Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (8 page)

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘I haven’t a name for it. It is
not catching but all who see it are disgusted. They think me leprous.’

‘Poor you,’ she says, bending
down and pressing a feather-light kiss on to his ravaged skin, ‘poor, poor
you.’

He can feel the prick of tears behind his
eyes. It is not that he has never been touched, for he has. Lovers have touched him in
all sorts of ways, but even in the thrall of Eros he can see revulsion in the set of
their mouths and their squeezed-shut eyes. What he sees in Katherine is something else,
something entirely sympathetic.

‘It is everywhere, save for my
face.’

She grabs both his hands and, standing,
pulls him to his feet too, saying, ‘Let’s go to the still room. We can
concoct a balm.’ There is a sparkle in her. ‘There must be something that
will cure it.’

‘Nothing I have found yet. Though it
can be soothed a little with certain unguents.’

They walk together through the dark panelled
corridors that wind through to the rear of the house.

‘Who would have imagined friendship
could have come through such adversity,’ she says.

‘True friendship is rare
indeed,’ he agrees, but he feels disingenuous for there is a secret he is keeping
from her, a subterfuge he fears would break their bond. He has come to see her as more
than a friend, could not bear to lose her; he cares for her in the way he imagines
caring for a sister, though as an only child he has no measure for that. His deceit
prods at him. ‘Particularly,’ he adds, ‘when most of one’s time
is spent at court.’

It is true there is no such thing as
friendship at court with everyone vying for position. Even the King’s physicians
play a constant game of one-upmanship. He knows they don’t particularly like him,
for he is a good decade younger than most of them and a better doctor already.

She slips an arm through his.

He wants to make things even with her, give
her a hold over him in return for his deception. ‘In Antwerp –’ he begins,
but stops abruptly.

‘In Antwerp what?’

‘I have become …’ He
doesn’t know how to phrase it. ‘I m-met …’ He stammers. ‘I
fell in love.’ But that is only the half of it.

‘Huicke.’ She grips his hand,
seeming to enjoy his confession. ‘Who is the lady?’

‘It is not a lady.’

There, he has said it, and she is not
reeling in shock.

‘Ah!’ she says. ‘I had
suspected as much.’

‘How so?’

‘I have known men who prefer the
intimacies of …’ She pauses, dropping her voice, ‘… their own
kind.’

He has given her something that will bind
him to her. This information in the wrong ear could see him hang. He feels a comfort in
having redressed the balance.

‘My first husband,’ she
continues, ‘Edward Borough. We were both so very young, no more than children
really.’

A servant lad passes with an armful of
freesias. Their spring scent hangs in the air.

‘Are those for my bedchamber,
Jethro?’ she asks him.

‘Yes, my lady.’

‘Give them to Dot, she will see they
are arranged.’

He dips in a little bow and moves on past
them.

‘Edward Borough was completely
unaroused by me.’ She picks up where she left off. ‘I thought it was
inexperience. Neither of us were prepared really. But there was a tutor in the
household, a serious young man, Eustace Ives. He had a beautiful mouth. I remember the
mouth, turned up at the corners in a kind of permanent solemn smile. It was when I saw
how Edward blushed as he talked to Eustace Ives that it began to dawn on
me … How little I knew then.’

‘What became of Edward Borough?’
asks Huicke, captivated by this nugget of his friend’s past.

‘He was taken by the sweating
sickness. Slipped out of his life in an afternoon. Poor Edward. He was such a gentle
soul.’ She has a faraway look about her as she talks of the
past
as if she has gone back there and left just the ghost of her in the present. ‘Then
I married John Latymer.’ A little shiver seems to bring her back. ‘So tell
me. This person is from Antwerp?’

‘No, he is an Englishman. A writer, a
thinker. He is quite remarkable, Kit.’ He feels a little thrill run through him
just talking of Nicholas Udall. ‘And wild …’ He pauses.
‘Excessively wild.’

‘Wild …’ she repeats.
‘Sounds dangerous.’

He laughs. ‘Only in the best kind of
way.’

‘And your wife?’ Katherine asks.
‘Is she understanding?’

‘We are virtually estranged these
days.’ He is reluctant to talk of his wife, feels too guilty. Instead he changes
the subject. ‘There is much love in the air these days. And much talk of the King
and a certain someone.’

