Patience, Princess Catherine by Carolyn Meyer Page A

was a poor affair, for there was no money to order a banquet. My minstrels played and Santiago and Urraca performed new tricks, but nothing cheered me. With a heavy heart I remembered the previous year when I was Arthur's bride and every imaginable dish had been presented at our banquet table at Bewdley.
    Yuletide also found little celebration at Durham. On the twenty-sixth of December, the feast of Saint Stephen, Arthur's sisters, Mary and Margaret, along with Henry, came to deliver Yuletide greetings. I had looked forward to their visit and had a small token for each of them: embroidered ribbons to mark the place in their missals. But their talk was all about the Yuletide merrymaking they had enjoyed at Richmond, the great feast that had taken place in observance of Margaret's thirteenth birthday, and the plans being made for Twelfth Night. I had no part in any of it. In the end their visit left me feeling more disconsolate than ever.
    There was another reason for my gloom: Henry was now a half year short of his twelfth birthday. Because a betrothal seemed likely, I did hope that we could become better acquainted. But Doña Elvira refused to allow it, insisting that we must not spend time together at all, even in the company of his sisters and all of my ladies. "I permitted it at Dogmersfield. I shall not permit it again. We cannot allow even a hint of impropriety to besmirch your spotless reputation."
    One day we received word that the young Tudors were on their way to Durham. When Doña Elvira saw that I meant to defy her and welcome them, she took the precaution of locking me in my chamber and sent word that I was unable to receive visitors. Francesca found a key and unlocked the door, but it was too late. The Tudors had gone. I was so distressed and angry that I refused to speak to my duenna for more than a week.
    My anger deepened at Doña Elvira's ironfisted rule, but I believed I had no way to loosen her grip without help. Everyone feared her. All I could do, for now, was to observe this boy, with his increasing good looks and high spirits, and to steal glances at him out of the corner of my eye whenever we happened to be at mass or some large public occasion. And I wondered what he might be thinking about me.
    Â 
    In January the court moved to the Tower of London, and there, on the second of February, Queen Elizabeth was delivered of her eighth child—not the hoped-for son, but another daughter. Nine days later, on her thirty-sixth birthday, the queen was dead of childbed fever. Her infant daughter, christened Catherine in honor of the queen's sister, lived only a few days more. Once again the royal family was plunged into deepest sorrow, and I with them, for I had lost my protector and friend.
    The death watch over the queen's body had not yet ended when King Henry summoned me to his chambers. I knelt three times as I approached him, and when the king raised me up I saw that he had become an old man. It was as though he had shrunken to a poor copy of the vigorous man I had first met at Dogmersfield only sixteen months earlier. His shrewd eyes swept over me, as they had at that first meeting, but now they seemed haunted, nearly lifeless.
    He wasted no time with an exchange of polite phrases. "Ten months have passed since the death of Prince Arthur. Is it true then, madam, as you claim, that you are not carrying Arthur's child, and that you will not provide the kingdom with his heir?"
    "What you say is true, my lord," I answered.
    He made no reply, merely sighing deeply and dismissing me with a wave of his bony hand before he turned away.
    A few days later on the eighteenth of February, 1503, I attended a grimly formal ceremony in which Henry, duke of York, was created prince of Wales. Befitting the occasion Henry was more serious and subdued than I had ever seen him. Only once in the course of the long ritual did he glance in my direction, but I was heavily veiled in black, and he could not read the