Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (13 page)

‘You don’t understand.’
His voice is raised and angry now. ‘Away from court I will have no influence. I
will be nothing. And …’ He stumbles over his words, spitting them out like
rotten teeth. ‘And
he
will have you.’

‘He will not have me. You are
imagining it, Thomas.’

‘You don’t know him as well as I
do.’

‘You will go and do your duty for the
King and in a few months you will return covered in glory and we shall …’

She waits for him to say it –
we shall
be wed
– but he doesn’t.

‘I know men, Kit. I know what a man
like him will do to get what he wants.’

‘You have no proof, Thomas. It is
nothing but rumour,’ she says, but a splinter of doubt is burrowing under her
skin.

‘He
will
have you,’ he
spits.

His words finally hit her like a blow in the
gut. How is he so sure? She feels herself begin to crumble. His words are eroding the
story she has been telling herself. If she could only run and keep on running, escape
from this place.

‘Come away with me,’ he
whispers, as if he can read her thoughts.

His breath is hot in her ear; his beard tickles
her neck.

‘We will go abroad to some remote
place …’

But they both know that this is as
impossible as travelling to the stars.

‘Shhh,’ she says, pressing a
finger to his mouth, feeling a place at the core of her freeze over.

She had woven images in her mind of the two
of them, designing great tapestries depicting their life together away from the prying
and wheedling of the court, but these dissolve in an instant. She knows as much as he
that the King’s wrath would seep into even these secret imaginings and blacken
them. And to imagine her dear Seymour’s severed head stuck on Tower Bridge for all
to see. She shivers. And Seymour is an ambitious man; he couldn’t be satisfied
hidden away from all this, even if it were possible. She knows him well enough. Another
piece of her story disintegrates.

‘This is God’s will,’ she
says.

‘The King’s will,’ he
counters, his jaw rigid, a little vein throbbing in his temple.

She puts her thumb on it, feeling his pulse,
feeling the life in him, releasing a long sigh and murmuring a defeated,
‘Yes,’ watching him as he turns sharply away from her without even a kiss or
a fond look, his cloak making an extravagant flourish in his wake. ‘It is the same
thing,’ she says, but he is out of earshot.

His footsteps echo as he walks away, his
sword rattles and his spurs clink as accompaniment. She cannot gather up the scattered
pieces of herself, parts are missing, crumbled to dust. He rounds the corner out of
sight, leaving her with a gaping void, out of which comes the treasonous thought that
perhaps God would claim King Henry for himself before too long. She leans into the
window, clutching the sill,
as if it will help hold the fragments of
herself together. She hears the bustle of people leaving chapel, mounting the stairs,
passing her as if nothing has changed, not noticing her, pale as bone, framed in the
casement.

‘If it is not the Dowager Lady
Latymer. And where were you at mass?’ It is Anne Stanhope, wafting a nosegay in
front of her face as if the stench of the minor aristocracy is more than she can bear.
‘I hear you have been seeking a husband among the dregs of my family.’

Katherine says nothing, just emits a little
huff.

‘I’d have thought you could do
better than a younger brother,
my
brother-in-law no less.’ Her eyes
swivel like a reptile’s.

‘I think you are mistaken,’
Katherine says. ‘There is much gossip in this place and little of it
true.’

‘Everybody knows,’ hisses
Stanhope, her eyes gleaming. ‘The King knows.’ This is said as if there are
several exclamation marks following it. ‘That is why Thomas is being sent
away.’

‘Is he?’ she says, as if it is
nothing more than a snippet of gossip, willing herself to remain calm. So it
is
true. Stanhope would know, with her husband in the King’s pocket as he is.

‘The King doesn’t like that kind
of carry-on,’ she spits.

‘I don’t know what you talk
of,’ Katherine says, trying to read her for signs that she might know more,
something of the King’s own intentions.

But she is giving nothing away. Surely,
Katherine reasons, Stanhope would be making some attempt at ingratiation if she’d
got a sniff of anything about the King wanting her for a mistress. She, of all people,
knows how to play the court game, how to curry favour in the right places.

‘Clever Katherine Parr playing
dumb,’ Stanhope says with a sideways smirk. ‘Not like you.’

