Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (48 page)

While Cranmer delivers his sermon she runs
silently
through the household she will take with her – Elizabeth,
Dot, Sister Anne, Cat, Lizzie Tyrwhitt – they will all be close by, even the ones who
will not live there, for Chelsea is just a short trip upriver from London. She will
bring William Savage and dear Huicke. The more she thinks of it the more of a paradise
her future seems, and she wonders about the possibility that God might have forgiven her
already, to have put all this her way.

She squeezes her sister’s hand and
they exchange a smile. She has the glow of pregnancy on her again, like a perfectly ripe
apple. Katherine examines her heart for the familiar twinge of envy, but there is
nothing. She has resigned herself to the fact that she will not bear fruit herself.

She must be happy with the windfalls that
have landed near her – and the orphaned Elizabeth is one such fruit.

Katherine sits with Elizabeth in her
presence chamber at Chelsea. They are looking at one of Surrey’s sonnets, a
rendition of Petrarch, comparing it to Thomas Wyatt’s version of the same
poem.

‘Do you see here, Elizabeth, how Wyatt
has used Petrarch’s rhyme scheme and Surrey has not? Think of how this affects the
meaning,’ Katherine explains.

‘But Wyatt has used an entirely new
metaphor. See this,’ Elizabeth speaks fast, as if she must get her ideas out
before she forgets them. ‘Look,’ she points to the page.
‘“… therein campeth, spreading his banner”, and, “In the
field with him to live and die”. He makes a war of love.’

Katherine never fails to be impressed by the
girl’s fine-tuned intelligence. She is only thirteen and already understands the
subtleties of translation better than most. But today Katherine cannot fully
concentrate, for her brother is coming to Chelsea and with him Thomas Seymour. She
imagines the Seymour barge gliding up the river towards them.

‘Yes, Elizabeth,’ she replies.
‘And see what Surrey has done.’

‘Though his rhyme scheme’s
altered, his meaning is more faithful to the original.’

She imagines the rhythm of the oars spooning
the water, the pat and skim, the synchronized breath of the oarsmen, the push and pull.
It occurs to her that the sensations she has now are so much akin to the feelings of
dread she had not so long ago: a heightened sense of her body’s workings, as if
she can feel the blood pumping to the far reaches of her, her heart palpitating with
anticipation. She has not seen Thomas yet, except in public. She glances towards the
casement, thinks she hears a sound, a splash.

‘What hour is it?’ she asks
Sister Anne, who is sewing with Dot, Lizzie Tyrwhitt and Mary Odell, the newest of her
maids, each embroidering a different part of the same piece. It is a cloth of state for
the new King.

‘It must be eleven of the clock, at
least,’ she replies.

Katherine rises, walking to the window. The
barge is there in the distance; it is close enough, though, for her to make out the
conjoined wings on the banner. She swallows and takes a breath before turning to
Elizabeth.

‘That is enough for today.’

She says it as if nothing is different, as
if her heart is not in her mouth. It is all she can do not to rush down to the river
steps. She helps Elizabeth collect her books together, choosing the poem they will look
at tomorrow. There is a slight tremor in her finger as she points it out.

It seems a lifetime before the usher raps at
the door, announcing them.

‘The Marquess of Northampton and Baron
Sudeley, Lord High Admiral of the Fleet.’

They enter, bedizened, Will in green brocade
and ermine, which he is allowed now he is a marquess, Thomas in midnight-blue velvet,
spilling gold silk from its slashes.

‘Marquess,’ she says, smirking
at Will whom she knows
must love the sound of his new title. Then,
‘Lord Admiral,’ her voice cracking slightly.

Thomas bows. She doesn’t dare offer
him her hand, fears if his skin touches hers she will lose control altogether. The men
greet the rest of the company and they all gather around the hearth. She cannot look at
him but feels his eyes on her. They make conversation. Katherine’s tongue is in
knots. Elizabeth reads Surrey’s sonnet – poor dead Surrey. But all Katherine can
really think about is how to conspire to be alone with Thomas. The air is thick and
sticky as honey with her longing.

As they move through to the hall to dine,
his fingers brush hers and she feels she might faint. She cannot eat. Nor can he. The
food comes and goes. Then Will, dear Will, wants to see the new plans for her physic
garden. Could she show him the place she has chosen? he asks. And as they wrap
themselves against the March cold he says, ‘Will you join us, Seymour?’ as
if it means nothing.

She walks arm in arm with Will along the
avenue of saplings she has planted. Thomas is at her other side, the space between them
prickling, as does the air before a storm. They inspect her herb garden, enclosed in its
hedges. Will unhooks his arm, drifting away without a word, and when he is gone they
grasp at each other wordlessly, like a pair of animals.

‘I have waited an eternity for
this,’ he murmurs.

‘And I too.’

His cap falls to the ground. She presses her
nose to his neck to breathe him in and she finds she has lost touch with the boundaries
of her body – where she ends and he begins. It is as if her entire life, each moment,
each experience, has conspired towards this.
This
is what love feels like, she
tells herself. She thinks of those carefully organized love sonnets, but this is not
carefully organized – this is perfect chaos.

‘My love,’ he whispers, ‘I
have wanted you. I want you.’ He grapples at her, pulling her partlet aside,
pressing kisses on to her breast.

‘Come tonight,’ she says,
forgetting she is recently widowed, forgetting any sense of seemliness or correct
behaviour, abandoning herself to him, wanting him to un-civilize her entirely. ‘I
will have the meadow gate left open.’

