The Constant Princess. Philippa Gregory

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      The court bade a cheerful farewell to the Spanish but Catalina found it hard to smile and wave. After they had gone she went down to the river to see the last of the barges shrink and then disappear in the distance and King Henry found her there, a lonely figure, on the pier looking downstream, as if she wished she were going too.

      He was too skilled with women to ask her what was wrong. He knew very well what was wrong: loneliness, and homesickness natural enough in a young woman of nearly sixteen years old. He had been an exile from England for almost all his own life, he knew very well the rise and fall of yearning that comes with an unexpected scent, the change of seasons, a farewell. To invite an explanation would only trigger a flood of tears and achieve nothing. Instead, he tucked her cold little hand under his arm and said that she must see his library which he had newly assembled at the palace and she could borrow books to read at any time. He threw an order over his shoulder to one of his pages as he led the princess to the library and walked her round the beautiful shelves, showing her not only the classical authors and the histories that were his own interest, but also the stories of romance and heroism which he thought more likely to divert her.

      She did not complain, he noticed with pleasure, and she had rubbed her eyes dry as soon as she had seen him coming towards her. She had been raised in a hard school. Isabella of Spain had been a soldier’s wife and a soldier herself, she did not raise any of her girls to be self-indulgent. He thought there was not a young woman in England who could match this girl for grit. But there were shadows under the princess’s blue eyes and though she took the proffered volumes with a word of thanks she still did not smile.

      ‘And do you like maps?’ he asked her.

      She nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘In my father’s library we have maps of the whole world, and Cristóbal Colón made him a map to show him the Americas.’

      ‘Does your father have a large library?’ he asked, jealous of his reputation as a scholar.

      Her polite hesitation before she replied told him everything, told him that his library here, of which he had been so proud, was nothing to the learning of the Moors of Spain. ‘Of course my father has inherited many books, they are not all his own collection,’ Catalina said tactfully. ‘Many of them are Moorish authors, from Moorish scholars. You know that the Arabs translated the Greek authors before they were ever made into French or Italian, or English. The Arabs had all the sciences and all the mathematics when they were forgotten in Christendom. He has all the Moorish translations of Aristotle and Sophocles and everyone.’

      He could feel his longing for the new learning like a hunger. ‘He has many books?’

      ‘Thousands of volumes,’ she said. ‘Hebrew and Arabic, Latin, and all the Christian languages too. But he doesn’t read them all, he has Arab scholars to study them.’

      ‘And the maps?’ he asked.

      ‘He is advised mostly by Arab navigators and map-makers,’ she said. ‘They travel so far overland, they understand how to chart their way by the stars. The sea voyages are just the same to them as a journey through the desert. They say that a watery waste is the same as a plain of sand, they use the stars and the moon to measure their journey in both.’

      ‘And does your father think that much profit will come from his discoveries?’ the king asked curiously. ‘We have all heard of these great voyages of Cristóbal Colón and the treasures he has brought back.’

      He admired how her eyelashes swept down to hide the gleam. ‘Oh, I could not say.’ Cleverly, she avoided the question. ‘Certainly, my mother thinks that there are many souls to save for Jesus.’

      Henry opened the great folder with his collection of maps and spread them before her. Beautifully illuminated sea monsters frolicked in the corners. He traced for her the coastline of England, the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, the handful of regions of France, the new СКАЧАТЬ