Her face drops. ‘I suppose that
someone is me.’ They have stopped walking and she turns to him, big-eyed, shot
through with worry. ‘Why me, Huicke? There are plenty of willing beauties at
court. The place is overflowing with them. And I’m not so young any more.
Doesn’t he want more sons?’

‘Perhaps it is your very unwillingness
that spurs him on.’ Huicke knows only too well what a spur indifference can be to
desire. All those pretty youths he’s fallen for, who were revolted by his skin.
‘The King is accustomed to getting what he wants. You are different, Kit, in that
respect.’

‘Different, pah.’ She heaves out
a sigh. ‘What would you have me do? Throw myself at him? Would that cool his
ardour?’ She marches off down the corridor.

‘He talks of your kindness too,
Kit,’ he calls out to her receding back. ‘And how tenderly you cared for
your husband.’

He couldn’t begin to tell her how the
King has plumbed
him for information. How was she with her husband? Did
she tend him kindly? Did she mix her own physic?

‘And how would he know that?’
she spits, turning.

They walk on in a brooding silence, he
slightly behind her. She swings open the still-room door. A resinous smell envelops them
and at last her frustration seems to abate. She begins to pull out jars, uncorking them,
sniffing at their contents, tipping a few herbs out into a mortar, beginning to crush
them with a pestle. ‘Goldenseal,’ she says; then takes several more pots
from a shelf, arranging them on the bench. She selects one, reading its label, removing
its cork and bringing it to her nose with a small satisfied sigh, holding it up for him
to smell too.

‘Myrrh,’ he says. It is pungent
and ecclesiastical, reminding him of a cleric he once had a passion for.

She grinds a little of it with the
goldenseal, then lights a burner beneath a copper dish, dropping in a hard glob of wax
and leaving it to melt while she continues pounding. She adds some almond oil then drips
in the hot wax, stirring fast until it stiffens.

‘There,’ she says eventually,
bringing the mortar to her nose to judge if the smell of it is right. ‘Now, give
me your hands.’

He removes his gloves, feeling entirely
naked without them, and she massages the salve into his poor angry skin. He is quite
overwhelmed again, to be touched in this way.

‘You see, Kit,’ he says after
some time. ‘This is why people think of you as kind.’

‘No more than most,’ she says.
‘The goldenseal works like magic.’

‘You are gifted with herbs. Your
tinctures for Lord Latymer were little short of miraculous.’

She looks at him strangely and he thinks he
sees a fleeting hint of fear, or something like it, pass over her.

‘Did you notice anything,’ she
says, ‘in my husband after he passed?’

There it is again, the look of a beast at
bay.

He wonders what it is that’s getting
at her. ‘Only that the tumour had eaten his guts away. It was a wonder he survived
as long as he did. I shouldn’t say it, but it would have been better if he’d
died sooner.’

The look dissolves to nothing.

‘God’s way is not always easy to
understand,’ she says.

‘How is Meg?’ he asks.
‘How has she taken her father’s death?’

‘Not well really. I worry for
her.’

‘Have you tried a few drops of St
John’s wort?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. I
shall try it.’

‘The King is adamant that she marry
Thomas Seymour,’ Huicke says. ‘Not a bad match for her, I’d
say.’

‘Not Seymour,’ she snaps.
‘Meg will never marry Seymour.’

‘
You
like Seymour?’ he
says, aghast.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No, but it is written all over
you.’

It is – it is woven into her like the
pattern in a carpet. And Seymour of all people. The King would never sanction it. It
doesn’t even bear thinking about.

‘I don’t want to like him. I am
so very confused by it all, Huicke.’

‘You must forget him.’

‘I know I must. And you,’ they
are talking in whispers now, ‘you will say nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ he repeats.
‘You have my word.’

He can see that she doesn’t fully
trust him. She is weighing
up his honesty. He is the King’s
physician, after all. The King put him in her house.

‘Why did the King send you to attend
my husband?’ she asks, as if she can read his thoughts.

‘I cannot keep the truth from you,
my … er … Kit,’ he says, bringing his hands up to cover his
face, to cover his shame. ‘The King asked me to report back on you. He has
long
been interested in you, since you came to court a year ago to serve Lady Mary.
He
commanded
it, Kit.’

