Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (31 page)

‘Help me pack up the books. I will
send for someone to remove them.’

Dot nods and curtsies. She has a smudge of
ash on her cheek, which Katherine absently brushes away with her finger.

‘Dot,’ she says, dropping her
voice further, ‘you must not breathe a word of this.’ But she knows that, of
everyone, Dot can be trusted; Dot is probably closer to her than anyone. ‘You do
understand the seriousness of this? If Anne Askew can be linked to me, we will all
burn.’

It is only on saying it, and seeing the look
of terror on Dot’s face, that the words seem to really find a foothold in her, and
she momentarily feels a hotness rise up her body as if the flames are licking at her
already. Katherine is horrified by her own recklessness, as if seeing for the first time
that she has brought this danger to her door willingly. She wants to tell herself that
the King adores her, would never let her burn, but she knows only too well that if
Wriothesley and Gardiner and that groveller Richard Rich can waft a cloud of heresy her
way they will all be choked on it. The King will know nothing of it until it is too
late. And the King is not here.

Dot picks up Katherine’s book, her new
book, the book that, just minutes ago, was the thing that shored her up against
obliteration. It seems diminished, just a few leaves of paper bound in hide, and some
words – a woman’s prayers, no more. She feels like a child standing in the face of
things so much bigger than her that she can’t make out their shape.

‘Not that one, Dot. That has nothing
in it that would condemn us.’

Part of her wishes her book
did
have something in it to condemn her, that she’d had the courage to fill it with
Calvin’s ideas,
justification by faith alone
, for that is what she firmly
believes. If she were truly a great Queen she would be prepared to go out in a blaze for
that. But she is no Anne Askew, who shouts her faith from the rooftops.
Scripture
alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, glory to God alone
. But then
Anne Askew is not Queen, and there is no need to shout when the King’s ear lies on
the pillow next to you.

She resolves to keep on persuading Henry,
gently, towards reform, to bring back the English Bibles for everybody, so people can
read God’s word for themselves, so they can think for themselves, to rid England
of Catholic corruption and hocus-pocus. In her head she is planning another book
already, a better book, one that stands up and loudly announces her faith, the new
faith, a book with the power to change things.

A book she will write if she survives.

Dot rushes down the long gallery with the
infernal François in her arms. This monkey is proving as troublesome as the
French King he’s named after. He’s trying to escape from
her hold, nipping at her with his sharp yellow fangs. He has already bitten her once and
drawn blood. Her heart stops when she sees the unmistakable silhouette of William Savage
framed in the doorway at the end of the gallery. She halts, unable to move. Thinks
stupidly of the fact that she has a rip in her pinny and her hair is all over the place.
He sees her too. Her stopped heart starts again, like the clappers. It has been so very
long, but there he is, her dearest William.

‘It is my Dot,’ he says.
‘My full stop.’

‘William, you’re back,’
she says.

The monkey takes its chance, leaping from
her arms and scampering off. But William grabs him.

‘Looks just like you,’ he quips,
chucking the monkey under the chin as you might a baby.

She is confused for a moment, doesn’t
know what he means, until he laughs and his joke eventually sinks in. He gives her back
the monkey, his hand brushing hers. She smiles at him, wanting to touch him properly
right there, in front of everyone, to push him up against the wall and press her mouth
on to his. But he seems older, bigger, different. His hair is longer and there is no ink
on his fingers. She can see the dark dots of stubble on his chin where there used to be
a wispy beard, and his clothes are fancy, covered in silver aiglets. He even smells
different, of some cloying perfume. He is a stranger, but familiar, and she is made
awkward in the face of him.

‘Where have you been?’ Her voice
is no more than a whisper.

‘Devon,’ he replies. ‘And
I have thought of you every day.’

Her heart bloats in her chest, making speech
seem impossible, but she squeezes out a faint, ‘And I, you.’

The monkey leans forward and picks at an
aiglet on his doublet, which makes him smile, and the sight of his dimple makes her feel
as if the root of her is being wrenched at. She wants to think of something to say but
her mind is befuddled by the nearness of him. She wants to bury her nose in the soft
part of his throat and find his real smell.

