Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (16 page)

‘You could trip over in front of his
desk and accidentally let one of your titties fall out,’ giggles Betty.

‘Ooops … Begging your
pardon, good sir,’ coos Dot, giggling too. ‘I slipped on a pat of
butter.’

‘Let me help you put that titty back
in your dress,’ growls Betty, dropping her voice an octave and causing them both
to laugh until they’re completely out of breath.

‘Why would an educated man be
interested in a nobody like me?’ she says when their laughter has subsided.

‘But you serve the lady who will be
Queen,’ Betty replies. ‘You could have any clenchpoop in these kitchens if
you wanted. All you want’s a fumble, it’s not like you want him to
marry
you.’

‘True,’ says Dot, but that
is
what she wants, however far-fetched, and though William Savage
hasn’t even uttered a single word to her she can’t help thinking of it. She
knows well enough that people stick to their own kind, but she can’t bear the
thought of getting herself hitched to one of the stable lads or one of the delivery
boys.

‘You could even have that one,’
continues Betty, pointing out of the loft hatch at the weasel in charge of the wine
cellars, who is known for slinking about, spying on the young girls in the closet.

‘Urgh!’ Dot cries. ‘And
you
can have Big Barney.’

That starts them off laughing again, for Big
Barney is the halfwit who cleans the jakes.

‘I wish
I
could serve a great
lady instead of scraping blasted pans day and night,’ says Betty with a mock
scowl.

But they both know that Betty wouldn’t
make a good upstairs maid for she has a filthy mouth and can’t keep it shut for a
minute. Secretly, though, Dot is a little jealous of Betty, who’s happy to sleep
before the squillery hearth and has nightly cuddles with the kitchen lads. She’d
like to try it, just the once, to see what it is like, properly, not like the fumbles
she had with Jethro or the innocent kisses Harry Dent used to give her. Dot must be
content with her chaste thoughts of William Savage. It is not so far-fetched to imagine
that he might, one day, look up from his papers and smile at her, and she will smile
back. The very thought of it makes her go soft inside.

‘Lady Latymer will be wondering where
I’ve got to,’ she says, standing and brushing the hay off her dress.
‘Is there any in my hair?’ she asks.

Betty pulls out a couple of strands that
have lodged themselves in her coif. She climbs down the ladder and gives herself a final
brush-down before collecting the copper basin to take back to Katherine’s rooms.
She finds Meg in the outer chamber, sorting embroidery silks.

‘There you are, Dot. Where have you
been? Mother wants the hearth laying.’

‘A fire in July?’

‘The King has asked for it.’

‘The King?’

‘He is in there with her.’

‘In there?’ Dot points to the
door, open-mouthed. ‘I couldn’t possibly …’

She feels herself shrink. There isn’t
much Dot is afraid of but the idea of encountering the King is making her slightly
queasy. Meg spools a skein of green thread around her
fingers, tying
it neatly in the middle and placing it in the sewing basket. Dot picks up a piece of
fabric from the pile beside her. It is ready for stitching, stretched into a wooden
round with a pattern picked out in ink; even without being able to read she can see that
it is the intertwined initials H and K.

Meg makes a little sigh. ‘I wish we
could turn back the clock, Dot.’

As she says this, it is as if a shadow
passes over her. Dot wonders if she might be thinking of how far she would have to turn
that clock back to get to a time when things were truly easy.

‘This is not so bad, Meg,’ Dot
says. ‘All this luxury and your mother to become Queen.’ But she is thinking
about the two other Queens who were called Katherine, wondering about all the initials
embroidered for them and what became of them.

Meg huffs. ‘It is not a good
thing.’

Dot remembers Katherine telling her that Meg
is one of the world’s pessimists. She’d had to ask what the word meant. It
is a curse, she thinks, to be a pessimist; she wishes that Meg could simply shake it
off. But if the world, or God, conspires to do what has been done to Meg, then you would
surely become a pessimist whether you chose it or not.

‘You’d better get on with the
hearth,’ says Meg, stretching a hand out and plucking a strand of hay from
Dot’s apron with a raised eyebrow.

‘It’s not what you think,’
Dot says.

‘Not my business,’ Meg mutters.
‘There’s a scuttle of coal that the scullion brought up over there.’
She points to a fancy kind of bucket in the corner.

