Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (48 page)

Lady Margaret goes out of the door but María pauses to close the shutters so that I am in shadow. “Oh, let him come then,” I say. “But not while I am like this. He can come next week.”

*     *     *

She brings him by the hidden stairway which runs from the cellars through a servants’ passage to the queen’s private rooms at Richmond Palace. I am wearily dressing for dinner, and I let him come into my rooms while I am still unlaced, in my shift with a cape thrown on top. I grimace at the thought of what my mother would say at a man coming into my privy chamber. But I know, in my heart, that I have to see a doctor who can tell me how to get a son for England. And I know, if I am honest, that something is wrong with the baby they say I am carrying.

I know him for an unbeliever the moment I see him. He is black as ebony, his eyes as dark as jet, his mouth wide and sensual, his face both merry and compassionate, all at the same time. The back of his hands are black, dark as his face, long-fingered, his nails rosy pink, the palms brown, the creases ingrained with his color. If I were a palmist I could trace the lifeline on his African palm like cart tracks of brown dust in a field of terracotta. I know him at once for a Moor and a Nubian; and I want to order him away from my rooms. But I know, at the same time, that he may be the only doctor in this country who has the knowledge I need.

This man’s people, infidels, sinners who have set their black faces against
God, have medicine that we do not. For some reason, God and His angels have not revealed to us the knowledge that these people have sought and found. These people have read in Greek everything that the Greek physicians thought. Then they have explored for themselves, with forbidden instruments, studying the human body as if it were an animal, without fear or respect. They create wild theories with forbidden thoughts and then they test them, without superstition. They are prepared to think anything, to consider anything; nothing is taboo. These people are educated where we are fools, where I am a fool. I might look down on him as coming from a race of savages, I might look down on him as an infidel doomed to hell, but I need to know what he knows.

If he will tell me.

“I am Catalina, Infanta of Spain and Queen Katherine of England,” I say bluntly, that he may know that he is dealing with a queen and the daughter of a queen who had defeated his people.

He inclines his head, as proud as a baron. “I am Yusuf, son of Ismail,” he says.

“You are a slave?”

“I was born to a slave, but I am a free man.”

“My mother would not allow slavery,” I tell him. “She said it was not allowed by our religion, our Christian religion.”

“Nevertheless, she sent my people into slavery,” he remarks. “Perhaps she should have considered that high principles and good intentions end at the border.”

“Since your people won’t accept the salvation of God, then it doesn’t matter what happens to your earthly bodies.”

His face lights up with amusement, and he gives a delightful, irrepressible chuckle. “It matters to us, I think,” he says. “My nation allows slavery, but we don’t justify it like that. And most important, you cannot inherit slavery with us. When you are born, whatever the condition of your mother, you are born free. That is the law, and I think it a very good one.”

“Well, it makes no difference what you think,” I say rudely. “Since you are wrong.”

Again he laughs aloud, in true merriment, as if I have said something very funny. “How good it must be, always to know that you are right,” he says. “Perhaps you will always be certain of your rightness. But I would suggest to you, Catalina of Spain and Katherine of England, that sometimes it is better to know the questions than the answers.”

I pause at that. “But I want you only for answers,” I say. “Do you know medicine? Whether a woman can conceive a son? If she is with child?”

“Sometimes it can be known,” he says. “Sometimes it is in the hands of Allah, praise His holy name, and sometimes we do not yet understand enough to be sure.”

I cross myself against the name of Allah, quick as an old woman spitting on a shadow. He smiles at my gesture, not in the least disturbed. “What is it that you want to know?” he asks, his voice filled with kindness. “What is it that you want to know so much that you have to send for an infidel to advise you? Poor queen, you must be very alone if you need help from your enemy.”

My eyes are filling with too-quick tears at the sympathy in his voice and I brush my hand against my face.

“I have lost a baby,” I say shortly. “A daughter. My physician says that she was one of twins and that there is another child still inside me, that there will be another birth.”

“So why send for me?”

“I want to know for sure,” I say. “If there is another child I will have to go into confinement, the whole world will watch me. I want to know that the baby is alive inside me now, that it is a boy, that he will be born.”

“Why should you doubt your own physician’s opinion?”

I turn from his inquiring, honest gaze. “I don’t know,” I say evasively.

“Infanta, I think you do know.”

“How can I know?”

“With a woman’s sense.”

“I have it not.”

He smiles at my stubbornness. “Well, then, woman without any feelings, what do you think with your clever mind, since you have decided to deny what your body tells you?”

“How can I know what I should think?” I ask. “My mother is dead. My greatest friend in England—” I break off before I can say the name of Arthur. “I have no one to confide in. One midwife says one thing, one says another. The physician is sure . . . but he wants to be sure. The king rewards him only for good news. How can I know the truth?”

“I should think you do know, despite yourself,” he insists gently. “Your body will tell you. I suppose your courses have not returned?”

“No, I have bled,” I admit unwillingly. “Last week.”

“With pain?”

“Yes.”

“Your breasts are tender?”

“They were.”

“Are they fuller than usual?”

“No.”

“You can feel the child? He moves inside you?”

“I can’t feel anything since I lost the girl.”

“You are in pain now?”

“Not anymore. I feel . . .”

“Yes?”

“Nothing. I feel nothing.”

He says nothing; he sits quietly, he breathes so softly it is like sitting with a quietly sleeping black cat. He looks at María. “May I touch her?”

“No,” she says. “She is the queen. Nobody can touch her.”

He shrugs his shoulders. “She is a woman like any other. She wants a child like any woman. Why should I not touch her belly as I would touch any woman?”

“She is the queen,” she repeats. “She cannot be touched. She has an anointed body.”

