Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (40 page)

Paget, still curled into an obsequious
crouch, says, ‘I’m sure that even the court of King François himself has not
such beauties adorning it.’

‘We were talking of God, were we not,
Gardiner?’ Henry says, ignoring Paget and waving a meaty hand towards the
Bishop.

They know she cannot hold her tongue when it
comes to religion. That is the trap. They think they have her.

‘We were indeed, Your Majesty.’
Gardiner’s sagging eye flicks towards her.

‘We were discussing justification by
faith alone. What think you to that, my dear?’ He pats his wife’s knee,
shuffling
at the sky-blue fabric of her gown to feel the shape of her
leg beneath, gripping at her thigh.

They mean to have her talking blindly of
Calvin. She can sense all the eyes in the room on her, and her skin feels tight as if it
has shrunk and become too small to accommodate her. Huicke’s words circle her
head:
docile, acquiescent, silent
. It is not so funny now.

‘Your Majesty,’ she replies,
‘I only know that God made me as nothing more than a foolish woman. I could not
suppose to know more than you. I must …’ She pauses. ‘I will refer my
judgement to Your Majesty’s wisdom, as my only anchor here on earth, next to
God.’

The King’s grip tightens on her thigh.
‘But,’ he says, ‘if this were the case you would not constantly seek
to instruct us with your opinions.’

A million thoughts are roaring in
Katherine’s head and the room seems to recede, distorting everyone in it,
rendering their features grotesque as they watch and wait for her reply. She has to rein
in the part of herself that wants to leap off her husband’s lap and defend
herself; reply to him that she
would
seek to instruct him for he is dense and
narrow-minded, and her thoughts and interrogations are more subtle by far than his.

A coal falls from the hearth, rolling
red-hot on to the floorboards. A page jumps forward, gathering it with the fire tongs,
scuffing at the sooty mark it has left with his slipper. Stanhope fiddles with her ruby,
running it up and down its chain. Sister Anne grips tightly at her cup of ale. Gardiner
twitches, still awaiting that bone. The room hangs in suspension.

‘I think it unseemly and preposterous
for a woman to take it upon herself to instruct her husband.’ She keeps her eyes
down and her voice low and unwavering. ‘If I have ever given
the impression of doing so, it was not to maintain my own opinion but more in the hope
of distracting Your Majesty from the terrible pain of your infirmities. My hope was that
Your Majesty would reap some ease thereby but also’ – she strokes the back of his
hand, looking up at him then, widening her eyes like a pet kitten – ‘that I might
profit from your great knowledge of such matters.’

The King hugs her to him, saying with a wet
whisper in her ear, ‘That’s more like it, sweetheart. Now we are truly
friends again.’

Relief washes over her. She is reprieved –
for now. But she is struck more than ever by the knowledge that her safety hangs on the
whims of a volatile old man. The haste of Henry’s about-turn makes her wonder if
this was more some kind of devious test than a trap. She wouldn’t put it past him.
And what, anyway, is true friendship, in someone as mercurial as the King?

Gardiner is twitching with
disappointment.

Katherine smiles at him, saying,
‘Bishop, your cup is empty. Perhaps you would like more ale.’

He holds out the cup to be filled but cannot
bring himself to smile back at her.

She has won, but the triumph feels as
fragile as a spider’s web.

They time their departure just as the early
tide is rising so it doesn’t take long to travel to Hampton Court. Katherine had
tried to delay, couldn’t bear the idea of leaving without Dot. But Dot is still
nowhere to be found and Katherine no longer knows where to look or whom to ask. Her
diminishing hopes lie with William Savage.

Meanwhile, the King’s barge floats
placidly alongside hers at the centre of the flotilla that conveys the court’s
inner circle. He waves to her with that look on his face that he used to have, the same
look on the faces of the Kings around the manger in the great Magi painting that she
remembers hanging at Croyland – a benign adoration. She wonders where that painting is
now – adorning some earl’s privy chambers, no doubt. It is the look he had for her
before they were married. If last night was a test, then she has passed. But it is no
reason for her to drop her guard, for if it took so little to change him it will take
less to change him back. Surrey sits in the King’s barge and catches her eye with
a nod of solidarity. He, too, knows what it is like to hang by a thread, to be in and
out of favour with the King.