‘Who is this then?’ he asks.

‘François. He was a gift to the
Queen.’

‘So are you the Queen’s monkey
keeper now?’

He’s teasing and she can’t think
of anything bright or funny to say. A silence hangs invisibly between them.

‘I have been reading,’ she
blurts out.

‘My diligent Dot.’

She wants to tell him everything. To tell
him about getting rid of all the books and how the whole of the Queen’s household
had been in a spin of fear, and how Anne Askew was freed for lack of evidence against
her – but he must know all this, for he is one of them. (Whether Dot is quite one of
them she is not sure, but she thinks that all the carting around of books and knowing so
many secrets must mean she is.)

‘Things have been –’ she begins,
but is interrupted.

‘I see you have become acquainted with
my pet monkey.’ It is Katherine herself who has glided up silently.

William drops on to one knee, saying,
‘I have indeed, Highness, and a fine specimen he is too.’

‘As a matter of fact he’s rather
a nuisance, isn’t he, Dot? But he was a gift from you know who, so he’s here
to stay, I’m afraid. It is good to see you, William Savage. I’ve missed your
playing. So how does your wife? Got any little ones yet?’

Dot feels as if her legs might give way
under her. Wife! She had known he must marry one day, but she had assumed that day was
years off, and secretly she’d harboured
impossible hopes that
make her feel, in this moment, that she has been had. Like when one of the fools singles
you out for a humiliation so fond, you don’t know it till after it’s done.
He has a wife
already
? She looks at him for some kind of an explanation but his
eyes are firmly directed towards the Queen. And what is there to say, anyway? He is
married and she is just plain Dot Fownten; that is that.

She manages to gather herself together and
turns to take her leave, but the monkey will not let go of William’s doublet. The
Queen laughs, making a joke about it. William reddens and tries to loosen its tightly
gripped fingers. Dot, desperate now to remove herself, tugs hard at the animal. The
doublet rips as its hand breaks free, provoking great guffaws of laughter. A crowd has
begun to gather about them and Dot would gladly drop through the floor with the shame of
it.

Jane, the Queen’s new fool, appears.
She has a big round face and a wandering eye, and talks as if she has drunk too much
ale, nonsense mostly, nursery rhymes and drivel, but sometimes there is a strange sense
in her madness, as if she is echoing the things people don’t dare say. She elbows
herself to the front of the gathering and, looking François in the eye, pats her
shoulder. The monkey jumps on to it, perching there smugly as if butter wouldn’t
melt in its mouth.

‘The higher an ape climbs,’ she
slurs, ‘the more you see of its backside.’

This provokes more laughter. Dot is left
standing there, desperate to leave, but unable to find the words to excuse herself.

Katherine, seeming to sense her discomfort,
says quietly, ‘You go, Dot, I’ll see to this.’

And she slips away, down the backstairs and
out through
the courtyard, past the guards at the gate and down
towards the river. The streets are seething with people, carts trundle by, and hawkers
shout out, advertising their wares. In her good black dress they think her the kind of
person who has the money to buy, and so she is stopped every few steps by someone aiming
to part her from the coins she doesn’t have. Some of them are quite forceful and
she is glad she has nothing, so she can’t be fleeced.

The tide is low with great muddy tracts
exposed where a few boys, ankle deep in sludge, pick about, looking for scrap metal and
other bits and pieces dropped from the boats. A dead stench rises from the black mud.
Two seagulls squawk and fight over the carcass of a fish. Another, larger and with a
great hooked beak, swoops down and grabs it from them, flying off to perch on a post
with it. The others cark in complaint and continue pecking about among the filth. It is
like that, Dot thinks, the strong get the best of things and the rest are left to
complain.

She stands on the embankment, watching the
slow summer flow of the river and the wherries carrying people back and forth, thinking
of the sea somewhere at the end of it where the King is fighting battles against the
French – the court is full of it. She imagines throwing herself in, her swollen heart a
dead weight in her chest, pulling her under into the depths, being swallowed up and spat
out downriver to be picked over by gulls.

