Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (7 page)

‘Mother was arranging the
match,’ Meg continues, chewing at her thumbnail. ‘I’m sure of it. She
had a private conversation with Seymour.’

‘You can delay it. Tell her you are
not yet ready.’

‘But I am seventeen. Most well-born
girls my age have been married two years and are cooking a second infant already.’
She breaks out of Dot’s embrace and goes to sit on the bed.

‘Your father has just passed
away,’ Dot says. ‘I’m sure Lady Latymer will not make you marry while
you are mourning.’

‘But then …’ Meg’s
voice drags off to silence and she lies down with a sigh.

Dot wishes she could tell her that
there’s nothing to worry about, that she can stay unmarried, and that she, Dot,
will be there for her always. But she will not lie to Meg, and heaven only knows where
she will be sent next. All the servants are wondering what will become of them now Lord
Latymer is gone and everything is in flux.

‘What’s this then?’ Dot says,
wanting to change the subject, picking up the book Meg brought back from court.

The book is covered in dun calfskin and
tooled with a pattern of ivy. She brings it up to her nose, breathing in the leather
scent. It is the smell of home, the little place in Stanstead Abbotts where she grew up.
The cottage stood next to a tanner’s yard and that smell got itself into its very
walls. She remembers how, in the summer, when the hides were stretched out in the sun
and brightly dyed, big splashes of colour, the smell was at its most intense. It is a
comforting scent. She wonders what her ma is doing now, imagines her sweeping snow off
the stoop, making a picture of it in her head: Ma’s sleeves rolled up, capable
hands holding the broom. Her sister Little Min helps, spreading grit on the path, and
her brother Robbie, with thatch dust in his hair like Pa always had, is cracking the ice
in the water butt. But she knows that picture is all wrong, that Little Min is not so
little any more and Ma’s face is a map of lines. She feels the heart-tug of
missing them, but it’s so long ago and she has grown into the wrong shape for that
life, couldn’t fit herself back into it.

She was twelve when she left for Snape
Castle all the way up in Yorkshire, to work for Lady Latymer whom her Ma’s ma had
wet-nursed as a baby. The Parr family at Rye House more or less kept the entire village
of Stanstead Abbotts employed back then, when Ma’s ma was still alive, or so it
was said. Dot left at the time when Pa had fallen off a roof thatching and broke his
neck. Ma started taking in washing, but there was never enough to go round even with
Robbie taking over the roof work. Dot remembers hunger gnawing at her belly at night,
when all there’d been was a half ladle of pottage each for the girls and a whole
one for Robbie who
needed his strength for climbing on roofs and
hauling great sheaves of thatch about. They had to count their lucky stars that there
was a position for Dot at Snape, for that left one less mouth to feed at home.

Ma had given her a silver penny as a
keepsake, which is still stitched into the hem of her dress for good luck. She remembers
saying goodbye to her best friends, Letty and Binny, who seemed not to realize that
Yorkshire was almost as far as the moon, for they kept talking about what they would do
when she came back to visit. There was a tearful moment with Harry Dent too, a handful
of a lad whom she was sweet on and whom it was generally assumed she would marry in the
end. He said he’d wait for her for ever. She wonders at the heartache she had over
Harry Dent when she can hardly even picture his face now. Dot thought she might never
return, but she didn’t say so for they seemed so very sad about it all as it was.
She did go back to Stanstead Abbotts, though, on the journey down to London from Snape.
Lady Latymer had given her a couple of days off to spend with her family. But Letty had
passed away from the sweats and Binny had married a farmer from Ware. Harry Dent had got
a girl in the family way and had disappeared himself – so much for him. Robbie was
drinking more than he should and everyone was thinking he’d fall off a roof and go
the way of Pa, though no one said it.

Everything was different but most of all it
was she who had changed; she felt out of place in the cottage, kept banging her head on
the beams. She’d got used to a different kind of life.

‘It’s a book Uncle Will gave to
me.
Le Morte d’Arthur
,’ says Meg, jolting Dot back to the
present.

‘That is not English,’ says Dot.
‘What tongue is it?’

‘The title is in French, Dot,’ Meg
replies, ‘but the rest is English.’

