Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (37 page)

His face breaks into a smile. ‘Pick it
up then.’

She bends and takes the papers from the
floor, placing them in his waiting hand, only then becoming aware of how much she is
trembling.

‘And that,’ he points at the
ribbon which lies in a squiggle by the skirting.

She ducks down to pick it up.

As she goes to stand, he places his foot on
her shoulder,
pushing her back with the word, ‘Down,’ as
if she’s a dog. He holds the ribbon up to the light, inspects it and then throws
it back to the floor.

‘Scared, are you?’ he spits.
‘Do you have reason to be?’

‘No, my lord,’ she whispers,
‘it is just …’

‘Well, you should be.’ He has
started to flick through the papers, stopping occasionally to read from them. ‘For
this,’ he taps them with a finger, ‘is heresy.’

Dot notices Jane the Fool still there, one
eye roaming the room, the other watching her. She begins to sing in her little girl
voice –
Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well
 …

‘Get up,’ barks Wriothesley.

Dot staggers to her feet, pressing herself
back against the wall, wishing it would swallow her.

‘I forget your name, girl.’

‘It is Nelly, my lord, Nelly
Dent.’ She gives the Fool a look that she hopes to God will stop her from blurting
out the truth.

‘Ah yes, Nelly Dent. Lady
Hertford’s skivvy.’ He grabs her arm tightly, with a hand that is dry and
scaled, pulling her towards him. ‘
You
will come with me.’

His face is so close to hers she can smell
the rotten-milk stink on his breath.

‘She is the dot on the horizon, the
speck in the ocean, the full stop,’ blathers Jane.

‘Oh will you shut up, you stupid
creature,’ snaps Wriothesley, giving the Fool a shove and dragging Dot off down
the gallery.

Dot is nowhere to be found. Katherine paces
her rooms; a board creaks each time she treads on it, back and forth, back and forth. It
has been two days now and she has barely slept with worry. She can feel Wriothesley and
Gardiner at her heels. Most of her ladies have made some excuse or other to get away
from the palace – to go ahead to Hampton Court; to visit new babies in the family, or
suddenly ailing parents, or a cousin who is dying; to attend to some sudden urgent
business somewhere – anything to get out of Wriothesley’s orbit. He has terrified
them all with his questioning. Her rooms have emptied. The very stones of the palace
seem to hold their breath, waiting for events to unfold.

Who sanctioned those interrogations? Can it
be done without the King’s permission? She daren’t ask Henry. Besides, there
is barely a moment with him alone and if he comes to her chamber at night, he is paraded
in with his torch-lit retinue, who wait outside to march him away within the half-hour.
He still tries for an heir then, but she has lost hope of that being her salvation, for
more often than not he is incapable, despite her best efforts. And where is Dot?
Wriothesley’s shadow looms over everything and it is the shape of the Tower.

Only her close circle remains. Her sister, who
is nervy as a colt, is standing at the window looking out, biting her nails. Bossy
Lizzie Tyrwhitt, a safe pair of hands, and ancient Mary Wootten, who has been so long at
court she has seen everything, are stitching shirts for the poor on the settle. Cat
Brandon is here too, embroidering in the window seat to make the most of the light. She
is not the sort to abandon ship. And there is Stanhope at the table playing patience,
always playing patience, flying the flag for the Seymour family.

Katherine had given Stanhope leave to go but
she insisted on remaining.

‘We need to stick together,’
she’d said, adding, ‘they are trying to bring down the husbands by getting
at the wives.’

Of course she is right. If Gardiner and
Wriothesley could pull down Hertford’s lot, then nothing would stand in their way.
These days Hertford, it is generally acknowledged, has more power than all the privy
councillors put together. And despite the fact that he’s a driven reformer, the
King dotes on him – perhaps Hertford reminds the King of his favourite dead wife, Jane.
Gardiner would give his right arm to see Hertford take a tumble. Katherine has to
concede to Stanhope; she has fortitude to stay in this wasps’ nest.