‘Coal?’ Dot questions.

‘The King prefers it. The heat is good
for his leg,
apparently.’ Dot’s nervousness must show on
her face for Meg says, ‘Don’t worry. Just curtsy, right down, and say
nothing. He’ll likely ignore you completely.’

Dot cannot imagine what
the King is like, has not even seen him at a distance despite the time she has spent
at the palace. There is a picture in her head – it is the one you see on the woodcuts
where he is quite magnificent, standing square, staring out as if nothing could touch
him. Dot picks up the scuttle and the tinderbox, tucking the hearth brush under her
arm.

‘You’d better get used to it,
Dot. She will be his wife in a few days.’

Dot takes a deep breath to calm her nerves
before knocking on the door to the inner chamber.

‘Enter.’ It is Katherine’s
soft voice.

Dot lifts the latch and pushes the heavy
door with her shoulder, clanking the scuttle against it, mumbling an apology as she
steps red-faced into the chamber, dropping down on to her knees. They are sitting by the
window, Katherine on a stool and the King on a wooden chair with his leg propped up on
her lap. To Dot’s relief he doesn’t look at her or even stop talking. It is
as if she doesn’t exist. Katherine nods at her silently with a smile and indicates
for her to stand. Dot can’t help but keep glancing at the two of them as she
starts to build the fire. He has his ham of a hand on her leg, and he looks nothing like
the King. He is a fat doughy old man, not even one little bit magnificent, and Katherine
looks like she might be his daughter or a niece.

Dot has never laid a coal fire before and
wishes there was someone to ask. But she puts in plenty of kindling and hopes for the
best. She wipes her hands on her apron, leaving smears of black, hoping none of it has
got on to her face, then sets to lighting the tinder.

The King is talking quietly in a low rumble.
‘Kit,’ he says, ‘sometimes I wonder what a normal life would
be …’

Dot glances over to see Katherine stroke her
fingers over his beard. A spark lights the tinder; Dot blows it gently, watching the
little blaze gather, tipping it into the hearth, all the while listening to the
King’s rumbling voice.

‘… a life where people do not
simply tell me what they think I want to hear.’

‘Harry …’ Katherine
replies.

Dot has never imagined that anyone might
call him Harry; it is such an ordinary name for the King.

‘… perhaps people humour you
because they are afraid.’

He shifts in his chair, which creaks loudly
under his weight. ‘That Florentine, can’t remember his
name … names seem to drop out of my head these days, Kit. He said it was
better that princes were feared than loved. It takes such a great effort to be
constantly feared. It has made me do things …’ He doesn’t finish.

‘Niccolò Machiavelli,’ Katherine
says.

Dot cannot make much sense of what they are
talking about.

‘We all do things, Harry, that prick
the conscience.’

‘
You
do not humour me, Kit.
You are the only one with the courage to speak the truth. I noticed you first for
that.’

Dot blows into the fire until the coals glow
brightly.

‘I strive to be honest, Harry. It is
what God asks of us, is it not?’

The King lifts his hand to the back of his
neck, rubbing as if in some discomfort. ‘Do you feel a draught, Kit?’

‘No, but the window is open a crack.
It must be that.’

He is on his feet at the window, pulling it
shut. It sticks and he tugs at it so hard that one of the glass panes cracks
and the latch comes away in his hand. ‘This cursed
thing,’ he shouts, rapping it hard against the sill over and over, gouging holes
in the wood – thud, thud, thud, splinters flying.

Dot shrinks into the corner, not looking,
hoping not to be noticed. She imagines it as the sound of hammer on bone.

‘Come, Harry,’ soothes
Katherine, who has gone over to him and is rubbing his shoulders.

His face is purple like a bruise and beads
of sweat have broken out on his forehead. He is utterly at the mercy of his frustration
– like a vast toddler.

‘Let me take that.’ Katherine
tries to gently prise the broken latch from his clenched fingers.

But all of a sudden he throws it with force
towards the hearth where Dot is crouched. She ducks her head and it flies past her,
landing with a great clash against the scuttle. Dot’s heart is going like a forge
hammer and her hands are shaking so much she can barely keep hold of the hearth brush.
She doesn’t dare get up to leave for fear of drawing attention. The King sits back
down with his head in his hands, breathing heavily while Katherine makes soothing noises
and continues to rub his shoulders.

