Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (51 page)

Elizabeth is up ahead, riding beside Thomas.
Her habit is of emerald-green wool and it is the only splash of colour on the landscape,
save for the tendrils of her escaped hair blowing behind her in a fiery comet’s
trail, and the occasional flash of pink satin sleeve that appears when Tom’s gown
flies up in the chill breeze.

Katherine watches them closely. They chat
easily. Elizabeth says something, making Thomas laugh, and he draws his horse up next to
hers, leaning over to untangle a twig from her hair. She holds his wrist with her long
pale hand, smiling at him, saying something, whereupon he pulls his
arm free and gives her a slap on the thigh, trotting off ahead. Katherine’s
jealousy is a tangle of snakes in her belly, and she tries to persuade herself that he
is just being a good stepfather to the girl, but knowing, dreading, there is more to
it.

There has been gossip among the servants,
but only snippets had reached her. It was Dot eventually who said something, told her
that Thomas had been visiting Elizabeth in the maids’ chamber in the mornings,
when she was still abed. Katherine hadn’t wanted to believe it. Dot had never got
on with Elizabeth. Katherine had seen that for years, the way Dot watched her with a
frown, and Elizabeth had not been kind to her, that is true. This, she had supposed, was
Dot’s little revenge.

‘Everyone is talking of it,’
she’d said.

Katherine told herself it was simply his
innocent affection for the girl, and servants
will
gossip. But she had taken to
accompanying Thomas on his morning visits. She had talked of it to Huicke, who had
suggested sending the girl away. But that would mean breaking up her fragile family, and
she will not do that.

This little scene she has just witnessed,
though, smacks of a particular kind of intimacy. She is reminded of that look between
herself and Thomas, the fatal moment that had inspired such wrath in the King and had
precipitated what she thinks of as her fall from grace. She knows how much meaning can
be carried in a moment like that.

‘But we are just married and ours is a
love match,’ she’d said to Huicke.

‘Kit,’ he had sighed, a long
exasperated sound, ‘a man’s love is never exclusive; it is only women who
truly love with their hearts. I know that, for I am both.’ He had confided in her
once of Udall’s excessive promiscuity, and she had asked
if it
didn’t make him jealous. ‘No,’ he had replied, ‘for I know he
can’t help it.’

But
her
jealousy bubbles up inside
her and will not settle. I will not break up my family, she says to herself. She
wonders, beneath all her other thoughts, if God has finally chosen his punishment for
her – a man who will pull her heart in every which way.

She cannot even find inspiration for her
writing any more. Huicke persuaded her to send her ‘Lamentation’ to the
printers. If it weren’t for him she would never even have thought of it, so taken
up has she been with Thomas. She feels lost to this love, is drowning in it, and all the
things that mattered before have shrunk away to almost nothing. She wonders where that
woman has gone who would have been the beacon for the new religion.

But her ‘Lamentation’ will be
published, thanks to dear Huicke, and it will be a memorial to that ambitious woman, she
supposes – but the thought of it leaves her empty. Reform is happening anyway without
her; Cranmer and the Lord Protector are driving it. New statutes are announced monthly,
banning the candles, the ashes, the incense, prayers in Latin; altar stones are
transformed into paving slabs. It is taking shape, just as she had dreamed, but she is
no longer moved by it as she once was. Her beliefs still stand, but the dreams of
bearing the torch are gone. Her sins are too great. ‘Justification by faith
alone,’ she whispers with a dry little huff, remembering her excitement about the
eclipse ringing in the changes and Copernicus revolutionizing the heavens. She’d
seen herself as an intrinsic part of it, had even believed for a moment that it
couldn’t happen without her. ‘How proud I must have been, and how
fickle,’ she murmurs.

Elizabeth has caught up with Thomas again
now and
Katherine gathers herself together, finding the fight in her,
pushing her horse into a canter to join them. She touches her crop to the rump of
Elizabeth’s horse, calling out, ‘Hoy!’ It skits to the side and she
nudges Pewter’s flanks, forcing him forward between the two of them.

‘My darling,’ says Tom, kissing
the tips of his fingers and touching them to her cheek.

