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“I’ll try to help you,” I said. “But if you aren’t a good horseman, why don’t you avoid horses in front of Katherine? Do something else. Sing. Dance.”

“I can’t sing, and I’m a clumsy dancer,” he said, his face set. “You can sing, and you can dance, but I can’t.”

“Recite verse, then.”

“I hate verse.”

What can you do, then? I wondered. “Then you must let others make fools of themselves dancing and singing and reciting, and look on with amusement.”

“And there’s something else! The—the wedding night!” His voice sounded higher than usual.

“Oh. That, I said nonchalantly, trying to appear wise.

He smiled wanly. “At least I can’t ask your help in that,” he attempted to joke—a joke that was to haunt me, literally, for years.

So it was to happen at last. Arthur was to be married straightway, and the Spanish Princess was already en route to England. The voyage would take two months at least. But she was coming! And there would be a royal wedding and festivities, after years of nothing. Father would be forced to spend money as all the eyes of Europe would be focused on the English Court, watching and judging. There must be great banquets and elaborate allegorical arches and statues and pageants in the streets to celebrate the marriage, and the public conduits would have to run with red and white wine all day. (Already my confessor had pointed out that I had an inordinate fascination for the glitter and pomp of this world, as he put it.) Most important to me, I would have new clothes.

I hated Father’s miserliness. I hated being in moth-eaten cloaks and wearing shirts whose worn sleeves ended halfway to my wrists. I was now just as tall as Arthur, yet I was put into the clothes of someone many sizes smaller. When I bent, the breeches cut into my backside; when I reached, the shoulders strained.

“You’re your grandfather all over,” Nurse Luke kept saying. She could not see how I winced at that. “He was outsized, and you will be, too. He was six feet and four inches.”

“Handsome, too.” I could not resist that.

“Yes,” she said tartly. “Perhaps too much so, for his own good.”

“One can never be too handsome for one’s own good,” I teased.

“No? He was. Anyway, handsomeness is wasted on a priest. If you—a perfect bride for Arthur.

I heard her voice before I saw her, and it was a low voice, and sweet, not scolding and shrewish. Then she emerged in her dressing gown, her hair still unarranged and free of any headdress; it fell, in thick, golden-brown waves, over her shoulders.

She was beautiful—like a maiden in the Morte d’Arthur, like the fair Elaine, the lovely Enid. Or Andromeda, chained to a rock, awaiting rescue by Perseus in the myth I had been dutifully translating. All the heroines of literature came to life for me as I stared at Katherine.

What can I say? I loved her, then and there. Doubtless you will say I was only a boy, a ten-year-old boy, and that I had not even spoken to her, and that it was therefore impossible for me to love her. But I did. I did! I loved her with a sudden burst of devotion that took me quite by surprise. I stood gaping at her, gripped by yet another unknown emotion: intense jealousy of Arthur, who would have her for himself.

And now the betrothal ceremony must be arranged. I was to represent Arthur and be his proxy in the ceremony promising them to one another, and I thought I could not bear it.

But I did. Early the next day we stood side by side and recited dull vows in Latin before a priest in her tent. Although Katherine was already fifteen, she was no taller than 1. 1 could turn my eye just a little and meet hers on the same level.

I found her continually looking at me, and it made me uncomfortable. But then I caught her expression and realized what she was seeing. Misled by my early height and thick chest, she looked at the second son and saw what no one else, thus far, had seen: a man. She saw me as a man, and she was the first to do it. And I loved her for that too.

But she was Arthur’s. She would be his wife, and he would be King.