‘Shall we read it?’ Dot says,
really meaning for Meg to do the reading and she to do the listening. She runs her
fingers over the embossed letters of the title, whispering, ‘
Le Morte
d’Arthur
,’ trying to get her tongue around the strange sounds,
wishing she could understand how these lines and squiggles transformed into words,
thinking it all a kind of alchemy.

‘Oh let’s,’ replies Meg.
Her mood thankfully seems to lift at the thought of it, and it strikes Dot that she –
plain Dorothy Fownten, a thatcher’s daughter from Stanstead Abbotts – is having
romances read to her by the daughter of one of the great lords. That is the extent to
which she has changed.

Dot gathers together all the candles she can
find so Meg has enough light to read by, and piles some cushions and furs beside the
fire, where they snuggle up with the book. Dot shuts her eyes, letting the story wind
itself around her, making pictures in her head of Arthur and Lancelot and the giant
warrior knight Gawain, imagining herself as one of the fair maidens, forgetting for a
moment her too-big, calloused hands and her clumsiness and the indelible fact of the
coal-black hair and sallow skin that make her look more like a Romany than one of the
lily-skinned, flaxen-haired ladies of Camelot.

A couple of the candles start to gutter and
Dot gets up to look in the box for replacements.

‘What do you want most in the world,
Dot?’ asks Meg.

‘You say first,’ she
replies.

‘I want a sword like Excalibur,’
says Meg, her eyes gleaming. ‘Imagine how you would never feel scared.’ She
strikes her thin arm through the air, gripping the imagined hilt. ‘Now you, Dot –
what is your wish?’

Without even having to think about it Dot
exclaims, ‘I should like a husband who can read,’ and then she laughs, for
it sounds so very silly when she says it out loud and more impossible even than Meg
getting her hands on a magic sword. She feels she has broken the spell of the story by
saying it.

Meg doesn’t say anything, seems lost
in her own thoughts.

Dot leans over to look in the candle box.
‘There are none left,’ she says. ‘Shall I go down and fetch
some?’

‘It is late. We should sleep,’
Meg says, rising with a stretch and picking up one of the furs, dragging it over to the
bed.

Dot goes to pull the truckle bed from where
it tucks neatly under the tester.

‘Sleep in here with me,’ Meg
says, patting the place beside her. ‘It will be warmer.’

Dot tidies the hearth, breaking up the
embers with the poker and placing the mesh guard carefully in front of it, then slides
on to the bed, drawing the hangings tight, making a small safe place for them. Rig
scrabbles up too, scratching and fussing and turning in circles before settling into a
tight little ball, making them giggle. Dot slides between the cold covers, rubbing her
feet back and forth to generate some warmth.

‘You are as bad as Rig,’ says
Meg.

‘Some of us don’t have the
warming pan.’

Dot feels a feather hand reach out for her,
and she shifts across the vast expanse of cold bed. Meg grips on to her, as if to let go
would unmoor her completely. Her nightgown smells of woodsmoke from sitting by the fire
and Dot is reminded of cuddling up to Little Min in the truckle they used to share. It
seems like someone else’s life she has found herself in.

‘If we could shape-shift like Morgan le
Fay,’ whispers Meg, ‘you could become me, Dot, and marry Thomas Seymour. He
would read to you “till the cows came home”.’

‘And what of you?’ asks Dot.

‘I would be you of
course …’

‘You’d have to empty the piss
pots every morning,’ Dot teases. ‘And what would
I
do with a fine
nobleman like this Seymour? I don’t think he’d fancy my dancing, for I have
two left feet at the best of times.’

They both laugh at the thought of it and
press themselves closer together for warmth like a pair of spoons.

‘Thank goodness for you, Dorothy
Fownten,’ Meg murmurs.

Katherine can hear the clatter of hooves in
the yard. She looks out of her chamber window, expecting to see one of
the King’s pages. She had hoped that her absence from court would put her out of
the King’s mind but that has not been the case, for each day there has been a
delivery: a brooch with two good diamonds and four rubies; a marten collar and matching
sleeves; an overskirt of cloth of gold; a pair of lovebirds; a side of venison, most of
which she has divvied out to the poor of the parish, for her household is so diminished
(with Meg’s brother and his wife, the new Lord and Lady Latymer, gone to run the
Yorkshire estates and most of the staff with them) that they would have struggled to
finish the meat before the maggots got at it. These are the gifts of a man who wants
something, but the idea of becoming the King’s mistress doesn’t bear
thinking about. Besides, there is no space in her mind, for the part of it that is not
filled with grieving for her husband is filled with Thomas Seymour.

