Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (41 page)

Dot sits thinking for hours and hours,
rubbing her thumb over the outline of the silver penny her ma gave her all those years
ago.

A gold brooch set with thirty diamonds and
twelve pearls arranged around a garnet the size of a robin’s egg; a pair of
jet-black coney-fur sleeves; a set of four bracelets in silver set about with sapphires;
a dovecote with six pairs of turtle doves; twenty yards of purple velvet; a mechanical
clock engraved with the words
love is timeless
; a rare, pure-white Persian
falcon; a bejewelled dog collar in crimson leather for Rig; a side of venison; a gross
of seed pearls for stitching upon gowns and hoods; a pack of greyhounds; five nightgowns
of the finest silk; a white female marmoset, which she has named Bathsheba, as a wife
for François.

It is all over, and things are as they were
before, with the King besotted and fawning over his wife just as he did when he was
courting her. There is an endless supply of gifts, which would be meaningless to
Katherine were it not for the fact that they signify the end of danger. Everyone has
returned, everyone but Dot; she has had to resign herself to the fact that Dot may never
return. Her brother Will is back at court, and with him Hertford and Dudley, for all the
reformers are in the King’s favour again. Wriothesley hangs from a thread after
his botched attempt to topple her. Lord
Chancellors have been got rid
of before, and the members of his company are shuffling about with shifty faces and
hanging tails, working out which side to leap to before it’s too late. Gardiner is
nowhere to be seen, having scuttled back under his stone.

Yes, the reformers are on the rise. Her
brother had excelled himself, entertaining the French ambassador on his arrival in
England, conveying him to Hampton Court to meet with the King and the two-hundred-strong
entourage that rode out to welcome him. Katherine teases Will that if his head swells
any more he will not be able to get himself through the great door at Whitehall.

Katherine had sat beside her husband to
receive the French envoy in acres of purple velvet and cloth of gold, dripping in
jewels, the perfect consort. It is as if nothing has happened, as if there was never a
warrant for her arrest, never a guard of twenty strong arriving with Wriothesley to take
her to the Tower – as if she never imagined the cold blade falling on her neck, or the
heat of the stake. That episode has been erased and the Parrs are basking in the sun
again. The King has even put Prince Edward in Katherine’s care – an honour indeed.
But the dread still simmers below the surface.

She has rarely seen her husband in such fine
humour and even the absence of a Prince in her belly has not been mentioned of late. He
has other things to distract him and is puffed up like a pigeon over the ratification of
the treaty with France. The victory at Boulogne has put England at the centre of
European politics again, but defending Boulogne is sapping the coffers and this treaty
returns the city to France. But it leaves King François indebted to England for a sum so
vast he will never find a way to pay it off. That puts a smile on
Henry’s face. If it were a game of chess, Henry would have just taken
François’s queen.

Katherine keeps her opinions to herself,
benign or not. She speaks only when spoken to and defers always to her husband. If he
said the sky was green she would agree. She does not ask anything of him – not if she
may invite Elizabeth to court, not if he will demand an investigation into Dot’s
disappearance (even though Dot would not be gone if the King had put his foot down to
stop Gardiner’s witch-hunt, she is sure of that, and blame still burns in her).
But she manages to act the part of Henry’s devoted wife, doing nothing to reveal
her true feelings about anything. She reads only her physic manuals and bland books of
little interest, and she no longer writes, though she imagines her
‘Lamentation’ festering away in the dark, unseen, unpublished, eaten by
mildew. A sense of failure washes through her when she thinks of all that new faith
buried, when she remembers the fervour she had felt at being a part of the great
reformation. But it is staying alive that she must concern herself with now, and
protecting those around her – even while she fears the worst for Dot.

Elwyn bursts into her cell, pink-faced and
grinning. ‘I am to let you go, Nelly,’ he says, hardly able to catch his
breath.

‘But I don’t
understand.’

