The King's Secret Matter by Jean Plaidy

with pleasure because instead she was to marry the Emperor who was also the King of Spain.
    A page came into the apartment with the message for which Mary had been waiting.
    â€˜The Queen is ready to receive the Princess.’
    Mary was eager, as always, to go to her mother.
    The Queen was waiting for her in her own private apartments and when the little girl came in she dismissed everyone so that they could be alone; and this was how Mary longed for it to be. She wished though that she was not wearing these ceremonial clothes, so that she could cling to her mother; she wished that she could sit in her lap and ask for stories of Spain.
    The Queen knelt so that her face was on a level with her daughter’s. ‘Why, you are a little woman today,’ she said tenderly.
    â€˜And does it not please Your Grace?’
    â€˜Call me Mother, sweeting, when we are alone.’
    Mary put her hands about her mother’s neck and looked gravely into her eyes. ‘I wish we could stay together for hours and hours – the two of us and none other.’
    â€˜Well, that will be so later.’
    â€˜Then I shall think of later all the time the ceremony goes on.’
    â€˜Oh no, my darling, you must not do that. This is a great occasion. Soon I shall take you by the hand and lead you down to the hall, and there will be your father and with him the Emperor.’
    â€˜But I shall not go away with him yet,’ said Mary earnestly.
    â€˜Not yet, my darling, not for six long years.’
    Mary smiled. Six years was as long as her life had been and therefore seemed for ever.
    â€˜You love the Emperor, Mother, do you not?’
    â€˜There is no one I would rather see the husband of my dearest daughter than the Emperor.’
    â€˜Yet you have seen him but little, Mother. How can you love someone whom you do not know?’
    â€˜Well, my darling, I love his mother dearly. She is my own sister; and when we were little she and I were brought up together in the same nursery. She married and went into Flanders, and I came to England and married. But once she came to England with her husband to see me . . .’
    Mary wanted to ask why, if her mother loved her sister so much, she always seemed so sad when she spoke of her; but she was afraid of the answer, for she did not want any sadness on this occasion.
    But into the Queen’s eyes there had come a glazed look, and at that moment she did not see the room in Greenwich Palace and her little daughter, but another room in the Alcazar in Madrid in which children played: herself the youngest and the gravest; and Juana, in a tantrum, kicking their governess because she had attempted to curb her. In those days Juana had been the wild one; her sister had not known then that later she would be Juana the Mad. Only their mother, watching and brooding, had suffered cruel doubts because she rememberedthe madness of her own mother and feared that the taint had been passed on to Juana.
    But what thoughts were these? Juana was safe in her asylum at Tordesillas, living like an animal, some said, in tattered rags, eating her food from the floor, refusing to have women round her because she was still jealous of them although her husband, on whose account she had been so jealous, was long since dead. And because Juana was mad, her eldest son Charles was the Emperor of Austria and King of Spain and, since the discoveries of Columbus, ruler of new rich lands across the ocean. He was the most powerful monarch in the world – and to this young man Mary was to be affianced.
    â€˜
I
wasn’t here when Charles’s mother came.’
    â€˜Oh no, my darling, that was long, long ago, before you were born, before I was married to your father.’
    â€˜Yet you had left your mother.’
    Katharine took the little face in her hands and kissed it. She hesitated, wondering whether to put aside the question; but, she reasoned, she has to know my history some day, and it is