Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (18 page)

Today she rouges her cheeks, making her eyes
seem brighter. They make Dot think of the river at sunset when the sun seems to get into
its very depths. Dot likes to sneak off and sit alone beside the Thames, watching the
boats, wondering where they are going. She knows the river meets the sea somewhere far
off, and that the big ships can travel for weeks without seeing land at all – it is
quite a thought. There is a painting that hangs in the long gallery, of galleons tall as
cathedrals, tossed about in a boiling ocean. Given where she came from and the fact that
she is here at Hampton Court Palace and serving the next Queen of England, having to
give herself a pinch every day to believe she’s not dreaming it all up, she thinks
she might have a chance of one day seeing the sea – almost anything seems possible.
Anything, that is, except a smile from William Savage who has still not acknowledged
her, despite her frequent visits to the squillery on one or other trumped-up errand.

She watches Katherine, who has gone to kneel
at the wooden altar at the far end of the chamber. She silently mouths a prayer and Dot
wonders what she prays for – not to lose her head like the other Queens, perhaps. When
she thinks of it too hard she feels sick. Katherine’s black satin
robe gleams like treacle; her hair, loose down her back, is the colour of the
marmalade they make in the palace kitchen, which tastes bitter and sweet at the same
time. The sight of her reminds Dot of Guinevere or Isolde, who could drive a man mad
with desire just from a glance.

She dusts the dresser, lifting off the
objects, the ivory comb, the silver-backed brush, the pot of scented oil that smells of
strange spices, the heavy necklace removed the previous night that rubbed a tender red
mark on Katherine’s neck. It is set with stones the size of thumbnails and the
colour of raw kidneys. She replaces it in the box, where there are velvet indentations
that fit its shape exactly, in the way broad beans nestle in their pod. She knocks over
a bottle of rose water with her elbow, gasping as it hits the floor with a clatter. It
doesn’t break but its stopper flies off and the water spills, leaking down between
the boards. The smell of roses spreads out through the room. She stoops to pick it up,
noticing that her stockings don’t match, wondering momentarily how she manages to
do everything she is supposed to when she cannot manage to turn herself out
properly.

‘What is it?’ asks Katherine,
looking up from her prayers.

‘I’m so sorry, my lady, it is
the rose water.’

‘There will be rivers of rose water,
Dot, don’t worry.’

They both laugh at this. Dot has the
impression that Katherine has only just realized what it means to be Queen; that
everything will be at her fingertips, despite the cost.

The gown, her wedding gown, is spread out on
the bed. It is a wonder, red and gold, encrusted with pearls and jewels, and is so heavy
that it took two of them to heave it from the wardrobe yesterday.

‘Help me into my kirtle first, and
then we will call in Sister Anne and Meg for the rest.’

Dot holds the kirtle while her mistress steps
into it, then laces it, pulling it tight at the back; the stiff taffeta rustles like
birds fluffing their feathers, and it smells of the pressing iron. Next she attaches a
pair of embroidered sleeves, tying them carefully at the shoulders, taking extra care
that the bows are neat though they will not even show once the gown is on.

‘Did you know, Dot, what an astrologer
said of me when I was an infant?’ says Katherine.

Dot tries to mumble in response, but her
mouth is full of pins.

‘That one day I would be Queen. Said
it was written in the stars. It became a bit of a joke in our family and they all used
to tease me and call me Majesty when I got above myself. We laughed about it because it
was the most unlikely thing imaginable.’

She stops, seems to be thinking hard about
something. Perhaps she is thinking of that handsome Thomas Seymour who has disappeared
without a word.

‘Things have a strange way of turning
out the way you least expect in life. Sometimes I wonder, Dot, if God has a sense of
humour.’

Dot doesn’t understand what she means,
for it is no laughing matter getting married to a king – especially this one. She
fetches Sister Anne and Meg, and between them they heave the gown on to Katherine who
stands as if it is nothing, light as a feather, not woven through with gold thread and
stitched with as many brilliants and pearls as there are stars in the sky. Katherine
allows in a few of the younger girls who have been poking their heads around the door,
twittering with excitement. They pretend Dot isn’t there. They don’t know
how to place her, don’t know how to address a girl who is nothing
more than a skivvy but is as close as a daughter to the woman who will be Queen in a
few hours.