It can’t be that simple. Is that stoat
Wriothesley not to come back to give her another grilling? Is she not to be taken to the
gallows?

‘If this is a joke, Elwyn, then it is
not a funny one.’

‘No word of a lie, Nelly. I am to
release you.’

‘But –’

‘You were here so long without word
that the chief warder sent for instructions to the Lord Chancellor’s
office.’ He grabs her shoulders, saying, ‘Lucky he did, Nelly, for the man
there said you had been forgotten, and might have been left here for ever. I suppose the
Lord Chancellor couldn’t get what he wanted from you.’

‘Thank heavens for that. Imagine me
festering here for ever.’

‘Listen to this, Nelly.’
Elwyn’s eyes are glittering. ‘Fate has struck a blow to the Lord Chancellor.
I have a cousin who works in the stables at Whitehall, who says that the man is out of
favour with the King. That he wronged the Queen and has been disgraced.’

‘So the Queen is not in the
Tower?’ Dot asks, thinking aloud.

‘Wherever did you get an idea like
that? No Queen has been in the tower since Catherine Howard.’

Dot’s head is spinning. She is to be
set free, just like that. What a place this world is! Elwyn escorts her to the head
guard, who makes her sign her name in a ledger, and then he accompanies her to the
gates, where she returns his book of Luther to him.

‘I was grateful for that,’ she
says. ‘It is what kept me from losing my wits altogether.’ She drops a light
little kiss on his cheek, which makes him blush, before bidding him goodbye. ‘And
I sincerely hope never to see you again,’ she adds.

This makes him smile, and then he adds,
‘I truly feared they’d burn you, Nelly.’

Just hearing that makes her taste the dread
again, but then
she looks to the door, saying, ‘Am I really to
leave, just like that?’

And he nods.

The open door looks like the gates to
paradise. She can see the sunshine falling on the cobbles beyond and hear the calls of
the market traders nearby.

‘You know,’ she says, quietly
drawing close to him, ‘I can tell you this now, but my name is not Nelly
Dent.’

He looks at her, his face a question
mark.

‘I am Dorothy Fownten, Dot to all who
know me, and I serve the Queen of England.’

His face is a picture, his eyebrows all lost
in his hair and his eyes popping out and his mouth like an ‘O’, which makes
her laugh. Then she turns and walks out, calm as anything.

When the gates clang shut behind, it is as
if she’s entered another world. She stands in a churchyard gawping at it all, the
busy gathering of starlings pecking about the cobbles, the cat lazing in the sun, the
apple tree next to the church wall, the spider’s web slung in the angle between
two branches, the crouched spider and a fly caught there beside it. She looks up at the
sky, white clouds with patches of blue, and takes a great heave of breath, like the
first breath she has ever taken. Picking up a windfall, the biggest and rosiest of them,
she crunches into it, the sweet, juicy foam pricking at her taste buds – she might as
well be in Heaven itself.

She moves on from the church square into a
market alive with traders all shouting out their wares. A herd of bleating sheep passes
through with a boy who can’t control them, getting all hot under the collar when
one of them goes off in the wrong direction. He shouts at his herding dog, who is not
much less disobedient or stupid than the sheep. She sits on a step and watches the world
go by, the kitchen lads from
the big houses coming down to buy fish
and bread and the traders trying to squeeze every last penny out of them. A woman drops
a basket of cabbages, which roll all over the place sending people diving for them, and
the bakers’ boys are hawking their loaves, shouting, ‘Fine fresh bread for
your table!’ and drawing out the words so they sound like a song. The smell of
that bread is enough to flog the loaves without the shouting. Dot takes it all in,
sitting in the sun, relishing her freedom. The only place she won’t look is at the
butchers’ stalls where the hanging carcasses and the chop and thud of the cleavers
remind her too much of things she’d rather forget.