Katherine would be glad of her diminished
household, if it weren’t for the fact that it makes her seem deserted, weakened,
like an animal at bay, all its resources used. She must give the impression of being
unshaken. Which is why – as she’d explained to Dot – she wears her finest dresses,
laced and buckled and buttoned and clipped into them, and weighs herself down with the
Queen’s jewels. But where is Dot? Someone must find her. Sister Anne is crumbling
and in no fit state to help; Will is away, as is Udall, and even Huicke –
they have each been sent away on one pretext or other. It begins to
come clear, when she thinks about it. All her allies are away – the men, anyway. It is
no coincidence. Gardiner and Wriothesley have chosen their moment well to start this
thing, whatever it is. She paces, trying to keep her mind away from the Tower and the
block.

But William Savage, William is still here;
he can be trusted. She calls Lizzie Tyrwhitt over to find a page to fetch him. When he
comes, he looks perturbed and pale, twisting his long fingers together, his dark eyes
woven with worry. He must know that if Katherine is brought down he’ll topple with
her – all those books would be enough to condemn him. Someone would tell, or
they’d rack him until he broke.

She notices that he wears a black enamelled
mourning ring and when he takes her hand she touches it, asking, ‘Your
wife?’

He nods in response.
‘Childbirth.’

‘I am sorry,’ she replies,
adding after some moments, ‘the baby?’

He shakes his head.

She strokes the back of his hand. It is soft
as a girl’s.

He manages a brief smile as he says,
‘It is God’s will.’

‘That is true, William. We have to
trust God’s plan for us.’

There is a commotion from the yard and a
cheer goes up. It must come from the cocking house or the tennis courts. Life is going
on as usual at Whitehall, while this silent vacuum reigns in her own chambers.

‘I have need of your help,’ she
says, squeezing his hand.

‘You know I will do
anything.’

‘Dorothy Fownten is gone.’

He gasps, his eyes wide with shock.

She realizes he has misunderstood her.
‘Not dead. Or,
at least, I think not … hope not.
Lost … Dot is lost, William.’

He tilts his head to one side, scrunching
his brows. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It has been two days since I have
seen her. William, you must find her. She is so very dear to me.’

‘And to me,’ he whispers.

‘I have asked all my ladies, but none
have seen her, not in the kitchens, nor in any other place here. Only the Fool Jane
claimed she’d seen her, but I could get nothing out of her but a nonsense
rhyme.’

‘What did she say?’

‘I can’t remember, William. It
was nothing but gibberish.’

‘You must try. It is the only thing we
have.’

‘Something about bells, I
think.’

She rubs her temples as if trying to massage
the memory out of her head, and fragments of a song come to her. She begins to hum the
tune and the words drift along with it … 
When will you pay me? Say the
bells of Old Bailey
.

‘There is no bell at Old
Bailey,’ says William, who has taken up the tune too. ‘It is the bell of St
Sepulchre that is right behind Newgate.’ He throws up his hands with a sharp
exhalation and cries, ‘She has been taken to Newgate? I will go there.’

‘William, I can’t thank you
enough.’ Katherine takes his hands in both of hers and kisses the scrunched tips
of their gathered fingers. ‘You must do all you can. Say you are sent by the
palace.’

He goes to leave.

She stops him with a hand on his sleeve.
‘Take care, William. And if you find her, remember she is mine. She is the nearest
thing I have to a …’

She doesn’t say ‘daughter’;
she knows how it would sound if said out loud, for Dot is as much a different species
from her as that monkey. Or that is how most would have it. But it is true: Dot feels as
close as kin, closer sometimes.

‘You have broken her heart once and
you will not do it again,’ she adds, surprising herself with the steel in her
voice.

He touches his hand to his heart, saying,
‘You have my word,’ and bows before turning to leave.