She feels her penny stitched into her hem
and she wonders what her family would think if she disappeared, but they are so very
distant and she doubts they would even hear of it for months. It is as if that was
another girl, from another world, who lived that life in Stanstead Abbotts, craving
after Harry Dent and yabbering with the maids in the village
square.
There is a yearning in her for the simplicity of it all and a sense of loss for what she
might have had: a string of tots and a drunk for a husband and nothing but pottage for
weeks in the lean part of the year – all the normal cares.

She hasn’t wanted for a meal since she
can remember and she is now a girl with expectations. Meg left her four pounds a year,
more than she has ever imagined, which will come to her soon – or so the notary had
said. That may be, but her worries now are so much more difficult to get a grip on, the
sense of danger hiding behind the brilliant tapestries, everything having to be kept
secret, and just Katherine standing between her and God alone knows what. She feels the
great burden of all the things she mustn’t tell: the books, the reading, Anne
Askew, the map of marks and bruises on the Queen’s body, the events at Snape. She
feels pinned down by all these secrets as if she’s nailed to the palace walls
through the hands and feet, like Christ.

And then there is William Savage.
My
Dot, my full stop
– and what is a full stop but a tiny mark on a page, a
nothing, that marks an ending? She will not think of William. He was never hers to begin
with. She will pretend he doesn’t exist.

She feels Meg’s absence like a hole in
her chest. Poor Meg, who disappeared before her eyes. They had been as close as sisters,
when she thinks about it. It had never seemed to matter that Meg was who she was, and
shouldn’t have been sharing confidences with a nothing-special girl like Dot, just
a servant, even if she did have a good dress and a well-fed flush in her cheeks. It was
only the months – the Elizabeth months, is how Dot thinks of them – when they lost each
other. But that was short-lived. Elizabeth puts a spell on people, that is her way. She
puts them under her magic, takes them if she wants them and gets rid of them when she is
bored. Dot has watched her do it. She doesn’t blame Meg. Meg
who coughed her heart up until it stopped beating. Four pounds a year will never make up
for the loss of Meg.

It is only Katherine whom Elizabeth never
discards. She has attached herself so close that the Queen cannot see what she is really
like. But Dot sees, and she will not let that girl get between her and Katherine, for
Katherine is all
she
has left. There are some uses to being so insignificant.
To Elizabeth, Dot is nothing more than a dust mouse in the corner of the room and not a
threat at all.

She walks back slowly through the evening
bustle. It is warm and the square outside the palace gates teems with people who have
gathered to pass the time of day and make the most of the last of the sun. A group of
girls play a skipping game, trying to avoid the dogs sniffing about their feet for
scraps. A few men lounge against a wall with cups of ale, watching and making comments.
Women chat in huddles, babies on hips. Dot could be one of those women, if her life had
not changed course all those years ago. A crier’s bell rings out and she hears his
call, ‘Hear ye! Hear ye!’ She can see the flash of his scarlet gown through
the crowd that has gathered around him, and pushes forward to find out what news has
drawn such a throng.

‘French fleet turned in the Solent.
The King’s ship
Mary Rose
is sunk. Near on five hundred souls drowned.
Vice-Admiral Sir George Carew lost with his ship.’

She tries again to imagine what it must be
like, the sea. Like the river – only vast? She thinks of the picture of ships that hangs
at the palace, with the sea dark like oxtail soup boiling in a pan. It strikes her
suddenly how it must have been for those men trapped in the bowels of that great ship,
sinking down to their watery grave, and how they are all the
same when
it comes to the end of it. From the Vice-Admiral right down to the lad who scrubs the
decks – when you go, you are brought to nothing, regardless of how high you have
climbed.

‘He named that ship after his
sister,’ says Katherine.

‘Terrible, terrible,’ says
Huicke, his face stricken.

‘The horror of it,’ adds Sister
Anne.