Elizabeth is suppressing giggles, her
shoulders heaving, so very young and girlish. It suddenly seems quite innocent and
Katherine feels silly for having let her imagination run away with her.

‘We have a surprise for you,’
Elizabeth says.

‘What is it?’ Katherine asks,
her fears abating.

‘That would be telling,’ Thomas
laughs, ‘and then it wouldn’t be a surprise.’

The turmoil inside her subsides, her world
settles back to its usual rhythm and they ride together through the gates into the yard,
dismounting and handing over their horses, slipping off their muddy gowns and stamping
their feet to get some heat back into them.

‘Come, Mother,’ says Elizabeth,
who takes her by the hand, leading her into the squillery. ‘We must be very
quiet.’

She tiptoes over to a niche by the
fireplace, beckoning Katherine to follow her. Elizabeth’s cheeks are flushed with
a high colour. In the cranny lies François’s monkey bride, Bathsheba, curled up
asleep with a tiny pink baby snuggled into the curve of her, its miniature hand clenched
to a tuft of its mother’s fur.

‘That is your surprise,’
Elizabeth whispers.

Katherine’s heart feels light as air
and the only sound that comes out of her is an ‘oh’ that is more a sigh than
anything.

It is March already but still cold. Huicke
is impatient for the warm weather as the damp chill makes his skin feel tight and
uncomfortable. There is a light mist of drizzle in the garden at Chelsea, and despite
the weather he walks with Katherine on the riverbank. She has him firmly by the arm and
Rig trots ahead, occasionally stopping to sniff at one thing or another.
Katherine’s manner is loose and easy, she laughs and tells him funny stories about
her household, demanding he feed her snippets of gossip from court.

Huicke has never seen her so well: the
tension is all gone from her and her edges have softened. Perhaps this marriage has been
good for her after all. Huicke had advised her against it, suggested she keep Thomas as
a lover, and it still pains him to see her with someone so shallow. But after all those
nights with the gross and reeking King she has earned the right to something beautiful
in her bed. She stops to pick up a flat stone, which she skims into the water, and they
watch its arc as it kisses the surface six … seven times.

‘When did you learn to do that?’
Huicke asks, impressed.

‘My brother and I used to have
competitions. He could never beat me.’

She stoops suddenly, scooping something from
the riverbank into her hand.

‘What is it?’

She opens her cupped hands slightly and he
can see a frog crouched there, its tiny body palpitating.

‘Kiss him,’ teases Huicke,
‘he may turn into a handsome
prince.’ He is struck by the
memory of the King’s frog pie at Hampton Court – the King’s first test.

‘I already have a handsome
prince,’ she laughs, releasing the little creature, letting him hop away to the
edge of the water.

He can see how besotted she is. Huicke
wishes she weren’t, as he feels he’s losing her, bit by bit. Besides,
Seymour won’t sanction her being alone with another man, not even him, and they
have had to steal this time together while he is at court.

‘Do you not mind that he won’t
let you alone with a man?’ Huicke asks.

‘What, his jealousy? Not a
bit.’

‘
I
couldn’t bear
it.’

‘But don’t you see?’ she
says with no hint of irony. ‘It is proof of his love.’

‘But
I
am hardly a
threat.’

They laugh together about this.

‘He is not very perceptive about such
things,’ she says.

This provokes another gust of laughter.

‘He can’t imagine how it is
possible for any man not to want what is his.’

There it is, her ruthless humour. It is good
to see Katherine so carefree, so much herself despite the new husband. Huicke
can’t help but hate him a little; it is his own jealousy, he admits to himself. He
has known men – men like Seymour – whose sole aim is not to love, but to be loved. And,
more than that, to be the most loved of all.

‘You like it here, don’t
you?’ he says.

‘Yes, Huicke. I find I am happy away
from the court and its …’

She doesn’t need to finish; they both
know what she means.

‘Your book is circulating there. You
should be proud.
There are no more copies to be had and everyone wants
one.’

She bends to pick up a stick from the
ground, throwing it for Rig. ‘I shall instruct Berthelet to print some more
then.’