Dot has been alone for a long time,
forty-five hours. She knows this because she has counted the tolls of a great tenor bell
that rings out the hours close by. She drank the last drops of rancid water, from the
ewer that someone had plonked down when she arrived, an age ago. There is nothing here –
no bench, no candle, no blanket – just a bucket in the corner, a slit for a window, too
high to look out of, which throws a little square of light on to the floor, and a nest
of mice for company. She had spent the hours of darkness feeling petrified, huddled into
a corner on a heap of piss-ridden straw she had scraped together, listening to the
shouts and wails of the other inmates. She tries to keep her mind off things. When she
arrived she had battered at the door ferociously, shouting, desperate for someone to
come and tell her what was happening, but the hours passed and her voice turned hoarse.
No one was going to come, that was clear. Her shouts became whimpers and eventually died
altogether, leaving her with her thoughts.

When she thinks about the bare fact that she
will not survive, it is too much: never feeling the sun on her skin, never
crushing a stalk of rosemary between her fingers to release the
scent, never again feeling a man’s hands on her, never knowing what it is to give
birth. She breaks into a cold sweat and has to clutch at the rough stones of the walls
for fear of falling into a dark place. In her mind it is like the pictures of Hell on
the walls of the church in Stanstead Abbotts that put the frights up her as a girl –
foul demons, half bird and half man, ripping sinners limb from limb. She makes herself
conjure up an image of Christ on the cross and whispers over and over, ‘Jesus died
for us, Jesus died and was risen.’

She tries to think back to that church and
the towering crucifix behind the altar, but she cannot fix the image of it in her mind,
it is too long ago. Her mind keeps wandering to a statue of the Virgin there that used
to cry. People came from far and wide to wonder at those holy tears. It turned out that
they were not tears at all. They were nothing but drips of rainwater from a series of
pipes leading to a gutter that someone had rigged up; no one had thought to question why
it was that she only cried when it was raining. No wonder people turned to reform. Her
own faith is worn thin as spring ice on a pond.

She distracts herself with the words of love
songs she remembers from years ago, humming the tunes to push the other thoughts out of
her head, but the love songs bring thoughts of William Savage. Just to see William one
more time. If she thinks hard enough she can feel his fingers burrowing, the heave of
him, his breath on her neck. She finds herself awash with tears, gasping, choking on
them. And then her thoughts return to the present. If she knew what was on that paper
she might at least have an idea of how to save herself, but Wriothesley had given
nothing away.

He had marched her out of the palace, one
dry claw gripping at her upper arm, his mouth drawn tight like a miser’s
purse. She had wanted desperately to shout out to someone to tell the
Queen, but didn’t dare, for now she was Nelly Dent who had nothing to do with the
Queen. Jane the Fool followed them, chanting … 
Ding dong bell,
pussy’s in the well
 … over and over until Wriothesley turned
and kicked her on the ankle, making her yelp like a dog and scuttle off. In the yard he
handed Dot over to a man who tied a sack over her head, bundled her into a cart and
brought her to this place.

A hatch opens in the door and a hand
proffers a cup.

‘Where am I?’ she asks.
‘Is this the Tower?’

She hears a guffaw of laughter. ‘I
don’t know who you think you are, gel. You may ’ave a decent wool dress and
be brought from the palace, but you ain’t one of them duchesses what gets took to
the Tower to get ’er ’ead tidily sliced off, that’s clear as
day.’

‘Then where am I?’

‘This is Newgate, gel, and a pretty
palace it is too, for the likes of you.’

‘But what will happen to me
here?’

‘Don’t ask me, gel. But I do
know if you don’t take this cup ’ere, you won’t be getting
another.’

She takes the cup. It is half filled with a
thin tepid broth. He passes her a hunk of coarse bread and slams the hatch. There is the
curled body of a dead weevil in the bread and a slick of oil floating on the broth, but
the smell of it has set off hunger pangs in her gut and her mouth is watering. She wolfs
it down and then regrets it, wishing she’d saved some, for she has no idea when
more will come.