The red moulded chimneys and crenellated
towers of the palace appear suddenly, banners dancing in the breeze, as they round the
bend in the river. Soon the building reveals itself from behind the riverbank
vegetation. The sight never fails to surprise her, the vastness of the place, its
newness, its audacity. When they disembark the King takes her hand, leading her off into
the gardens, though he has Paget hovering like an unwanted fly and brandishing a sheaf
of papers that need his attention.

The King swats him away. ‘Not now,
Paget, not now.’ He turns to Katherine then, saying, ‘Come, Kit, let’s
see what the gardeners have been busy planting.’

They walk hand in hand, and the King chats
blithely about this and that. She stoops to pick up the perfect half sphere of a fallen
finch’s nest. In it, nestled among a drift of fluff and feathers is a trio of
small speckled eggs. The sight of them makes her feel quite bereft and she whispers,
‘How sad.’

The King takes the nest from her, saying,
‘Don’t worry, sweet Kit, those little ones will survive.’ And he tucks
it safely back into the branches of a nearby tree.

But the empty broken feeling will not leave
her. She wonders when she stopped wanting a child for the pure sake of it and started
wanting one for the sake of her own safety. She has given up hoping now. And what of
Dot? She dares not mention Dot to the King for fear of igniting some new suspicion. They
walk a little more and finally sit on a bench in a shady knot garden enclosed by high
walls of privet, where he pulls her into him with his arm so that she can rest her head
against him. He hums, she can feel the sound reverberating in his chest, and he strokes
the softest part of her temple – the place, her brother told her once, you could kill a
man if you pressed hard enough.

It is quiet enough to hear the fish diving
in the pond but Katherine begins to hear, beyond her husband’s soft humming and
occasional splosh of a fish, a metallic rattle and the unmistakable sound of marching
feet. The noise approaches, becoming louder, and the King’s tune dies as
Wriothesley appears in the privet archway at the head of a small army, twenty strong, of
yeoman guards, armed and kitted out in the King’s own livery.

‘Oh, God save me,’ murmurs
Katherine. ‘I thought it was done with.’ She has come to the end of her
resistance and thinks, just take me now. Take me and do what you will. Of all the ways
she had thought it would happen, this was not it. It is Henry’s cruellest game
yet, to let her believe herself reprieved and then –

But the King is on his feet, black-faced and
screaming at his Chancellor. ‘Knave! Arrant knave! Beast! fool!’ he shouts.
‘Be gone!’

Wriothesley signals the guards to stop with a
visibly trembling hand. He seems unsure of how to respond.

The King trembles with rage and seems unable
to curb his shouting. ‘Out of my sight, varlet,’ he bellows, wheezing with
the effort.

Bewildered and white-eyed, Wriothesley turns
tail and scuttles off, hunched and humiliated, under the gaze of the guards. He knows,
as she does, that it will be round the whole palace by suppertime – that he came to
arrest the Queen and the King sent him packing, calling him a fool and a varlet before a
score of halberdiers. Wriothesley has played the wrong card – so very unlike him. Did no
one get word to him of last night’s events? Perhaps the King was testing him too –
only Wriothesley has failed
his
test.

‘That man,’ the King growls,
‘is pissing close to the wind.’

‘I think only that he is mistaken,
Your Majesty, I’m sure he meant no harm. I shall call him back to make amends with
you.’

‘Oh my sweetheart, how little you
know,’ he says, stroking her cheek and running his hand over the tender part of
her throat. ‘This man has been an arrant knave to you. He would have had you
tumble like the others, my dear. Let him go, devil that he is, to his own
comeuppance.’