He smiles as if the holy truth is amusing. “Well, I hope someone has touched her, or there cannot be a child at all,” he remarks.

“Her husband. An anointed king,” María says shortly. “And take care of how you speak. These are sacred matters.”

“If I may not examine her, then I shall have to say only what I think from looking at her. If she cannot bear examination then she will have to make do with guesswork.” He turns to me. “If you were an ordinary woman and not a queen, I would take your hands in mine now.”

“Why?”

“Because it is a hard word I have to tell you.”

Slowly, I stretch out my hands with the priceless rings on my fingers. He takes them gently, his dark hands as soft as the touch of a child. His dark eyes look into mine without fear, his face is tender, moved. “If you are bleeding then it is most likely that your womb is empty,” he says. “There is no child there. If your breasts are not full then they are not filling with milk, your body is not preparing to feed a child. If you do not feel a child move inside you in the sixth month, then either the child is dead, or there is no child there. If you feel nothing then that is most probably because there is nothing to feel.”

“My belly is still swollen.” I draw back my cloak and show him the curve of my belly under my shift. “It is hard, I am not fat, I look as I did before I lost the first baby.”

“It could be an infection,” he says consideringly. “Or—pray Allah that it is not—it could be a growth, a swelling. Or it could be a miscarriage which you have not yet expelled.”

I draw my hands back. “You are ill-wishing me!”

“Never,” he says. “To me, here and now, you are not Catalina, Infanta of Spain, but simply a woman who has asked for my help. I am sorry for you.”

“Some help!” María de Salinas interrupts crossly. “Some help you have been!”

“Anyway, I don’t believe it,” I say. “Yours is one opinion, Dr. Fielding has another. Why should I believe you, rather than a good Christian?”

He looks at me for a long time, his face tender. “I wish I could tell you a better opinion,” he says. “But I imagine there are many who will tell you agreeable lies. I believe in telling the truth. I will pray for you.”

“I don’t want your heathen prayers,” I say roughly. “You can go, and take your bad opinion and your heresies with you.”

“Go with God, Infanta,” he says with dignity, as if I have not insulted him. He bows. “And since you don’t want my prayers to my God (praise be to His holy name), I shall hope instead that when you are in your time of trouble that your doctor is right, and your own God is with you.”

I let him leave, as silent as a dark cat down the hidden staircase and I say nothing. I hear his sandals clicking down the stone steps, just like the hushed footsteps of the servants at my home. I hear the whisper of his long gown, so unlike the stiff brush of English cloth. I feel the air gradually lose the scent of him, the warm, spicy scent of my home.

And when he is gone, quite gone, and the downstairs door is shut and I hear María de Salinas turn the key in the lock then I find that I want to weep—not just because he has told me such bad news, but because one of the few people in the world who has ever told me the truth has gone.

*     *     *

S
PRING
1510

Katherine did not tell her young husband of the visit of the Moor doctor, nor of the bad opinion that he had so honestly given her. She did not mention his visit to anyone, not even Lady Margaret Pole. She drew on her sense of destiny, on her pride, and on her faith that she was still
especially favored by God, and she continued with the pregnancy, not even allowing herself to doubt.

She had good reason. The English physician, Dr. Fielding, remained confident; the midwives did not contradict him; the court behaved as if Katherine would be brought to bed of a child in March or April; and so she went through the spring weather, the greening gardens, the bursting trees, with a serene smile and her hand clasped gently against her rounded belly.

Henry was excited by the imminent birth of his child; he was planning a great tournament to be held at Greenwich once the baby was born. The loss of the girl had taught him no caution; he bragged all round the court that a healthy baby would soon come. He was forewarned only not to predict a boy. He told everyone that he did not mind if this first child was a prince or princess—he would love this baby for being the firstborn, for coming to himself and the queen in the first flush of their happiness.

Katherine stifled her doubts, and never even said to María de Salinas that she had not felt her baby kick, that she felt a little colder, a little more distant from everything every day. She spent longer and longer on her knees in her chapel; but God did not speak to her, and even the voice of her mother seemed to have grown silent. She found that she missed Arthur—not with the passionate longing of a young widow, but because he had been her dearest friend in England, and the only one she could have trusted now with her doubts.

In February she attended the great Shrove Tuesday feast and shone before the court and laughed. They saw the broad curve of her belly, they saw her confidence as they celebrated the start of Lent. They moved to Greenwich, certain that the baby would be born just after Easter.

*     *     *

We are going to Greenwich for the birth of my child. The rooms are prepared for me as laid down in My Lady the King’s Mother’s Royal Book—hung with tapestries with pleasing and encouraging scenes, carpeted with rugs and strewn with fresh herbs. I hesitate at the doorway, behind me my friends raise their glasses of spiced wine. This is where I shall do my greatest work for England, this is my moment of destiny. This is what I was born and bred to do. I take a deep breath and go inside. The door closes behind me. I will not see my friends—the Duke of Buckingham, my dear knight
Edward Howard, my confessor, the Spanish ambassador—until my baby is born.

My women come in with me. Lady Elizabeth Boleyn places a sweet-smelling pomander on my bedside table. Lady Elizabeth and Lady Anne, sisters to the Duke of Buckingham straighten a tapestry, one at each corner, laughing over whether it leans to one side or the other. María de Salinas is smiling, standing by the great bed that is new-hung with dark curtains. Lady Margaret Pole is arranging the cradle for the baby at the foot of the bed. She looks up and smiles at me as I come in and I remember that she is a mother, she will know what is to be done.

“I shall want you to take charge of the royal nurseries,” I suddenly blurt out to her, my affection for her and my sense of needing the advice and comfort of an older woman is too much for me.