There it is, out, his shame displayed for
her to see.

‘You, Huicke, a spy?’

He can feel her slipping away, her
friendship taken back. ‘I was, maybe, but not now. I am
your
man
now.’

He can’t look at her, looks instead at
the rows of labelled jars and pots on the shelves behind her. She turns herback to him.
He reads off the names in his head: figwort, meadowsweet, wood spurge, milkwort,
elecampane, burdock … The silence between them is unbearably heavy,
suffocating.

‘Kit,’ he says, eventually,
‘you
can
trust me.’ His voice has a supplicant’s tone.

‘How can I?’

‘I didn’t know you
then … I know you now.’

‘Yes,’ she mumbles, ‘and I
know you.’

Is she thinking of the shared secrets that
bind them together, he wonders, feeling better for it.

She picks up his gloves and hands them to
him, asking, ‘Do your hands feel soothed?’

‘They do. The itch has
lessened.’

‘Come,’ she moves to the door.
‘My sister is due. I shall have your horse brought round?’ She is dismissing
him.

He feels hollow, wants to prostrate himself
on the
flagstones and beg her forgiveness. But her polite coolness has
rendered him incapable. He follows her back through the dark passages to the hall where
she calls her steward.

‘Doctor Huicke is leaving, Cousins,
will you let the groom know and see him out.’ She lifts the back of her hand for
him to kiss.

‘Friends?’ he asks.

‘Friends,’ she replies with a
vague smile, but she is inscrutable.

Katherine strolls in the Charterhouse
gardens with her sister. Anne’s usually luminous skin is greyish and the milky
bloom of a month ago has gone. She has lost the baby but is sanguine. ‘There will
be others,’ she’d said, when Katherine offered her sympathy.

It had rained earlier, a brief fine spray,
leaving the new leaves sparkling. The sky has now cleared completely of cloud; it is
that intense after-rain blue, almost cobalt, and the spring sun flares against it, an
early herald of summer.

‘I have had no one but lawyers for a
month and then two dear visitors in one day,’ Katherine is saying.

‘I’m sorry to have stayed away
so long, sister,’ says Anne. ‘I was laid low with this miscarriage, was abed
a full fortnight.’ Anne has the light behind her and the tendrils of pale hair
that have escaped from her coif are lit up like a halo.

The sun catches at the edge of everything,
making the courtyard seem touched by God. The cobbles gleam and the windows shimmer,
winking as they pass. Katherine opens the gate to her physic garden, leading the way
through. The pear trees in the orchard beyond are in full blossom, billows of white
against the blue sky, and the yew hedges around the perimeter are impossibly green.
There is a circular pond at
the centre where silver carp slip and
shimmy just beneath the surface.

‘You have made a little Eden
here,’ says Anne. ‘You wouldn’t think the chaos of Smithfield is just
a stone’s throw away.’

‘Yes,’ says Katherine.
‘Sometimes I forget altogether that I am in London.’

Katherine’s herb beds are set around
the pond and have been newly dug, with the earth fresh red, and the hopeful young plants
are carefully labelled with carved rounds of wood set on stakes. The sisters sit on a
shady stone bench but stick their damp feet out into a pool of warm sun to dry.

‘Will you stay here?’ asks
Anne.

‘I don’t know. I don’t
know what is best. I’m trying to stay away from court. All this business with the
King.’

‘He does seem to have a bee in his
bonnet.’

‘I don’t understand it, Anne. He
barely knows me and –’

‘Knowing has never been a necessity
for marriage,’ interrupts Anne.

‘
Marriage!
You don’t
really think it is
marriage
he wants from me?’

‘It is common knowledge he seeks a new
Queen. And after the Anne of Cleves debacle he won’t look abroad.’

The bell of St Bartholomew’s rings out
three times, with echoes of more distant church bells behind it.

‘Why not you, Kit?’ Anne
continues. ‘You are perfect. You have never put a foot wrong.’

‘Hah,’ puffs Katherine, her
secrets pressing down on her. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Huicke thinks the King
only desires me because I am unwilling and he’s used to getting everything he
wants. I am a novelty.’ An acid laugh escapes from her. ‘Think of all those
young maids he could have, their sap rising.’