Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (10 page)

‘Dot, I’ve been looking for
you!’ It is Meg, crossing the yard towards her with Rig in her arms. ‘You
will ruin your complexion sitting in the sun like that.’

‘Pah! Who cares about having
lily-white skin when the sun feels so good,’ says Dot.

‘But you have freckles on your
nose.’ Meg looks quite horrified. ‘People will think you coarse.’

‘Since when did it matter to me what
anyone thinks – besides, I
am
coarse,’ laughs Dot.

‘
I
don’t think so,
Dot.’

‘Well, no one’s ever going to
mistake me for a lady.’

‘Will you walk with me, Dot? I’m
escaping from Mother’s visitor.’ She drops her voice. ‘It’s
him
.’

‘Just a few minutes. I have so many
chores still to do.’

Dot hitches her skirts up and runs towards
the orchard gate, calling out, ‘Last one to the back wall earns a
forfeit.’

The puppy jumps from Meg’s arms and,
caught up in the excitement, he scampers ahead. Meg follows, encumbered
by her gown which is heavy brocade and not made for running about in.

It is cool and shady at the bottom of the
orchard where the blossom has carpeted the ground thickly in drifts. Dot pulls her coif
off her head and throws it aside. Scooping up an armful of blossom, she tosses it into
the air so it falls over her, watching the pale petals spin and float in the shafts of
light that speckle the ground, shaking her head so her hair flies out.

‘You will never get all that off
you,’ says Meg.

‘Try it,’ Dot laughs, tugging at
the ties of Meg’s hood, pulling it away from her head so her nut-brown hair hangs
free.

She scoops up a pile of petals and holds
them above Meg’s head, then slowly releases them until the girl’s hair is
smattered with white like flakes of snow. Soon they are flinging great handfuls at each
other, a blizzard of petals, and laughing so much they can barely breathe. It is
everywhere, clinging to their skirts, in the folds of their sleeves, stuck to their
skin, in their ears, down the fronts of their kirtles. They collapse to the ground in a
billow of giggles and lie flat, looking up through the branches of the apple trees at
the sky beyond.

‘Sometimes I wonder if Father is
watching me,’ says Meg. ‘And when I have too much fun I worry that he thinks
I have forgotten him.’

‘Oh Meg, you are such a worrier. If
your father thought you were spending your life on your knees praying for his soul I
have no doubt it would make him sadder than anything. He would be glad to know that you
are merry.’

Dot sometimes wonders what happens when
people die, but it is as if the thought of it is too big to fit into her head. Where is
Heaven and why are there no glimpses of angels and cherubs sitting up in the clouds? How
difficult it is to believe
when there is no proof. That is what they
mean by faith, she supposes. And if she is good, which she tries to be, she will find
out soon enough about Heaven. And if she is not good … She wonders about Hell.
If it is a lake of fire, as it is said to be, how does it burn with all the water? How
much does it hurt; do you not get used to it? She burned her finger, quite badly, once
and that hurt a good deal. She will be good – though it’s hard to tell what is
good when some say one thing and some another, and both think they are right.

When she was very small, before the great
changes, it was more straightforward. If you did something bad, had wicked thoughts or
swiped a dried fig from a merchant’s cart when he was turned away, then you would
confess; it would be a string of prayers and Hail Marys and that would be that, the sin
rubbed out. If you were rich and sinned really badly you could buy a pardon from the
Pope and even that really bad sin would be rubbed out. She knew she would never sin that
badly for it would be stuck to her for good; she could never afford a pardon. Like when
their neighbour’s brother in Stanstead Abbotts, Ted Eldrich, killed a man in a
fight; he knew he was headed for Hell and that was that. Some still believe in that, but
many don’t. Many think they have to carry every single one of their sins around
with them until they are judged. That is what Lady Latymer and Meg think, though it is
not to be talked about. If Lord Latymer was of the old faith, does that mean he has gone
to Hell? She doesn’t say it, for it would worry Meg all the more to think of
that.

‘There just seems so much to worry
about in life,’ says Meg.

‘But if you dwell too much on it all,
Meg, you will make life even harder.’ A single petal has stuck itself to
Meg’s cheek and Dot stretches out to pluck it away.