Katherine watches the ripples of
Thomas’s back as he pulls his shirt over his head, and the way the flicker of
candlelight plays on his skin. She feels as if her heart will burst. He is sulking. He
always sulks when he has to leave before the household wakes. She loves him even more
for his sulks and his petulance, cannot explain it. He wants to marry her and has pushed
and wheedled for it. She would be content to remain lovers, enjoys the clandestine
thrill, doesn’t want to civilize it. And then there is the scandal it would cause,
a new marriage with the King barely cold.

‘But you married the King in haste
after Latymer was gone,’ he reminds her.

‘Oh, Thomas, that was different, you
know that.’

‘Why different?’ he scowls.
‘Am I not a man, as he was?’

She reminds him that marriage would likely
be construed as treason, that she is the Dowager Queen and he is the King’s uncle,
and neither are at liberty to marry whom they choose – they are bound by the council and
by Hertford.

‘Your brother would not be
pleased.’

‘My brother … the Lord
Protector,’ he spits. ‘The King
wouldn’t mind. I am
the favourite uncle, Kit. I shall get
his
permission.’

‘Mind not to put your brother’s
nose out of joint. He could make trouble for us.’

‘
My brother
made even
your brother
a marquess,’ he complains. ‘And all I have is a
paltry baronetcy and some castle in the middle of the country, miles from
anywhere.’

She would have thought that his petulance
would make him seem less attractive, but the effect is the opposite. He reminds her of
her brother, she supposes.

‘You are Lord Admiral too, Thomas, and
that is a great office.’

‘And so I should be,’ he
replies. ‘There is no one more suited for the job in the whole of
England.’

It isn’t the danger of angering the
Lord Protector that holds Katherine back from agreeing to marriage. It is something
intangible, a feeling, the sense that she has tasted freedom at last, has unfurled her
wings, and that marriage would clip them again. But then there is the undeniable fact of
him
, his very man-ness, the irresistibility of him, and the things he does
to her, the excess of pleasure. And a part of her wants to pin that down, to own it, box
it, treasure it.

‘
You
may be content to have
me for a lover but
I
want this to mean something in the eyes of God.’ He
goes on and on, slowly eroding her with the hyperbole of romance. ‘I want you all
for myself, Katherine. I can’t bear the thought of another man even looking upon
you.’

He talks of how long he has waited, and asks
her what she thought it felt like for him to be manoeuvred out of the way, forced to
watch his own true love married off to the elderly King. He’d watched her from
afar, dying inside, he says.

Somehow, slowly, he rubs off on to her, in
the way not-quite-dry ink leaves its ghost print on the back of the previous
page. The lure of freedom begins to shrink in the face of him,
seeming eventually small and inconvenient. And with all her secret sins weighing down on
her, if she is to be damned for eternity, then why
not
fill her time on earth
with pleasure?

‘Do you not feel as I do,
Katherine?’

Nothing she says convinces him that she
loves him equally.

‘Imagine spending the whole night
together.’

They laugh about that, remembering that tale
from Chaucer’s miller, with the lovers who want to do just that. He had read it
aloud to her just the other night, acting out all the parts, playing the cuckold and the
young lover and piping his voice into a high-pitched squeak to play the wife, until
she’d gasped with laughter, unable to catch her breath. Mary Odell had rushed in,
thinking she was choking to death, and Thomas had had to hide beneath the bed.

‘See what a man will do to spend the
whole night with his love?’ he’d said when Mary was gone. And then
he’d become angry, his feathers ruffling adorably. ‘Think of how it is for
me, lurking about in the darkness like a thief.’

And then there is the undeniable fact that
this is a man who turns grown women into giggling wrecks, who blows through legions of
girls, leaving them flattened like young wheat stalks after hail. He could have any of
them, but it is
her
he has chosen. She is rendered weak in the face of that,
and though she is aware it is driven by vanity, she barely cares.

Deep down she knows herself to be changed,
that the events of the last months have broken her down and remade her. She questions
everything, wonders about her beliefs, about God. It has lent an intense urgency to the
business of living and this man infuses every pore of her with vitality. When she is
with him she is alive, more alive than she can ever remember.

Her normal cares have paled; she doesn’t
mind that Stanhope swans about like the Queen now. She’d refused to take her place
behind Katherine in the procession at the coronation, but Katherine couldn’t have
cared less, for her mind was elsewhere, back at Chelsea in the arms of Thomas. Let
Stanhope worry about precedence and who goes where in the line. The woman has somehow
got her hands on the Queen’s jewels, had worn the best of them that day, and all
Katherine had thought was how glad she was not to have those heavy necklaces pinching
and rubbing at her skin. Her only sadness is that her own mother’s cross is among
those jewels, though Stanhope wouldn’t deign to wear anything so understated. It
is the single thing Katherine would like to have returned.

She runs a hand over his shoulders, pressing
her fingers into his firm flesh. The thought lurks that if he doesn’t marry her he
will attach himself to another, as sure as night follows day, for that is the way of
things. At the bottom of it she can refuse this man nothing, for just the slightest
brush of his fingers against her skin makes her irresistibly alive.

‘I
will
marry you,’ she
says, just as he has pulled on his boots and is about to leave.

He jumps on to her, pushing her back down on
to the bed, smothering her and saying, ‘You will not regret it.’

‘I do not intend to.’ She smiles
and runs her fingers through his hair.

‘I will write to the King
today,’ he says as he rises, touching a kiss on to the thin skin of her inner
wrist, then stroking it softly with a finger, saying, ‘I see your vessel here,
blue with your blood. We shall mingle yours and mine and make an infant out of the parts
of us.’

She hasn’t dared think of a baby – it
is too tender a thought
– and says nothing in reply, for she wonders
if it is possible to have so much of what she desires, if it would be asking too much of
fortune to give her a child as well. She can’t help remembering her dead baby, its
withered little face and the tiny scribble of veins on its closed eyelids.