Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (55 page)

‘Doctor Huicke,’ she says,
looking up at him with her round pale eyes, ‘do you believe in the new map of the
universe?’

‘I do,’ he says, thinking how
much older she seems than her eleven years.

‘Well,
I
think of the Queen
as the Sun, around which we are all in orbit.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better
myself, Jane,’ he replies.

He sends her away not long after, though she
doesn’t want to go, but Katherine’s cries have become urgent and unsettling
and he doesn’t want the girl terrified. There is nothing he can do, but he
can’t bring himself to leave, so he waits and waits, through the night and into
the morning. Each time someone leaves the room, for clean sheets or to change the water
or to fetch victuals for the ladies, he starts up, meeting
their eyes.
But always it is a little shake of the head. Poor Kit, this is a long one.

He waits on, feeling powerless, knowing that
for all his physician’s knowledge there is nothing he can do to help her. Another
day passes, torturously slow. It is hot and close as if there is a storm gathering.
Night falls and he realizes he hasn’t eaten, thinks he can’t.

The minutes creep. Katherine’s moans
sear through him. He wonders, for the first time, if she will survive this.

Just as he begins to hear the first birds
sing in the dawn, Lizzie Tyrwhitt bursts from the chamber, wan with exhaustion but
smiling.

‘Doctor, the Queen is delivered of a
daughter. I will fetch the Lord Admiral.’

In that moment he feels that he might be
overcome with tears, only then realizing quite how great his anxiety had been.

Katherine has a daughter.

She is a mother.

People move about the chamber like shadows.
There are whisperings and shufflings and the gentle tinkling of liquid being poured.
Something is held to her lips. It is cool and slips down her throat. Katherine’s
mind wanders and flits. She feels herself slipping and sliding at the edges of
consciousness. She is hot, burning, and fears she is already in the fires of Hell, then
remembers the cloying summer heat.

‘Where is Huicke?’ she murmurs.
‘I must see my doctor.’

She cannot hold on to anything, thoughts fall
out of her mind like petals from a dead rose. She throws the covers off her body. The
place is a furnace.

‘Open a window,’ she croaks, but
isn’t entirely sure if any sound leaves her mouth.

A girl waves a fan; the cool air chills her
skin, where she is damp with perspiration, and suddenly she is cold to the bones.

‘Meg?’

‘I am Jane,’ says the girl.

And she can see it now – the pale round
eyes, the swan’s neck, not Meg at all.

She hears snippets of murmured conversation.
Mary Seymour – she remembers naming her baby Mary after her stepdaughter, who is back in
the fold of her family. My
own
daughter, she thinks, still barely able to
believe it.

‘Jane,’ she is suddenly afraid
for her child, ‘Jane, is little Mary well?’

‘Yes, she is. She is feeding with the
wet nurse.’

‘I should like to hold her.’ She
wants to press her face up to the soft fuzz of her baby’s crown, breathe in her
brand-new scent.

‘A week-old infant cannot be disturbed
at her feed.’ It is bossy Lizzie Tyrwhitt.

Katherine’s need becomes desperate, to
touch her little girl, to feel the clench of her tiny fist around her finger, to see her
little bud mouth, swollen from sucking. It is unbearable to be separated. She tries to
sit, to heave herself out of the bed, but her body is a dead weight.

‘There there.’ She feels
Lizzie’s capable hands coaxing her back to the pillows. ‘You will have her
when she is fed.’

‘Where is Dot?’ she asks.
‘And Elizabeth? Where are my girls?’

‘Dot is not here,’ says Jane.
‘She is at Coombe Bottom in Devon, do you not remember?’

But Katherine cannot hold on to her
memories. They are like wet fish and slip from her fingers just as she thinks she has a
hold on them.

‘But Elizabeth is
here …’

‘Elizabeth is at Cheshunt with Lord
and Lady Denny.’

Jane’s face moves in and out of focus,
as if seen through water. Katherine closes her eyes and allows herself to drift.

‘Childbed fever …’ she
hears Lizzie say, in a hushed voice to someone. Is it Seymour or is it Henry? No, it
must be Seymour for Henry is no more.

So I am dying, she thinks then with a grip
of dread, wondering, as she used to, which husband she will accompany in paradise – if
that is where she is going. She can’t think about the other place. Will it be the
greatest of her husbands? No, Henry will have Jane Seymour at his side. Will it be most
recent then, the father of her daughter? She silently begs God not to give her Seymour
for the whole of eternity. She hopes it will be Latymer, for he was the one she was with
the longest. Dear Latymer, the one she killed; the thought intensifies her dread. His
face drifts before her and she wonders if he has come to meet her.

