woman whose smooth face could hide her thoughts like this one.

‘D’you want to stay here with me?’ Henry asked softly, knowing that he should not ask her such a thing, praying, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, that she would say ‘no’ and silence his secret desire for her.

‘Why, I wish whatever Your Majesty wishes,’ she said coolly.

‘I suppose you want to be with Arthur?’ he asked, daring her to deny it.

‘As you wish, sire,’ she said steadily.

‘Tell me! Would you like to go to Ludlow with Arthur, or would you rather stay here with me?’

She smiled faintly, and would not be drawn. ‘You are the king,’ she said quietly. ‘I must do whatever you command.’

Henry knew he should not keep her at court beside him but he could not resist playing with the idea. He consulted her Spanish advisors, and found them hopelessly divided and squabbling among themselves. The Spanish ambassador, who had worked so hard to deliver the intractable marriage contract, insisted that the princess should go with her new husband, and that she should be seen to be a married woman in every way. Her confessor, who alone of all of them seemed to have a tenderness for the little princess, urged that the young couple should be allowed to stay together. Her duenna, the formidable and difficult Dona Elvira, preferred not to leave London. She had heard that Wales was a hundred miles away, a mountainous and rocky land. If Catalina stayed in Baynard’s Castle and the household was rid of Arthur, then they would make a little Spanish enclave in the heart of the City, and the duenna’s power would be unchallenged, she would rule the princess and the little Spanish court.

The queen volunteered her opinion that Catalina would find Ludlow too cold and lonely in mid-December and suggested that perhaps the young couple could stay together in London until spring.

‘You just hope to keep Arthur with you, but he has to go,’ Henry said brusquely to her. ‘He has to learn the business of kingship and there is no better way to learn to rule England than to rule the Principality.’

‘He’s still young, and he is shy with her.’

‘He has to learn to be a husband too.’

‘They will have to learn to deal together.’

‘Better that they learn in private then.’

In the end, it was the king’s mother who gave the decisive advice. ‘Send her,’ she said to her son. ‘We need a child off her. She won’t make one on her own in London. Send her with Arthur to Ludlow.’ She laughed shortly. ‘God knows, they’ll have nothing else to do there.’

‘Elizabeth is afraid that she will be sad and lonely,’ the king remarked. ‘And Arthur is afraid that they will not deal well together.’

‘Who cares?’ his mother asked. ‘What difference does that make? They are married and they have to live together and make an heir.’

He shot her a swift smile. ‘She is only just sixteen,’ he said, ‘and the baby of her family, still missing her mother. You don’t make any allowances for her youth, do you?’

‘I was married at twelve years old, and gave birth to you in the same year,’ she returned. ‘No-one made any allowances for me. And yet I survived.’

‘I doubt you were happy.’

‘I was not. I doubt that she is. But that, surely, is the last thing that matters?’

Dona Elvira told me that I must refuse to go to Ludlow. Father Geraldini said that it was my duty to go with my husband. Dr de Puebla said that for certain my mother would want me to live with my husband, to do everything to show that the marriage is complete in word and deed. Arthur, the hopeless beanpole, said nothing, and his father seems to want me to decide; but he is a king and I don’t trust him.

All I really want to do is to go home to Spain. Whether we are in London or whether we live in Ludlow it will be cold, and it will rain all the time, the very air feels wet, I cannot get anything good to eat, and I cannot understand a word anybody says.

I know I am Princess of Wales and I will be Queen of England. That is true, and it will be true. But, this day, I cannot feel very glad about it.

‘We are to go to my castle at Ludlow,’ Arthur remarked awkwardly to Catalina. They were seated side by side at dinner, the hall below them, the gallery above and the wide doors crowded with people who had come from the City for the free entertainment of watching the court dine. Most people were observing the Prince of Wales and his young bride.

She bowed her head but did not look at him. ‘Is it your father’s command?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then I shall be happy to go,’ she said.

‘We will be alone, but for the warden of the castle and his wife,’ Arthur went on. He wanted to say that he hoped she would not mind, that he hoped she would not be bored, or sad or – worst of all – angry with him.

She looked at him without a smile. ‘And so?’

‘I hope you will be content,’ he stumbled.

‘Whatever your father wishes,’ she said steadily, as if to remind him that they were merely prince and princess and had no rights and no power at all.

He cleared his throat. ‘I shall come to your room tonight,’ he asserted.