Katherine can feel the anger rising in her. She
redraws the benign smile on to her face, saying, ‘Will you be travelling in Lady
Mary’s barge tomorrow?’

She knows full well that Stanhope will not
be, for she herself had helped compile the list of who would travel with Lady Mary. She
hates herself a little for stooping to Stanhope’s level but knowing what a
stickler the woman is for pecking order, she can’t resist it.

‘Perhaps,’ says Stanhope.

‘I shall see you then,’
Katherine says.

‘But … I may travel a day
later … business.’

Katherine nods her head, saying,
‘Countess,’ before walking away sedately, resisting the overwhelming urge to
run.

One foot in front of the other, she passes
through the gallery, one step at a time, down the stairs, across the courtyard,
eventually arriving at her rooms, which are thankfully empty. She flings herself on the
bed, allowing at last the tears to come, in great gulping sobs. The thought of
Thomas’s absence has run itself through her, as if a poison has got into her
blood, and she wonders if she will ever be the same again.

Dot follows the Lord Steward’s man up
the stone steps, through the Great Hall and the watching chamber, along the gallery,
round a corner, past the King’s chapel and into a set of rooms that are so
magnificent she can’t help but gasp. The panelling is carved so delicately into
folds that she wants to touch it just to make sure it is really wood and not linen, and
the intricate plasterwork on the ceiling is painted a blue
so bright,
the kind of blue you’d imagine was the colour of the sky in Heaven, and it is all
picked out in gold and dotted with red and white Tudor roses – in case you forget whose
palace it is. The hearth is like an enormous marble doorway, high enough for a man to
stand inside, with firedogs so beautifully wrought they look like the earrings of a
giantess. There are more windows than Dot has ever seen in one place all together,
flooding the rooms with sunlight. She supposes they must be Lady Mary’s chambers
and that their rooms will be in the warren of corridors she imagines beyond.

But the Lord Steward’s man says,
‘Here we are,’ and the small army of men who have lumbered up behind them
with all of Lady Latymer’s belongings begin to dump them in a great stack on the
floor.

‘These are Lady Latymer’s
rooms?’ she questions.

‘Correct,’ says the Lord
Steward’s man.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Look, see for yourself.’ He
waves a piece of paper under her nose. ‘It is written here. Four rooms on the East
Wing off the gallery: watching chamber, privy chamber, bedchamber, wardrobe, see.’
He points to a line of writing.

But Dot, not being able to read, is none the
wiser. She nods, saying, ‘I see.’

The Lord Steward’s man leaves. Two of
the porters have begun to hook a set of hangings on the walls and two others are putting
a large tester bed together in the next chamber. Dot wanders from one room to the other,
answering questions about where she wants things put, waiting for the Lord
Steward’s man to come back and say that there has been a mistake, that these are
not Lady Latymer’s rooms after all and lead them off to a cramped little garret
somewhere. But the man doesn’t return.

If she was impressed by Whitehall Palace then
she is completely knocked off her feet by Hampton Court. She wouldn’t have
believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. They had approached on the
London Road, a great train of them, she near the back, perched on a bone-rattling old
cart, holding on for dear life and with little Rig tucked under her arm. Someone had
shouted out that the palace was in sight and she had stood, finding a foothold on the
stack of luggage to get a view.

There it was, in tantalizing glimpses
between the trees, the fancy brickwork chimneys and crenellated towers soaring up to the
sky. She couldn’t take her eyes off it as they trundled into Base Court, the
windows winking in the sun, the pink brick casting a rosy glow over everything and the
fountain at its centre like an explosion of diamonds. It crossed her mind that she might
be in a dream, had somehow found herself in the marchpane castle that she had seen being
made in the Whitehall kitchens as a centrepiece for one of the King’s
banquets.

She followed the Lord Steward’s man in
a daze, past the statues and murals and tapestries stitched with golden thread that
gleamed as if they were images of Heaven itself. She wanted to stop, take time to admire
it all, to look up at the carved ceilings and out of the windows at the gardens and fish
ponds that she saw only in flashes as they passed, but the Lord Steward’s man
strode ahead as if he was late for something and she tripped along behind him, doing her
best to keep up. For all the splendour of the place, though, it is Lady Latymer’s
rooms that are the best of it because Dot will be bedding down there too, or so she has
been told.