Before she knows it the traders are all
packing up their things and the crowds have thinned out. A young lass offers her a meat
pie, too broken to sell. Dot refuses at first, saying she can’t pay for it, but
the girl presses it on her. She must look a sorry state indeed for a stranger to offer
her vittles in the street. Her penny is stitched into her hem, she can feel the rim of
it, but if she’s going to get herself to Whitehall she’ll need to hang on to
it. She heads for the river. The best way to get to Whitehall is by boat because it
would not be wise for a girl to wander alone about the city now the crowds have thinned.
The only boat for hire is one of the pretty painted barges, with a singing boatman, that
the ladies and gentlemen like to take out for romancing.

The boatman is got up in crimson with all
manner of bows and buckles and fripperies attached, and he charges her the whole of her
silver penny for the short trip to Whitehall. His isn’t just a common-or-garden
boat, he says, when she complains; it is a barge fit for a princess. She knows
she’s being fleeced by the fancily clad nincompoop, but she doesn’t give a
monkey’s. After all, if this isn’t the emergency she’s
been saving her penny for then she doesn’t know what is. And
besides, she has four whole pounds stashed away somewhere in Katherine’s keeping –
her inheritance from Meg. She kisses the penny before handing it over and whispers the
words, ‘Bless you, Ma.’ God only knew where Ma had got hold of that coin, in
the first place, because the Fowntens were not the sort of family to have silver pennies
lying about.

That gets her wondering, while she’s
going up the river, about her family and what has become of them, whether her brother
has drunk himself into an early grave yet, like Pa always said he would – when
he’d come in late every night drunk, whacking his head on the beams, walking into
things and making a right old racket, waking them all up. She supposes Little Min must
be married, and wonders to whom. Then she thinks of her other ‘family’, of
Katherine. She has butterflies in her gut, thinking of being reunited with her. And now
she is out, her longing for William has become a constant throb – even just to have his
friendship, given that he is already married and probably with a string of babies, which
she tries not to think of.

It doesn’t take long to get to the
Whitehall steps, where she bids goodbye to her singing boatman. He had insisted on
warbling a tuneless ballad about a cuckold, all the way, which has got itself stuck in
her head: ‘For the zealous
jade
, Ben a true cuckold
made
, And
now he’s no longer in masquer
ade
 …’

She mounts the steps, making for the palace
gates.

‘I am Dorothy Fownten and I serve the
Queen. Admit me, if you will,’ she says to the yeoman guard.

‘And I’m the King of
England,’ he replies, the cheeky devil.

‘But truly I am.’

She feels her voice waver as she begins to
explain how she
comes to be where she is. He must feel sorry for her
and her ordeal, as his grim face softens a bit but he still holds his halberd in front
of him, barring her way.

‘Listen, girly,’ he says,
‘if the Queen were here, I’d have someone fetch one of her pages to take a
look at you – just to shut you up, if nothing else. But she’s off on progress with
all her household. The Queen’s chambers are empty save for the decorators
who’re in there tarting the place up.’

Her heart drops at that. She slumps, not
knowing what to do; she is free and yet free to go where? The Queen could be away for
months, traipsing from palace to palace. Her silver penny is spent and she has nothing
but the filthy clothes she stands up in.

All she can do is wait, and hope that
someone will come along who recognizes her. Her fight diminishing, she collapses on to a
low wall and ponders the disadvantages of her invisibility, which had once been such a
blessing.

It is a fine early autumn day and the park
is silent, shrouded in mist, its great trees looming like pale ghosts. Spectral antlers
move about around them; the park is teeming with deer. A great winch has been fabricated
to help Henry heave his huge shape on to a horse and he has hunted each day since their
arrival at Oatlands – though it is hardly hunting, for the poor deer are herded into a
corner before Henry’s arrival, to contrive that he may be in at the kill. It is no
better than slaughter; the creatures don’t stand a chance, and Henry’s poor
over-burdened horse barely breaks out of a walk all day,
though the
King returns to the palace each evening full of stories of the chase. But yesterday he
took a sudden turn for the worse, and will not hunt this morning.