But it is Huicke. His eyes are clouded with
grief.

She wonders why, realizing then that it is
for her, remembering she is dying. She takes his arm and pulls him towards her, holding
her hand to cup his ear close to her mouth.

‘Huicke, he has poisoned
me.’

She doesn’t know why she has whispered
that, where it came from. But she feels something in her, something wrong that has got
into her. Her husband’s words float back to her –
I want to know what you are
giving my wife
.

‘He wants rid of me so he may wed
Eliz–’

No, she says to herself, stopping the words.
I am thinking of what I did to Henry, to Latymer. But something has got inside her and
is sapping her. Who put it there? She can feel the blackness of the other place like a
cold shadow to the side of her eye.

‘Huicke,’ she whispers into his
ear, ‘did I poison the King?’

‘No, Kit, you did not.’

She can feel him stroking her hair. She is
floating, slipping, falling.

‘I am going, Huicke. Fetch me
Parkhurst. It is time.’

Then Seymour is beside her on the bed,
clasping her hand. She feels she might suffocate, tries to shake herself free. Lizzie is
there, wiping a cool cloth over her face. The cold damp is soothing.

‘I am not well handled,’ she
says to Lizzie. She can hear the trickling sound of her rinsing the cloth in a basin.
‘Those about me do not take care of me.’ She tries to nod in the direction
of her husband, for it is him she is talking of. ‘They laugh at my
misfortune …’

‘Why, sweetheart,’ comes a
well-oiled voice, ‘I would do you no harm.’

It is Seymour. He has wrapped an arm around
her; it is heavy like a great limb of iron pressing down on to her. She pushes it off,
rolling away from it, exhausting herself with the effort.

‘No, Thomas, I think
so
,’ she hears herself say.

There is a muffled sobbing. Who is crying?
She can feel tears on her cheek from where Seymour has just pressed a kiss.

‘I would have given a thousand marks
to see Huicke before now, but dared not ask for fear of displeasing you,’ she
says,
surprised at how clear her voice sounds. She adds, murmuring,
‘Your tears are for guilt, I think, not grief.’

‘Sweetheart …’ he says,
then seems lost for words.

A waft of cedar and musk seeps into her –
his smell. It cloys unbearably. She doesn’t want this to be the last earthly thing
she smells.

‘Go,’ she says, feeling lighter
as he moves away – lighter and lighter, blowing away like a dandelion clock.

There is Parkhurst looming, his wooden cross
dangling from his neck. She fixes her gaze on it, the still point in a spinning world.
Parkhurst has hold of her hand, to prevent her from drifting away.

‘Will God forgive me? I have so much
to be forgiven.’

His habit smells of just-blown-out candles.
She hears him administer the rites, feels the soft brush of his hand on her
forehead.

‘You will surely be forgiven,’
he whispers.

She sighs and floats, exhaling.

Dot’s baby girl is four months old
now. Dot watches Little Min down on the beach below the house with the baby in her arms
and Min’s own two children trotting behind her along the side of the water. Dot is
in the garden trimming back her physic bed. Her bracelet glints in the sun; it is the
one Katherine gave her before they parted. She never takes it off. When she first heard
of Katherine’s death it was like a punch in the gut; she thought she might go mad
with grief. Just the idea of her no longer being somewhere on the earth was too much to
bear. She thought about the people she’d lost: first her pa falling from the roof
and sweet Letty, her childhood friend, then Meg and now Katherine, each one of them
taken at the wrong time. Everyone said to her, ‘You will be together again one
day.’

But what if Heaven and Hell are just stories
people tell each other, like the stories of Camelot? The thought of it is too unwieldy
for her head.

It was the birth of her own child, her dear
little daughter Baby Meg – that was the thing that helped her hold on to her sanity. And
William, of course; her own William Savage has been her rock and Baby Meg the thread
attaching her to him.

‘You must not think so much, Dot,’
William would say to her. ‘If you let those thoughts run wild they will pull you
over the edge of things.’

He is right, of course; there are some
things that don’t bear thinking of.

Little Min and the children are all swaddled
up against the brisk wind. The tide is coming in and the shingle will be under water in
an hour. Dot has grown to love the sea, the constant heave and suck of it, its sound,
like wind blowing through leaves. Little Min is running in a circle and the children are
chasing her. Snippets of their laughter can be heard between gusts. Little Min is not
little any more – she is a good two inches taller than Dot, who is already tall enough,
but the name has stuck.

