Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (23 page)

Elizabeth and Meg have their heads together,
whispering. Meg rises, taking Elizabeth by the arm, leading her to the floor. The
Bassanos start up a country dance and the girls join a circle of others. Meg skips
through the steps head held high, uncharacteristically bold. She throws a flirtatious
flick of the eyes at an onlooking usher. When she circles back round to him she beckons
the boy with a single finger and a smile. He slips, beaming, into the circle beside her
but she turns away from him as if he doesn’t exist. Katherine begins to make a
list in her head of possible suitors. Elizabeth says something to Meg and the two of
them laugh, heads tossed back. Meg seems to have had the sadness taken out of her. That
is the effect of Elizabeth. Even Katherine feels she has fallen a little under the
girl’s spell. It is a shame Henry will not let her stay and she will be packed off
back to Ashridge in a day or so. But watching them dance, their happiness is infectious
and Katherine feels that she is making a success of her role as stepmother. Although
this thought reminds her again of the child she
must
conceive – the son that
will make her safe. For all the yeast and the rising, it is easy to fall in this
place.

Elizabeth had begun to write letters to her
stepmother. She had sent her a poem written in both French and English,
beautifully inscribed in a flawless hand, a formidable thing for a girl of ten.
Katherine can’t bear to see the child ostracized in this way and sent a young
painter, new to her household, to make a likeness of her. Now when Henry visits the
Queen’s rooms, he sees his daughter on the wall of the presence chamber, her
delicate hands clutching a book, looking for all the world unmistakably a Tudor. Just
her mother’s dark hooded eyes betray her Boleyn blood.

Brother Will approaches; he has been
dancing, too, and is pink-cheeked and breathless. His shirt has come untied at the
throat. He sits beside her and Katherine leans forward to tie it for him, telling him to
sit still as if he is a child.

‘Kit …’ he says in that
little-boy way he has when he wants a favour.

‘What do you want, Will?’

‘It is about my divorce
petition.’

‘Will, not this again. I have talked
to him. He will not budge.’

‘It’s one law for him and
another for the rest of us,’ spits Will.

‘It gives you something to complain
about. You know how you like to moan. And you have everything else you’ve ever
wanted. You are a garter knight, you are Earl of Essex, your mistress is one of the
beauties of the court.’

He stomps off to join Surrey across the
room.

The King beckons her and she moves towards
him, weaving her way through the dancers, planting herself on the stool at his knee. He
wears a bright jowly grin and ignores Bishop Gardiner beside him, who makes a fawning
attempt to get his attention, almost but not quite touching his sleeve. The King bats
him away with a swipe of an arm, as he would a fly, and the Bishop glares at Katherine.
One of his eyes has
a droop and his mouth is permanently downturned,
making his face seem as if it is on the brink of melting. As he turns away his fox fur
flicks like a devil’s tail.

‘Kit, we have something of importance
to tell you,’ Henry says in the friendly growl he uses when he is in an indulgent
mood. He rarely uses her pet name in public.

‘Harry,’ she says, keeping her
voice low, intimate. She meets his eyes, glass beads half swallowed by flesh, but they
are creased at the corners and that takes the menace out of them. This is a good mood
indeed.

‘We have decided that you will take
our place as Regent when we go to fight the French, Kit.’

A thrill rolls through her and with it a
feeling of weight, as if she is more firmly rooted. ‘But Harry, this
is …’ She begins to see what this means. She will be at the helm of England.
Not since Catherine of Aragon has he handed over so much power. ‘It is too great
an honour.’

‘Kit, we trust you. You are our
wife.’

She glances at Gardiner, who is pale as a
ghost, and she looks back at Henry, catching the residue of a smirk playing on his lips,
revealing to her that what was an intimate exchange between husband and wife had in
reality been carefully stage-managed to be overheard by the Bishop.

‘What is it?’ Henry snarls at
Gardiner, who attempts an ingratiating smile, more of a grimace than anything.

‘Your Majesty, if I may be so
bold …’ He stumbles for words. ‘There are some matters of state
–’

‘Not now,’ barks the King.
‘Can’t you see we are talking with our wife?’

Gardiner begins to stammer something – an
apology, perhaps.

