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“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
(Federico García Lorca, “Blood Wedding”)
Une fille
Catherine is already a woman and yet she feels like a child.Henry courts her, but even though he seems smitten with her, she can see he is a practical man. She is more a means to an end for him.(After all, as her mother told her, “Aren’t we all means to an end for them?”)She will be Queen of England and France. And he does not despise her. She knows that it could be way worse. She could have a marriage like that of her parents.And yet why does she feel like something is missing?Why does she feel like she cannot truly reach his heart?He is a man not fit for peace, for love, for the quietness of a morning that reachs you in bed in your lover’s arms.And yet she wonders if his true love is war, as she thought before. It seems more like a duty than anything. A need to prove himself before their subjects, before himself for the Glory of England.After all this time, and even though his body has been interred in Westminster for years, she still thinks him a mystery with walls put up too high.
If we’d only had more time…
Une femme
Catherine is soon to reach her thirties and yet she feels like she is discovering the world for the first time.Her Henry is no longer and they have taken her child. They fear her. They fear her marrying someone they cannot control. They fear her educating her child as a frenchman and not as an englishman.
A woman is a terrifying being. And men demean and ridicule what they fear. Stand proud, ma petite. Don’t listen to their mockeries. You are more powerful than what they will ever be.
If only her mother could see her now, though…But among all this solitude, there is a man. A man that does not look at her with fear or worry, instead with an adoration that stirrs inside her feelings long forgotten.(Or perhaps weren’t they awaken until now, she does not know. She does not want to think of the past. It hurts too much.)He had been a servant of her Henry in his last campaigns, and now he had been appointed her Master of the Wardrobe.After all, no one would expect a Welshman to ambition marriage to the Queen Dowager.They were right though.It is not ambition what moves Owen Tudor.No, it is something far more dangerous, reckless and stupid than that.It is love. For the woman, not for the Queen. Every action, every word of his reveals it to CatherineHe knows her heart and she knows his. They are for each other and will be until the end of time.And when she wakes up in his arms she feels safe. She feels more at home than what she has ever felt in her whole life.They both know this will not end well.
And yet they will make good use of the time given to them.