Dot has enjoyed getting to know her sister.
She had never thought about how much family could leave its print on you, like the way
Min sits with her head in the clouds half the time and the way she is not afraid of
anything much and sometimes acts before thinking. ‘The impetuous pair,’ is
what William calls them, for they like to throw off their shoes and stockings and search
for clams in the shallows with their skirts tucked up like farm girls, not caring a jot
that they are getting drenched in saltwater, and when it snowed this winter they took
the biggest platters from the kitchens and slid on their behinds down the hill to the
beach – things that ladies should never, ever do.

But in lots of ways Min is different too.
She has no interest in learning to read, doesn’t care a fig for stories. It is
singing she likes and she will often accompany William with a song in the evenings when
he plays the virginals. It is Dot who teaches the children their letters, sitting with
them, going over their books, correcting their mistakes, helping them
sound out the letters; it always reminds her of Katherine, doing the same with Meg and
Elizabeth.

They are not so remote here in Devon that
they don’t have news from court, for William is often summoned there to play for
the King and carry out various other duties, returning full of gossip. Seymour is in the
Tower for conspiring to marry Lady Elizabeth without the permission of the council,
which is treason.

‘Now
there
is a man who let
his ambition get the better of him.’ That was what William had said of it.

Dot remembers overhearing Elizabeth in the
orchard at Chelsea … 
I wager you all the gold in Christendom that if the
Queen dropped dead tomorrow, Seymour would be knocking at my door
. He will go
to the block for it, so William says. Elizabeth was questioned, came close to losing her
head too. Dot feels almost sorry for the girl in spite of everything, pushed as she was
from pillar to post, raised to be this and that, bowed and scraped to, lifted up, thrown
down, then criticized for becoming who she became – and never a moment of innocence in
her whole life. In fact, when Dot really thinks about it, she believes she might have
forgiven Elizabeth. But she doesn’t think so very often of it.

She wonders what will become of
Katherine’s daughter, little Mary Seymour, with her mother gone and her father in
the Tower and facing his comeuppance. William says she is to go into Cat Brandon’s
care, as hers is a household befitting Mary’s rank. Dot wishes Mary Seymour could
come to Coombe Bottom and be raised here, learn to milk a cow and ride a pony bareback
and pick cockles off the beach at low tide, imagining her with the children below, whose
laughter trickles up through the wind. But Mary Seymour is the daughter of a Queen and
must be raised as such.

Dot gazes out to the water, taking comfort
from the notion that Katherine lives on, in a way, through that infant daughter, and how
even when they are all turned to dust the stories will continue on through time – as
endless as the sea.

(Characters are listed alphabetically using
the name most often used in the novel.)

A NNE  A SKEW	Outspoken religious evangelist, with suspected links to the Queen’s household; burned for heresy. ( c. 1520–1546)
A NNE  B OLEYN	Also Nan Bullen. Second wife of Henry VIII; mother of Elizabeth Tudor; a religious reformer; executed for suspected incest with her brother and adultery with a number of other courtiers, deemed as treason, though the charges are unlikely to have been valid. ( c. 1504–1536)
A NNE OF  C LEVES	Fourth wife of Henry VIII; marriage annulled due to non-consummation. (1515–1557)
C AT  B RANDON	Duchess of Suffolk (née Willoughby de Eresby); fervent religious reformer and great friend to Katherine Parr; stepmother to Frances Brandon and step-grandmother to Lady Jane Grey. (1520–1580)
C ATHERINE  H OWARD	Fifth wife of Henry VIII; executed aged about seventeen, for adultery, deemed as treason. ( c. 1525–1542)
C ATHERINE OF  A RAGON	First wife of Henry VIII; formerly the wife of his elder brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, who died before ascending the throne; mother of Mary Tudor; marriage annulled, though this was never accepted by the Catholic contingent. (1485–1536)
C RANMER	Archbishop of Canterbury; confirmed religious reformer; burned for heresy during Mary Tudor’s reign. (1489–1556)
D ENNY	Anthony, Lord Denny; confidant of Henry VIII and Privy Council member; brother-in-law to Mistress Astley. (1501–1549)
D OT  F OWNTEN	Dorothy Fountain; maid to Margaret Neville as a child; chamberer to Katherine Parr as Queen; married William Savage. (Dates not known)
E DWARD  B OROUGH	Of Gainsborough Old Hall; first husband of Katherine Parr. (Died before 1533)
E DWARD  T UDOR	Only son of Henry VIII; came to the throne, as Edward VI, aged only nine. (1537–1553)
E LIZABETH  T UDOR	Younger daughter of Henry VIII; deemed illegitimate when Henry divorced her mother, Anne Boleyn; became Elizabeth I. (1533–1603)