She looks briefly over at Dot, lifting her
eyebrows as if to ask, ‘All right?’

Dot nods and Katherine brings a finger up to
her lips in a silent shush. The King says nothing, doesn’t even glance in her
direction to see if her head is still attached to her shoulders.

When he does lift his face he mumbles,
‘I am afraid of myself sometimes, Kit.’ He looks collapsed and forlorn, eyes
drooping. ‘These rages come upon me. It is as if I am someone else. As if I am
possessed.’

Katherine strokes his sleeve and murmurs
something.

‘I feel sometimes as if I’m
losing my mind. The weight of
England bears down on me.’ He
stops and is silent for some time, picking at a jewel on his doublet. When he speaks
again it is barely more than a whisper. ‘I wonder what I have done to her by
breaking with Rome. I feel … England is fractured at the heart.’

Dot has never thought that the King might
have doubts like any other man. Is he not told what to do by God?

‘The past must be
accepted …’ says Katherine.

Dot has heard her say this often, to Meg in
particular.

‘… it takes mettle, Harry, to
change things as you have done.’

As she says this, it is as if the King seems
larger, shinier, his eyes brighter.

‘And it is my firm belief that you
have God on your side.’

‘He gave me a son,’ says the
King. ‘That is surely an indication of his pleasure.’

‘And a fine one too.’

‘Will you give me a son, Kit?’
he asks, like a small boy asking for a sweetmeat.

‘If God wills it,’ she replies
with a smile.

But as she slips out of the chamber Dot sees
a dark cloud scud over Katherine’s face.

‘We have been granted the Abbey at
Wilton,’ says Sister Anne. She sits next to Katherine on the window seat in her
watching chamber. A gown is draped over their laps and they are inspecting the seed
pearls stitched on to it. It is to be Katherine’s wedding gown.

‘Will you live there?’ Katherine
cannot bear the thought of her sister being buried in the Wiltshire countryside.

‘I don’t like the idea of
it,’ says Anne, ‘what happened at the abbeys. The carnage.’

‘Wilton saw no violence,’ says
Katherine. ‘The abbess handed it over quite willingly, I believe, and was
pensioned off.’

Katherine cannot help but think of all the
other great abbeys, reduced to little more than rubble, the monks tortured and
terrorized, the utter devastation – Cromwell’s doing. In the name of the King, she
reminds herself. She remembers Latymer telling her of the holy men he saw – a score at
the very least, he had said – strung up from the trees, their guts spilt, near the Abbey
at Fountains.

‘I am glad to know that. But even so,
I shall stay at court. My husband likes to keep me close. And besides, I want to stay
near you.’

‘Heaven knows I shall need you.’
Katherine looks around the room where pockets of ladies are scattered about, women she
barely knows.

She has no inkling of their allegiance. They
listlessly waft fans in an attempt to stir the July heat. A trio of fat black flies
circles the room and occasionally someone swats at one of them with a fan. Katherine
reaches up, unlatching the window to let in a whisper of breeze. People have been
arriving all day – for the wedding. She wonders if it will be a blessing or a curse,
this marriage of hers. Katherine had wanted to confide in her sister. But there is so
much to confide: Murgatroyd, Latymer and her terrible sins; Seymour, whom she still
harbours in her heart; her disgust for the King. In her mind these things are
inextricably linked, one event leading to another as if there is some guiding principle
behind them, divine or damnable – she knows not which. She can’t bring herself to
put it into words, to say it out loud. She is afraid. Afraid of what, she isn’t
sure. It is an amorphous fear that hangs in the air.

‘I could command you to stay,’ she
quips with a nudge. If she pretends she is not afraid then perhaps she will convince
even herself.

‘Kit, you will be Queen,’ gasps
Anne, as if this is the first time she has really considered what is happening.

For the last weeks Katherine has been
appointing her household. She has insisted that Dot remain, in spite of the piqued
ladies who have tried so hard to place their gently born daughters with her. She has
fended off the flatteries and the gifts with a benign smile and has sat before a parade
of shy girls, gawky with adolescence, whom she is sure would rather stay at home with
their brothers and sisters than come and skivvy for the Queen.