Dot doesn’t care; she’s used to
it and knows her place. But she knows, too, that there are people who get a foot in the
door of the court and end up climbing higher and higher. Cromwell was the son of a
brewer or a smithy, or something like that, and Wolsey, who Dot has only vaguely heard
of but knows was a cardinal, which is the most important thing you can be in the Church
– except for Pope, of course – well, his pa was a butcher. She has an idea that both
Wolsey and Cromwell came to a sticky end but she tries not to think about that part of
it.

The dress and gown are on. Dot can’t
imagine how Katherine can look so cool and collected in the July heat, which is made
worse by the privy kitchens underneath her rooms. The stink of boiled cabbage wafts up
through the boards, erasing the remains of the rose scent. Dot undoes a sheaf of
lavender, strewing it about the room. Meg plaits Katherine’s hair and coils it up
on the back of her head, fastening it with ribbons, and Sister Anne lifts her wedding
hood from its box. The girls cluster around, and Dot hangs back, leaves them to it. She
has seen the hood close up already, with its diamonds and golden fringing, has even
tried it on when no one was in the room, felt its dead weight pressing at her
temples.

Katherine smiles but her left hand is
clenched so tight her knuckles look like shelled nuts. ‘I am ready,’ she
says, picking up her prayer book.

Meg looks as if she’s drowning.

‘Thank you, ladies.’

She sails out of the room in her prison of a
dress, her hand still a fist, with Meg and Sister Anne just behind. None of the maids
will be at the service, which is in the Queen’s
closet with only
about thirty attending. Not like you’d think a royal wedding would be, with crowds
and a procession through the streets afterwards.

Dot wonders again if Katherine is thinking
of that Seymour fellow. The King may be the King but Dot knows he is nothing more than a
man got up in glitter – and a fat old one at that, with a rotten stink about him and a
vicious temper. Katherine is going to have to share a bed with him. It makes Dot’s
skin crawl.

The Queen’s closet is clogged with
heat. Bishop Gardiner drones through the service. He wears a benign smile, but his eyes
have a sly look that belies it, and Katherine can’t help but think of that
choirboy with the broken finger.

He speaks: ‘
In nomine Patris et
Filii et Spiritus Sancti
.’

The congregation responds:
‘
Amen
.’

A cramped row of white-clad choristers
stands to her left, just visible if she swivels her eyes. There is barely space for the
guests as it is, and she can feel the press of people at her back. Her thoughts wander.
She cannot focus her mind on the service; she feels pinned down by the weight of her
dress, like one of Dante’s hypocrites in a gilded cape lined with lead. Is it not
hypocrisy to marry one when her heart is given to another? She would not be the first
who has done that. She dares not turn and look at the King beside her. His breath
whistles and wheezes, and his ambergris scent cloys, competing with the fog of incense
that billows from the thurible, congesting the airless room.

Gardiner speaks: ‘
Hoc est autem
verbum Domini
.’

The room responds: ‘
Deo
gratias
,’ words they have all uttered a hundred thousand times.

She thinks of the vows she is about to make,
of God up
there inspecting her sin-blotched soul, and wonders – not
for the first time – if this is her punishment wrapped in gold. Her stomacher is tied
too tight, making her breath shallow, and her knees complain despite the velvet cushion
beneath them; she fears standing and passing out, ruining this fragment of history which
will be written about, remembered, for ever.

She closes her eyes, thinking of Thomas, of
how he might have been here beside her, if fate had dictated a different path. The
thought burrows under her skin. The part of her that harbours him is numb, has become so
accustomed to the constant wrench and hurt that it feels nothing. She had hoped, in the
weeks after he left, for a letter, something, anything, to indicate that she was not
forgotten, but nothing came. She wants to assume him afraid of the King’s wrath
but a doubtful part of her fears worse. She has no right to hold his heart. She imagines
him clustered by ladies, beauties, offering himself up to them.