‘You are right, Dot. I just
wish …’ Meg’s sentence drifts off into silence.

Dot doesn’t know what she thinks about
religion, doesn’t give a fig about whether the gospels are in English or Latin;
she can’t read anyway and never really bothers to listen to the chaplain droning
on in chapel. She remembers learning about transubstantiation, when the wine is supposed
to actually, literally, turn into the blood of Christ. And the bread actually,
literally, becomes his body. The whole idea of it is quite disgusting when you think too
hard about it. Once she’d spat it back out into her hand at mass, when no one was
watching, but there was nothing but a gob of guck and crumbs in her palm, which she
wiped on the underside of the pew. There was nothing fleshy about it at all. Doing that
must have been a sin, she supposes. The new religion doesn’t believe in that
either. They say it’s symbolic and that if you believe enough you get God’s
grace just by pretending. Nor do the reformers think it’s right about the
Pope’s pardons, they get their hackles up about that too, and there’s always
someone standing on a box and going on about it at Smithfield.

She thinks the reformers have got a point.
Besides, Murgatroyd and his lynch mob were fighting for the old ways and it can hardly
be God’s work when you’re brutalizing and raping young girls. But she has no
idea if disagreeing with the old religion makes her a reformer. None of it makes any
sense. If truth be told, she doesn’t care much, for God hasn’t a good deal
of time for people like her, and besides, life is for living, not wasting it all
worrying about what’s going to happen when you’re dead.

‘Which would you rather,’ asks
Dot, wanting to change the subject with a familiar game, ‘only ever eat turnips or
only ever eat cabbage?’

‘Yuk to both,’ laughs Meg.
‘Cabbage, I suppose. So which would
you
rather be, a poor man or a rich
woman?’

‘That’s a tricky one
–’

They are interrupted by the sound of voices
beyond the yew hedge in the physic garden.

‘Shhh,’ breathes Dot, placing a
finger over Meg’s mouth. ‘Listen, it is your mother and Seymour. They will
be arranging your marriage.’

Meg grimaces. ‘Can you hear anything?
I can’t hear them,’ she whispers.

‘Come.’ Dot crawls into a hollow
at the base of the hedge. ‘Bring Rig, or he’ll give us away.’

Meg grabs the puppy and squeezes in beside
her where they have a view of the physic garden unseen. Lady Latymer and Seymour are
standing beside the fishpond, deep in conversation, but they are a good twenty yards
away, too far to hear what they are saying.

‘At least he’s good-looking,
Meg,’ she whispers, for he is long-limbed and lithe with a head of bouncing curls,
and even at a distance she can see that the different parts of his face are perfectly
arranged.

Meg doesn’t say anything.

They watch in puzzled silence as he lifts a
hand to stroke Lady Latymer’s cheek. She smiles, grabbing it, kissing it. Why?
Then, with a swipe he pulls away her hood so it hangs down her back, still attached by
its strings at her throat, and takes a hank of her hair, twisting it tight. Meg gasps.
Her eyes are round with shock and her mouth is wide like a baby bird waiting for a worm.
Seymour has pushed Lady Latymer up against the hard stone of the sundial, one hand still
clasping her hair, the other rummaging beneath her skirts.

‘No,’ cries Meg, too loud, but
they don’t hear; they are
completely enthralled in each other.
‘He’s hurting her. We must stop him …’

Dot claps a hand over Meg’s mouth.
‘They will discover us,’ she whispers.

Dot knows she should stop watching, but she
can’t seem to turn away. He is kissing her now, on the mouth, on the neck, on the
breast. She can see how he rubs and presses up against her. Dot looks over at Meg. Tears
are streaming down her cheeks, catching the light.

‘What about Father?’ she
sobs.

Time has stopped.

Katherine is melting. Her mind empties of
everything but the touch of him, his smell, a woody, musky male tang. She cannot contain
herself in the face of him, her decorum abandoned entirely by the sweep of his smile,
the shine of his eye. She is helpless, would do anything he asked of her.