The King cuts him off. ‘We are
discussing her regency,’ he
adds. ‘Queen Katherine is to
be Regent when we are in France. What think you to that, Bishop?’

Gardiner is so quick to drop on to one knee
that he knocks his elbow on the arm of the throne, letting out a yelp of pain. When he
has collected himself he manages to purr, ‘It will be my honour, Highness, to
serve you.’ He takes Katherine’s hand in both of his. They are loose and
waxy, like uncooked pork fat. He kisses her wedding ring. An oily drift of white flakes
is spread over his velvet shoulders.

‘We are most grateful to Your
Grace,’ she says.

‘Now go,’ snaps the King.

Gardiner creaks to his feet and backs
away.

‘Our council must pass it. Some of
them will loathe the idea.’ A glint of mischief passes over Henry’s face.
‘But that is a formality. We will set up a council for you, my dear. And we intend
to draw up a new will, should anything happen while …’

She grips his sleeve. ‘Nothing will
happen. God will keep you safe, Harry.’

They sit in silence for some time, watching
the dancers. Katherine’s thoughts are soaring.
She
as Regent of England –
she had never thought to imagine such a thing. The idea of power prickles beneath her
skin, and thoughts of seeing all those fawning Catholic councillors put in their place
pop into her mind like bubbles. She feels shoots growing out from her belly, pushing
down beneath the palace, strengthening like the roots of a great oak that reach deep
into the earth. The King’s face is spread with satisfaction and Katherine notices
his eyes following Elizabeth as she skits around the hall with one of the Dudley boys,
seeing how a small smile insinuates itself on to the far reaches of his mouth.

‘Elizabeth is becoming quite a
beauty,’ he says.

‘She looks like her father.’

‘You are right, Katherine, she is a
Tudor through and through.’ He seems excited, his glass eyes dancing, like a child
with a new toy.

She sees Gardiner, seething, across the
room, in a huddle with Wriothesley and another of his conservative cronies, Richard
Rich, whispering something as he glances in her direction. But, son or no son, they
cannot touch her now. She feels an unfamiliar contentment, like a cat stretching itself
out in a patch of sun, something she has not felt for longer than she cares to
remember.

‘I was wondering, Harry, if the Lady
Elizabeth might come to court when you are campaigning in France. I would like to have
our family about me.’

‘If you did not wish it, my dear, we
would command it,’ he booms.

Katherine’s roots expand incrementally
further into the ground.

The whispering trio break away from one
another and Wriothesley catches her look with his stoatish eyes. It is nothing more than
a glance, but one brimming with such contempt it sends a shiver through her as if
someone has walked on her grave.

Dot is rubbing at the windowpanes with a
vinegar-dampened cloth. It squeaks against the glass. The fumes make her eyes smart. It
is the Queen’s birthday and all the royal children are gathered in the privy
chamber to hear Katherine read a letter
from the King, who is at war
in France. Things are certainly different with him away; there is a carefree feeling
about the palace. Prince Edward, who is a stony little creature, sits on Mary’s
lap. Elizabeth is now with them, too, for she has recently arrived from Ashridge. She
sits pressed up to Meg, whispering. They are thick as thieves. Dot rubs harder at the
glass, so hard she fears she might break it.

Elizabeth is like one of the knife
sharpener’s magnets, drawing everyone in. Even Rig the dog sits at her feet,
gazing up at her as if she were the Virgin Mary herself. Meg is holding her hand. But
Dot is not drawn in by her. Dot imagines she is rubbing Elizabeth away with her vinegar
cloth like a smear on the window. Meg is rising up and up and out of her reach. Now she
is the friend of the King’s daughter and they huddle over books together, taking
it in turns to read out loud in tongues that Dot doesn’t understand. They both sit
with the tutor, quietly scratching words on to pages while Dot brushes out the hearth
and sweeps the floor and heaves the cushions down to the yard to beat the dust from them
and getting shushed if she makes too much noise. Meg is thinner than ever and pallid as
a slab of goat’s cheese, but she wears a bright smile so no one notices. And
Katherine has so much else to do, rushing from place to place, holding council meetings,
hearing petitions, dictating letters.

‘See how the Queen is,’ Dot had
heard Elizabeth say to Meg. ‘Who says women cannot rule? Who says they must be
married and governed by men?’

