Read Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set for Free Online Page B

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 thenchink-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 he, 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 fulfill 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 Coruña in August, and we had to wait for the storms to pass. When we finally set