She stops the thought before it takes hold,
thinking instead of the other times she has knelt before God and spoken vows of
marriage. She was younger than Meg when she travelled from Rye House to Lincolnshire to
marry Edward Borough. She didn’t question it; her whole life had been a
preparation for marriage, and as she travelled north she had no misgivings, no fears of
wedding a stranger. Edward was a pretty boy, thin as a whip and sweet as a puppy. She
had met him only the once, briefly and formally, but he had sent a drawing, which
she’d kept under her pillow.

…
hoc est autem verbum Domini
–
Deo gratias
.

She thinks how innocent she was and how
lacking in ambition. Circumstance has foisted ambition on her now. She had made those
first vows without a second thought. But Edward
Borough was buried
within two years, and her mother too. To lose a mother and a husband within months of
each other, cut loose in the world at nineteen – she had thought then that life
couldn’t possibly be harder than that. How wrong she was. Latymer came next. He
seemed so safe, so easy to love. She loved him as one would a father. But it was his
love for her that drove their union. When he made his vows in the chapel at Snape, his
eyes welled with tears. She had never seen a man cry before, had thought them incapable
of it. How little she knew back then. Her thoughts circle around her, crows about a
tree.

Gardiner stops his drone and a boy begins to
sing the Kyrie eleison; his voice is the sound of diamonds and reverberates in the small
space, lifting her up, away from her thoughts. The King’s hand reaches for hers
and she opens her eyes to look at him, seeing that he, too, is transported by the song.
A small smile moves over his mouth and for a moment he is not the King, just an
ill-judged old man.

Could she love him as a father, she wonders.
At times she feels she could. But what of those moments when he is like an overgrown
infant in a tantrum? What of the other side of him: the blustery, vain youth with a
vicious streak? She cannot reconcile all the different parts of him into one person. She
wonders if he is thinking of the marriage vows he has made five times before?

The white cloth is flung over the altar and
the paten of bread placed on it, then the chalice. A knot of panic tightens in her and
she becomes aware of a small voice buried deep in her head shouting out, like a voice in
a dream that makes no sound. The host is raised. Her eyes follow it. The bell chimes, a
thin high ring, the blessing murmured.

…
corpore Christi
.

A chink and trickle as the chalice is filled –
the bell again. Eyes up.

…
sanguine Christi
.

Does the King truly believe that in this
moment the wine has become the blood of Christ? She cannot accept that a man of such
acute intelligence could believe it so.

Of all the things they have talked about,
they have never fully discussed their faith. It is assumed that she believes as he does.
But how
does
he believe? Mass that was recently in English is now in Latin as
before. You could not tell from this service that there had been ten years of change and
struggle. The King is becoming conservative in his old age. The thurible swings,
chattering faintly on its chain, drenching the room again in a cloud of incense.
Perhaps, she reasons, he is afraid to meet his maker knowing the atrocities that have
been committed in the name of the English Church – his Church. It pains her to think of
how great a weight it must be for him to bear, so much greater than her
hypocrite’s cloak.

She opens her lips and Gardiner presses the
host on to her tongue. It sticks to the arid roof of her mouth, tastes yeasty. She longs
for something to quench her thirst, imagines snatching the chalice from Gardiner’s
waxy hands and swigging it back; but then the idea that it is blood fixes itself in her
head. She slaps her imagination down – it is just wine, sanctified perhaps, but wine
nonetheless.

They stand. Katherine’s head spins,
everything is momentarily black; she grabs hold of the prie-dieu to stop herself falling
and can hear the King make his vows, distantly, as if from the other end of a tunnel.
Before she knows it she is repeating Gardiner’s words like a
parakeet … 
ego tibi fidem
 … the ring is pushed on to
her finger and the King presses his damp mouth to hers.

She shuts her eyes tight. It is done. She is
Queen.

She turns to face the guests who are all
smiling and looking at her. She wonders what they are thinking behind those smiles,
whether they are thinking of little Catherine Howard screaming down the long gallery not
forty feet from where they now stand; or the Cleves wedding and how Henry could barely
spit out his vows; or Anne Boleyn waiting for the swordsman to arrive from France to
decapitate her.