Huicke notices a lack of interest, as if
that intellectual fire in her, which had once burned so strongly, has been quenched, and
they walk a little in silence. He picks a stem of rosemary, rubbing it between his
fingers, bringing it to his nose and breathing in the heady smell. He wonders if she
ever allows herself to think about the old King’s death, what she requested of
Huicke in her desperation, if it weighs on her conscience. He wouldn’t ask. It is
a buried thing, a dark thing that joins them, something that cannot be put into words.
Seymour can’t intrude upon
that
secret.

The rain begins to fall more heavily, the
sound of it pattering and rustling through the leaves above.

‘I am glad you are here,
Huicke,’ she says out of the blue, pulling him under the cover of an arbour where
there is a stone bench.

The wet brings new smells, grassy and
earthy.

‘Tell me,’ she adds, ‘how
does Udall? Is he inventing wondrous masques for the young King?’

They talk a little about Udall and how his
star continues to rise, but Huicke has the idea that there is something she is not
telling him. The cold damp from the stone seeps through his hose. Katherine chatters on,
not seeming to notice or care. She is reminiscing about Udall’s play,
Ralph
Roister Doister
, laughing about it, ‘his audacity’ as she says. But
he remembers how forced her laughter was on the day it was presented to her at
court.

‘There
is
something,’
she says, suddenly becoming serious. ‘If you wouldn’t mind putting your
physician’s hat on.’

She seems a little embarrassed, and he
squeezes her arm.

‘What is it, Kit?’

‘It is women’s stuff really, but
I wanted to ask you about the change, you see …’ she hesitates. ‘Oh,
you may as well be a woman, Huicke … I don’t know why I’m so shy
about it. It’s just that my courses have stopped these past three months and I
think things may be finished for me. I am not yet of such a great
age … but … how can I know if the change has begun?’

It all makes sense to him now, the bloom on
her, the ripeness.

‘Kit, you are with child, I’d
wager my last sou on it,’ he cries, grabbing her hands.

‘But …’ Tears have sprung
in her eyes. ‘I thought it was over for me.’ She wipes her cheek with the
back of her hand. ‘I am to have a baby? I hadn’t dared think … I
mean … Oh Huicke, I am lost for words.’ She is laughing now between
sobs. ‘And now you mention it, I
have
been a little
nauseous … I put it down to a bad oyster.’

Her happiness touches him, but he feels that
he is losing her a little more. He quashes the thought, with a silent admonishment for
his selfishness, for wanting her all for himself.

‘I am to have a child! I can barely
believe it, Huicke. Wait till I tell Thomas … he will be beside himself with
joy.’

Katherine lies stretched out on her bed.
She had dreamed of Henry, that she was still married to him, and had woken with a jolt,
confused and steeped in that familiar pervasive fear, before realizing after a few
moments, with a sigh of relief, where she is. She lies still and can feel, minutely, the
stirrings
of her baby, barely there, a vague oscillation, like a moth
trapped inside her. A feeling of utter joy washes through her as if the world at last
makes sense.

There is a dip in the pillow where Thomas
had lain beside her. She had returned from court utterly exhausted, barely able to keep
her eyes open in the barge, and they had lain down together. Thomas was angry with his
brother and hadn’t stopped talking of it, but she had let his words drift over her
as she sank into sleep. She didn’t care about any of that now, the jewels, the
nonsense about who should go first, whether Thomas had a position on the
council … The only thing that mattered to her was the infant forming
miraculously in her belly.

She thinks of Thomas’s face when she
told him, the wide beam of his grin, as if it had never been done before, as if he were
the first man to have ever made a baby. She had teased him, called him Adam, and she
felt his attention falling back on to her. She could almost hear the machinations of his
mind, building great dynasties on the head of this tiny seed inside her.

‘You will give birth at
Sudeley,’ he’d said. ‘For this fellow must begin his life in his own
castle. I shall have the place prepared. Make it fit for a Queen, for my child will be
the son of a Queen.’

She has an overwhelming sense of fecundity,
feeling more woman than she ever has before, and her desire for her husband’s
touch increases daily as the infant develops invisibly, deep in her belly. But Thomas,
for all his adoration, won’t touch her for fear of doing damage. She feels she
might go quite mad with wanting, but he will only take her in his arms and stroke her
hair, whispering sweet things to her. She has never felt so adored, nor so
frustrated.