Thoughts of him find their way into her head
unbidden and she can’t help but long to find a page clad in the red and gold
Seymour livery, in the courtyard below, with a letter, a token, the return of her
necklace. But there is only, daily, the green and white livery of the Tudors with more
unwanted and seemingly endless offerings. She has tried to send them back but the page
told her in a polite, wavering voice that the King would punish him for not having
persuaded her to keep them. So she has kept them, reluctantly, but each one makes her
feel a little emptier, as if she is an hourglass and her sand is almost run through.

She would exchange them all for the
slightest thing – a dandelion, a thimbleful of thin ale, a glass bead – brought by a
Seymour page. She can’t take control of her feelings. Why is she waiting like a
lovesick girl for some petty token from that shallow man? But he has embedded himself
deeply at the core of her, and he will not be excised by reason. She tells herself it is
her mother’s cross she longs for, but she knows she deceives herself. It is
him
she wants. He skits through her thoughts with that infernal bouncing
plume, and she cannot eject him.

She opens the casement, craning her neck to
see who is dismounting. It is Doctor Huicke, the physician who cared for her husband,
back from Antwerp. If it is not to be a Seymour page then Huicke is who she would have
hoped for. She wants to shout to him from the window, realizing how lonely she has been
in her mourning. She has itched for company and here is Huicke, one of the few, aside
from family,
she feels entirely herself with. She had felt an
inexplicable affinity with Huicke from the outset; he had come each day to tend Latymer
and they had become close over those months. He had been a support to her. It is not
often in life, she thinks, that one encounters a true friend – once in a decade,
perhaps.

She dashes down the steps, excited like a
girl, arriving in the hall just as Huicke is shown in. She wants to fling herself into
his arms but Cousins, the steward, is standing by and decorum won’t allow it.

‘So glad to see you,’ she
says.

His look dances over her and his face opens
into a smile. He appears, with his dark eyes shining like two fat drops of molasses and
his thick tar-black curls, like he might have walked out of an Italian painting.
‘The world is dull indeed without you, my lady.’

‘I think we know one another well
enough now to dispense with the formalities,’ she says. ‘Call me Kit, then I
can pretend we are brother and sister.’

‘Kit,’ he says, seeming to taste
the word as one might a French wine.

‘But I shall continue to call you
Huicke,’ she adds, ‘as I know far too many Roberts.’

He nods with another smile.

‘So tell me about Antwerp.’ She
leads him to a seat in the window where the April sun washes in. ‘Did you learn
anything?’

‘Antwerp. There is so much going on
there. All the talk is of the reformation. The printing presses are churning out books.
It is a city of great ideas, Kit.’

‘Reform has become a force for
reason,’ Katherine says. ‘When you think of all the horrors that have been
done in the
name of the old Church.’ She cannot help but think of
all that has been done, to her and to her family in particular, in the name of
Catholicism, though she would never say it, not even to Huicke. Besides, the idea of
reform pleases her; it seems so reasonable. ‘And did you meet this Lusitanus
fellow?’

‘I did. He has such notions, Kit, of
the way blood circulates. I sometimes think that our generation, more than any yet,
stands on the brink of change. Our sciences, our beliefs, are in such a state of flux.
It excites me.’

Katherine watches him speak, animated,
mimicking with his gloved hands Lusitanus slicing open a cadaver or a dead vein to
expose its intricate workings, talking fervently all the while. She has never seen
Huicke ungloved, even when he came to examine her husband. She reaches out, catching his
fingers in mid-air.

‘Why do you never take these
off?’

Huicke says nothing, but he begins to peel
back the lip of his glove, exposing a sliver of skin that is covered with raised, red
welts, then looks at her, watching, waiting for her to turn away in disgust. But she
doesn’t. She takes his hand and strokes the deformed skin with the tip of her
finger.