Meg had laughed, as if Elizabeth were
joking.

‘If I am ever Queen I shall not be
ruled by a man.’

But they all know she will never be Queen.
Her brother will be King and his children after him and she will doubtless be hitched up
to some foreign prince – and good riddance.

Dot secretly wishes the King would not return
from France, for though Katherine is busy she is more brimming with life than Dot can
ever remember. The strain has disappeared from her brow and the painted smile is gone.
There is a fire lit in her. She has written a prayer for the soldiers going to war. It
has been printed and passed around, all the ladies nodding their approval – even bitter
old Stanhope seems impressed.

Dot dumps the rag in her bucket and pulls
her duster out of her belt, running it over the panelling and the prayer stand. There is
a copy of Katherine’s prayer there. It is nothing to Dot but a pattern of lines
and swirls like rows of stitching on a white shirt. She hates herself for not being able
to unpick it. Once she would have asked Meg to read it to her, but not now; not now Meg
has her new little friend. She can’t ask Katherine, for she is busy dealing with
all of England. She can’t ask Betty; Betty is worse than her when it comes to
reading and can’t even sign her own name. Dot would be laughed at if she asked any
of the cooks, for they already think she has ideas above her station. She knows that
Betty has been loose-tongued with them about her secrets and they laugh behind her back,
calling her Duchess Dotty. Sometimes when she passes through the kitchens there is a
sudden, thick silence. She is not trusted. They don’t know where she belongs.

But there is William Savage. And for all the
packages she has hidden about her person and secretly delivered to the Queen for him, he
owes her a favour. She resolves to ask him when she next goes to the kitchens, though he
is there less and less. There is a new clerk called Wilfred, who has spots and looks at
Dot as if she’s got the plague, while William can be found most evenings in the
Queen’s chambers playing the
virginals. He has been the object
of her dreams a whole year now. But she can feel him slipping away with his music, out
of the kitchens and into the fine world she only inhabits invisibly, like a ghost – a
ghost with a duster. She sometimes watches his fingers dance over the keys as she passes
to light the fire or bring something to the Queen. It is truly a beautiful sound he
makes, and she wonders if it is the sound of Heaven.

Elizabeth has written a poem for the
Queen’s birthday. Katherine seems more delighted with it even than with her gift
from the King – a brooch encrusted with rubies and emeralds that arrived from one of the
London goldsmiths this morning.

‘Look, Dot,’ she had said when
she opened the box. ‘The emeralds are Tudor green for the King and the rubies
stand for me. See how they sit together.’ She had given it to Dot without even
trying it on.

Finding herself alone in the wardrobe, Dot
had pinned it on to her own bodice and looked at herself in the glass. It looked wrong
there, like a lily in a field of buttercups, and her face was wrong too, eyes too deeply
set, mouth too wide. When she unpinned the brooch, it pricked her finger and she got a
smudge of blood on her white coif.

The Queen is reading Elizabeth’s poem
out loud and sighs as if she’s reading a letter from a lover. It is true that
Elizabeth’s gift is a beautiful thing. Dot had seen it the day before when it had
been left in the schoolroom. She may not be able to read but she can tell that the
writing is perfectly even. Part of Dot wants to feel sorry for Elizabeth, the poor girl
whose father has called her a bastard and whose mother, Nan Bullen, was thought to be a
witch with six fingers and was killed for all sorts of unspeakable things. She
had
felt sorry for the
girl, buried in the country at
Ashridge, miles from anywhere, when she should be living in a palace surrounded by
courtiers, and with her father. Though Dot secretly thought that if
she
had a
father as terrifying as the King, she would rather be anywhere, even in some gloomy grey
place in the middle of nowhere like Ashridge, than under his gaze, which made even great
people small with fear.

When Meg came back from her visit she had
described Ashridge, painting a picture of sodden, windswept gardens, huge dank rooms
where they huddled around smoggy hearths until their clothes stank of woodsmoke,
draughty corridors and high stone arches infested with bats that would swoop and flutter
and squeal at night. Meg, who was not usually one to chat, talked all the time of her –
Elizabeth this and Elizabeth that. Dot hadn’t minded; it was so good to see Meg
throwing off the past, finding a little spirit. But then Elizabeth arrived at court a
few weeks ago, and everything is changed.