His sharp tooth catches her lip, biting
down, flooding her mouth with the taste of copper. His rough beard scrapes over her
skin. It is so long since she has felt a man on her. He has rendered her awash with
desire; she wants to eat him alive, pull him into the depths of her, swallow him, digest
him, make him part of her. All those thoughts, anxieties over his intentions – was she
just another conquest, the convenience of a widow’s experience, the allure of her
wealth – have dissolved to nothing. She is Eve and he Adam and they are wallowing in
exquisite sin.

Sensible Katherine Parr is gone.

His hand searches among the folds of her
dress. There is a moan; she can’t tell whose mouth it comes from. She sucks on the
salt skin of his neck, exploding slowly. She would have an eternity in Hell’s fire
for a moment of this. She finds
her own shaking fingers fumbling at his
laces, finding the knot, unravelling it.

He lifts her slightly on to the sundial and
he is in, pushing to the very core of her, lost in her.

She is lost too.

Katherine is light as air. She is one of
the paper lanterns that are lit for celebrations and take to the sky, flying up until
they are indistinguishable from the stars.

‘Thomas.’ His name is like honey
in her mouth.

‘Sweetheart,’ he replies,
squeezing her so her face is pressed tightly against the satin of his doublet.

Her belly unravels, a snake uncoiling inside
her. In these last weeks, six weeks of snatched secret moments, she has barely been able
to think of anything but him. She has become engulfed by desire. But this is more than
desire; it is something unrecognizable. She has thought about her first impression of
him, the disdain she felt and how quick it was to change. Is it love? If so, love has no
logic to it; it can appear out of animosity as a flower might miraculously push itself
through a crack in a brick. Her brother was right –
he is not what you think
.
But in a sense, he
is
exactly what she thought. He
is
flamboyant. He
is
self-regarding. But she has discovered that those things she found so
loathsome are the very things she now finds endearing. Does his flamboyance not point to
an artistic nature, an originality of spirit. And his self-regard, is it not an
ebullient confidence, a belief in himself? And she had misinterpreted his lightness for
shallowness.

He says it again. ‘Sweetheart.’ The
word liquefies her.

‘How is it words have such power to
move?’ she says.

‘What are we if we are not
words?’

The barge rocks and lulls. The drapes are
drawn around them for privacy, curtaining them from the world. He twines his fingers
with hers; she nuzzles his neck, breathing him in. All else has receded; she is not
clogged up with guilt about Latymer’s death, not beset with worry over Meg; Snape
is nothing but a story once told by someone and now mostly forgotten; the King, the
rumours, the gifts, all dissolved to nothing. With Thomas those things have slipped away
to the recesses of her, and there is no past, no future, just a glorious, endless now.
She has been used to the slow-growing affection of a marriage that is an arrangement.
But this is … What is it? It is something other, something inexplicable, like
the stolen glimpse of a butterfly, all the more dazzling for its never being quite
caught.

She has read Surrey’s poetry. He has
tried to describe it. She remembers him reading in Lady Mary’s chambers. His long,
serious face and dark, hooded eyes. ‘Description of the Fickle Affections, Pangs
and Slights of Love’
was his title, and when he said it the whole room sighed
in recognition. Only now does she understand.

The bells of St Paul’s peal as they
pass as if to announce them. She has forgotten her husband is buried there. The river
noises are a serenade: the roar of the Lambeth bear pits, the prattle of the gulls, the
shouts of the rivermen, the cries of the Southwark mollies touting for trade, the thunk
of the rudder, the wet skim of the oars, and the coxswain calling out the time like a
heartbeat.

He leans down for a kiss. The slippery
wetness of his tongue uproots her, makes her want him desperately. Their
teeth click together. He breaks away slightly, close still, so close his two eyes
become one.

‘Cyclops,’ she says, laughing
and pulling back further so as to see him better. The sight of him grips her like a good
story.

‘Your one-eyed monster.’

‘The language of love is
nonsense,’ she says.

He blows in her face. His breath smells of
aniseed.

‘Hard to port,’ calls one of the
oarsmen.

The boat lurches and veers to the side. She
peeps out to look. The water is grimy, teeming with flotsam, and has a rancid stench. A
flotilla of small boats surrounds something white and bloated in the water. Men stand up
to see better, wobbling as their little crafts bob and sway.

‘What the hell is it?’ shouts
one.