Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (9 page)

‘Don’t you see, Kit. That is what
he had last time, and look what happened. Your attraction is precisely that you are
not
like Catherine Howard; you are her opposite. The King could not stand
to be cuckolded again.’

‘How can I avoid it?’

‘I don’t know, sister. If you
stay away, you risk fanning the embers. And besides, Lady Mary will call for you soon.
She wants you there.’

‘Oh Anne,’ Katherine murmurs,
resting her forehead on her palm, closing her eyes, imagining taking Pewter and
galloping off, finding another life for herself, another person to be.

‘Think how merry Mother would be were
she still alive … you being courted by the King himself.’

‘Our ambitious mother! Why can’t
I do as you did, Anne, and marry for love?’

‘But to be Queen,
Kit … Would you truly not want that?’

‘I would have thought you of all
people would know what it means to be
his
Queen. You were there. You saw what
happened to them all. Catherine of Aragon cast out to meet her end in a damp castle in
the middle of nowhere, estranged even from her daughter. Anne Boleyn – need I even say
it? Jane Seymour not properly tended in her childbed –’

‘Many women succumb to childbed fever,
Kit. You can hardly blame the King for that,’ interrupts Anne. It is true; death
stalks pregnant women.

‘Well, perhaps not, but then look at
Anne of Cleves, who only escaped with her head because she agreed to an annulment,
and
what about little Catherine Howard …?’ She pauses.
‘You were there, all the way through, all of them, you saw it all.’ She has
the urge to slap her sister.

‘You are not like
them
, Kit.
You are sensible and good.’

Katherine is wondering what Anne would think if
she knew that her sensible sister had whored herself with a Catholic rebel and
administered a lethal tincture to her husband. ‘Sensible,’ she says.
‘Huh.’

‘What I mean is you are not driven by
your passions.’

‘No indeed,’ Katherine replies,
but her head is full of Seymour.

‘Do you remember, Kit,’ says
Anne, ‘when we used to play queens at Rye?’

‘Oh,’ says Katherine, her anger
dispersing in the face of her sister’s disarming sweetness. ‘Yes. With me
all wrapped up in a bed sheet and married off to the dog.’

‘And the paper crowns that
wouldn’t stay on … What was the name of that dog? Was it
Dulcie?’

‘No, I don’t remember Dulcie.
She must have been after I left to marry Edward Borough. That one must have been
Leo.’

‘You’re right. Leo was the one
that bit the barber’s son.’

‘I’d forgotten
that … Leo was Will’s dog.’

‘No wonder it was a biter,’ says
Katherine. ‘I’m sure Will teased that poor animal something
rotten.’

‘Do you remember Will in
Mother’s fine red damask stuffed with a pillow, playing the Cardinal, when he
dropped the silver cross from the chapel?’ laughs Anne. ‘It was never the
same after that, always a bit skewed. I didn’t dare look at it during prayers for
fear of the giggles.’

‘And when you stumbled on my bed-sheet
train and knocked into the steward with a pitcher of wine that went flying.’

Anne’s good humour is infectious. They
were always laughing back then, when they didn’t have to be at court and on their
best behaviour.

‘I forgot,’ says Anne. ‘I
have something for you, Kit, from Will.’ She digs about in the folds of her gown,
pulling out a little leather pouch, which she drops into Katherine’s hand.

She knows what it is without looking; it is
her mother’s cross. Her throat is blocked as if she’s swallowed a stone.

‘Why did Will have it?’ Anne
asks.

‘It was being mended.’ Katherine
stands and saunters to the herb beds with her face turned away so as not to reveal
anything.

Why did Thomas Seymour not bring it himself?
He was simply toying then. Flirting with the idea of bedding a widow. Pull yourself
together, she demands inwardly. You barely know him.

‘And there is a letter,’ says
Anne, handing Katherine a fold of sealed paper. ‘Why does it have the Seymour
stamp?’

‘I have no idea, Anne,’ she
says, tucking the letter away in her sleeve.

‘Will you not open it?’

‘It is not important, just a
goldsmith’s bill I expect.’ She feels the letter might burn a hole in her
gown. ‘Come, let me show you what I have planted. Here is mandrake for earaches
and gout. See, I have labelled them all.’ She imagines the mandrake roots as
little buried bodies putting out feelers into the dark earth. ‘They say witches
make love potions from it,’ she adds.

‘Can it make
anyone
fall in
love?’ asks Anne, wide-eyed.

‘It’s claptrap, of
course,’ says Katherine bluntly.

‘And digitalis?’ Anne points to
one of the markers. ