Читать книгу Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1: The Constant Princess, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Boleyn Inheritance - Philippa Gregory - Страница 30

I may think that I have won; but still I have not won. I should have won; but I have not won. Harry reaches twelve, and they declare him Prince of Wales but they do not come for me, declare our betrothal or invest me as princess. I send for the ambassador. He does not come in the morning, he does not even come that day. He comes the day after, as if my affairs have no urgency, and he does not apologise for his delay. I ask him why I have not been invested as Princess of Wales alongside Harry and he does not know. He suggests that they are waiting for the payment of my dowry and without it, nothing can go ahead. But he knows, and I know, and King Henry knows, that I no longer have all my plate to give to them, and if my father will not send his share, there is nothing I can do.

My mother the queen must know that I am desolate; but I hear from her only rarely. It is as if I am one of her explorers, a solitary Cristóbal Colón with no companions and no maps. She has sent me out into the world and if I tumble off the edge or am lost at sea, there is nothing that anyone can do.

She has nothing to say to me. I fear that she is ashamed of me, as I wait at court like a supplicant for the prince to honour his promise. In November I am so filled with foreboding that she is ill or sad that I write to her and beg her to reply to me, to send me at least one word. That, as it happens, was the very day that she died and so she never had my letter and I never had my one word. She leaves me in death as she left me in life: to silence and a sense of her absence.

I knew that I would miss her when I left home. But it was a comfort to me to know that the sun still shone in the gardens of the Alhambra, and she was still there beside the green-trimmed pool. I did not know that the loss of her would make my situation in England so much worse. My father, having long refused to pay the second half of my dowry as part of his game with the King of England, now finds his play has become a bitter truth – he cannot pay. He has spent his life and his fortune in ceaseless crusade against the Moors and there is no money left for anyone. The rich revenues of Castile are now paid to Juana, my mother’s heir; and my father has nothing in the treasury of Aragon for my marriage. My father is now no more than one of the many kings of Spain. Juana is the great heiress of Castile and, if the gossips are to be believed, Juana has run as mad as a rabid dog, tormented by love and by her husband into insanity. Anyone looking at me now no longer sees a princess of a united Spain, one of the great brides of Christendom; but a widowed pauper with bad blood. Our family fortunes are cascading down like a house of cards without my mother’s steady hand and watchful eye. There is nothing left for my father but despair; and that is all the dowry he can give me.

I am only nineteen. Is my life over?