She is shown the kitchens, which are got to
by a set of steps beyond the great watching chamber. She can barely
count the number of cooks and scullions and squillery lads and other people, rushing
to and fro, heaving animal carcasses or stirring vats of sweet-smelling liquid or
kneading huge balls of dough, preparing for the King’s arrival tomorrow. It is as
hot as Hell must be, with the fires burning and the spits turning and bubbling pans
giving off steam.

As she is taking it all in, and feeling
rather lost if truth be told, a girl approaches her. This is unusual as there are not
many girls about, apart from in the laundry. She has a round face and apple cheeks, a
mischievous smile and a hefty weight to her with a pair of breasts like a couple of
Spanish melons.

‘I am Betty,’ she says, smiling.
‘Betty Melcher. There are few enough lasses around here and we need to stick
together. What is your name?’

‘I am Dorothy Fownten,’ she
replies. ‘But most call me Dot.’

‘Then
I
shall call you Dot,
if you don’t mind. Who do you serve?’

‘I serve Lady Latymer.’

‘Ooooh,’ gasps Betty.
‘She’s the one they are all talking about, in’t she?’

Dot is not sure what she means by this so
gives Betty a nod, saying, ‘And who do you serve, Betty?’

Betty launches into a speech about how she
serves ‘every blasted soul in the kitchens’ but Dot eventually ascertains
that she works in the squillery scrubbing pots and dishes, which explains her red, raw
hands.

‘Betty,’ Dot asks, when Betty
has eventually finished listing her chores, punctuating her speech with oaths. ‘I
wonder, could I bother you to show me around the kitchens, for I am quite lost in this
place.’

So Betty takes her to the grain store, and
the boiling
house, and the fish court, and the wine cellars, and the
buttery, and the smoke house, and the still room, and the meat store, and the place
where water can be got for washing, and they go to the common jakes that drop down into
the moat below, where there is room for twenty-eight to ease themselves at the same
time.

They end up in the squillery where there are
a couple of kitchen clerks sitting at desks poring over papers, dipping quills and
writing things down. One in particular catches Dot’s eye. He has ink-smudged
fingers and dark-green hooded eyes that give her the feeling of looking down a well,
when you can just about see the shine of water at the bottom. His hair is a
conker-coloured crop, and there is a little indentation in his chin that she’d
like to put her finger in to see if it fits. He looks up, straight at Dot, but
doesn’t seem to see her, rather looks right through her, seeming to think very
hard about something, then begins to count on his inky fingers before dipping his pen
and writing something down. Dot’s heart pops and she has a squeezed feeling in her
belly.

Outside, in the passage, she asks Betty who
he is.

‘What, that clerk? I don’t know
his name. They don’t really talk to us. Too lowly,’ she laughs, a throaty
cackle. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know, just
wondered.’

‘You’ve taken a fancy, Dorothy
Fownten, I can tell a mile off,’ Betty giggles, nudging her new friend. ‘I
don’t know why you’d choose one of them snotty clerks when there’s
near on a hundred comely fellows about the place. Don’t know what you see in him
next to some of the stable boys. Oooh, there was one …’ She tells Dot about
all the goings-on in the kitchens after dark, where they all sleep on pallets laid out
before the hearth. ‘Not the clerks, though, of course,’ she says.
‘They have proper lodgings elsewhere.’

It is nice to have a friend to chat with,
thinks Dot. I believe I shall like it here.

Later, upstairs, exhausted from the journey
and all the unpacking and making everything ready for Lady Latymer’s arrival
tomorrow, she lies alone in the big tester bed, spreading her arms and legs out as far
as she can reach like a star, thinking of her nameless clerk with his ink-splodged
fingers and bottom-of-a-well eyes. She floats off to sleep with the thought that here is
a man who can read; not allowing herself to spoil her dreams with the fact that he is so
far up above her in the scale of things, he would likely not notice her if she walked
right past him as naked as the day she was born.