Time has lost all meaning for Dot, the days
have merged one into the other and she wonders if the world has forgotten she exists.
She barely thinks she exists herself any more. She has stopped counting out the strokes
of the bell or watching
the sliver of window for signs of day or
night. She sleeps when she’s tired, wakes when she’s not and eats the
miserable vittles that are brought to her without complaint. Each Monday at the toll of
nine, the condemned prisoners are taken out to meet their ends. She knows this because
the scaffold is outside her cell and she hears their final words, confessing their guilt
and begging for the Lord’s mercy, or pleading their innocence to the last. They
usually make a prayer or spill out their love to their families, whose choked witterings
and wails she can hear too. Then comes the dull thud of the hangman’s trap, and
with it the curdling fear that pierces through her gut, forcing thoughts of her own fate
to the front of her mind.

She has never seen a hanging; nothing like
that ever happened in Stanstead Abbotts, only the occasional thief put in the stocks for
stealing a loaf or a cut of meat. She always felt sorry for them, whatever their crime,
because by her reckoning they only ever stole when they were starving with hunger. She
was never one to chuck rotten cabbages at them. She has seen some violent things, has
felt her share of fear, but the idea of stepping up to the scaffold – or worse, the
stake – is too much to think of.

Yet she cannot help but imagine her own
death, the cold earth packed over her. She can’t bear to think of it but
can’t not. It makes her hollow. Twenty years old is too young to die. Meg was only
nineteen. But Meg may as well have died when Murgatroyd wrenched all the joy out of her.
She hears Meg’s words: ‘
I am afraid, Dot. I am afraid to
die
.’ If Meg, with all her belief and praying and reading of the gospels, was
afraid to die then what of Dot, who has thought more of King Arthur and Camelot than
God? She tries to think of God now but her head is too full of fear to get things
straight.

She thinks she would have completely lost
her mind were
it not for Elwyn. He is the guard who keeps an eye on
her most days, the one who was guarding her the day Wriothesley came to question her.
Elwyn couldn’t hide his dislike of the man. When he’d taken her back to her
cell that day he’d said so, called him a ‘blasted Catholic brute’ and
had given her double rations at suppertime. The next day he gave her a blanket, full of
moth, but a comfort nevertheless, and a couple of days later he slipped her a book. She
had seen one like it before, in the Queen’s library, though that was tooled in
gilt on the finest calf’s leather, with leaves as thin as skin. This was nothing
in comparison, with crude bindings and coarse paper, but the words were the same. And so
she read each day until she was better at it than some of those tutor-schooled girls at
the palace. It was by Martin Luther and spoke of all the things the Queen and her ladies
whisper about.

She thinks about it now. Whether the bread
at mass
actually
becomes Christ’s flesh. Whether you need miracles to
believe in God or if it is enough to simply have faith – she doesn’t really
understand that one. It’s all the same to her, though she’d never tell that
to anyone, and she secretly wishes that Elwyn had given her something else to read – one
of the romances, a story of knights and maidens and magic. But what use is reading and
dreaming of Camelot when she is nothing more than a caged beast? She may as well get
herself educated and Luther is a place to start, she supposes. When Luther talks of
faith, it makes Dot think of Anne Askew who would not recant to save her own life; she
didn’t understand at first, but now she can see that if you believe in something,
really truly believe, then your life makes sense if you are faithful to it.

Other times she thinks of William Savage.
Wonders how
things might have been had they not been the way they
were, wonders what his wife is like and whether they have a string of little ones,
little Savages that she would have given her eye teeth to bear herself. She always knew
she couldn’t marry William, but that didn’t stop her thinking of it.
She’d hated him until her guts burned with it, and hated his wife even more. But
now she is just glad that he inhabits the same earth as she does. He is forgiven and her
heart feels lighter for it. She hangs on to the fact that he was seeking her out; it is
the slenderest thread attaching her to the world outside, allowing her to believe she is
not altogether forgotten.

The Queen is never far from Dot’s
mind. She conjures an image of Katherine kneeling in prayer in her rooms at Whitehall,
asking God for her safe return. But she fears that the Queen is no longer at the palace,
that she too is held prisoner and awaiting an uncertain fate. She would be held in the
Tower, with the ghosts of Nan Bullen and Catherine Howard for company – but Dot will not
think of that. And surely Katherine is too clever to let that happen. Dot has seen how
the King is, though, how he can turn on the head of a pin. He is like two different men
– one lecherous and one raging – and both of them would strike fear into the hearts of
most people.