She gave him a look from eyes as blue and hard as the sapphires around her neck. ‘Whatever you wish,’ she said in the same neutral tone.

He came when she was in bed and Dona Elvira admitted him to the room, her face like a stone, disapproval in every gesture. Catalina sat up in bed and watched as his groom of the bedchamber took his gown from his shoulders and went quietly out, closing the door behind him.

‘Wine?’ Arthur asked. He was afraid his voice quavered slightly.

‘No, thank you,’ she said.

Awkwardly the young man came to the bed, turned back the sheets, got in beside her. She turned to look at him, and he knew he was blushing beneath her inquiring gaze. He blew out the candle so she could not see his discomfort. A little torchlight from the guard outside flickered through the slats of the shutters, and then was gone as the guard moved on. Arthur felt the bed move as she lay back and pulled her nightdress out of the way. He felt as if he were a thing to her, an object of no importance, something she had to endure in order to be Queen of England.

He threw back the covers and jumped from the bed. ‘I’m not staying here. I’m going to my room,’ he said tersely.

‘What?’

‘I shan’t stay here. I’m not wanted …’

‘Not wanted? I never said you were not …’

‘It is obvious. The way you look …’

‘It’s pitch black! How d’you know how I look? And anyway, you look as if someone forced you here!’

‘I? It isn’t me who sent a message that half the court heard, that I was not to come to your bed.’

He heard her gasp. ‘I did not say you were not to come. I had to tell them to tell you …’ She broke off in embarrassment. ‘It was my time … you had to know …’

‘Your duenna told my steward that I was not to come to your bed. How do you think that made me feel? How d’you think that looked to everyone?’

‘How else was I to tell you?’ she demanded.

‘Tell me yourself!’ he raged. ‘Don’t tell everyone else in the world.’

‘How could I? How could I say such a thing? I should be so embarrassed!’

‘Instead it is me who is made to look a fool!’

Catalina slipped out of bed and steadied herself, holding the tall carved bedpost. ‘My lord, I apologise if I have offended you, I don’t know how such things are done here … In future I will do as you wish …’

He said nothing.

She waited.

‘I’m going,’ he said and went to hammer on the door for his groom to come to him.

‘Don’t!’ The cry was forced out of her.

‘What?’ He turned.

‘Everyone will know,’ she said desperately. ‘Know that there is something wrong between us. Everyone will know that you have just come to me. If you leave at once, everyone will think …’

‘I won’t stay here!’ he shouted.

Her pride rushed up. ‘You will shame us both!’ she cried out. ‘What do you want people to think? That I disgust you, or that you are impotent?’

‘Why not? If both are true?’ He hammered on the door even louder.

She gasped in horror and fell back against the bedpost.

‘Your Grace?’ came a shout from the outer chamber and the door opened to reveal the groom of the bedchamber and a couple of pages, and behind them Dona Elvira and a lady-in-waiting.

Catalina stalked over to the window and turned her back to the room. Uncertainly, Arthur hesitated, glancing back at her for help, for some indication that he could stay after all.

‘For shame!’ Dona Elvira exclaimed, pushing past Arthur and running to throw a gown around Catalina’s shoulders. Once the woman was standing with her arm around Catalina, glaring at him, Arthur could not return to his bride; he stepped over the threshold and went to his own rooms.

I cannot bear him. I cannot bear this country. I cannot live here for the rest of my life. That he should say that I disgust him! That he should dare to speak to me so! Has he run mad like one of their filthy dogs that pant everywhere? Has he forgotten who I am? Has he forgotten himself?

I am so furious with him I should like to take a scimitar and slice his stupid head off. If he thought for a moment he would have known that everyone in the palace, everyone in London, probably everyone in this gross country, will laugh at us. They will say I am ugly and that I cannot please him.

I am crying with temper, it’s not grief. I tuck my head into the pillow of my bed, so that no-one can hear me and tell everyone else that the princess cried herself to sleep because her husband would not bed her. I am choking on tears and temper, I am so angry with him.

After a little while I stop, I wipe my face, I sit up. I am a princess by birth and by marriage, I should not give way. I shall have some dignity even if he has none. He is a young man, a young English man at that – how should he know how to behave? I think of my home in the moonlight, of how the walls and the tracery gleam white and the yellow stone is bleached to cream. That is a palace, where people know how to behave with grace and dignity. I wish with all my heart that I was still there.

I remember that I used to watch a big yellow moon reflected in the water of the sultana’s garden. Like a fool, I used to dream of being married.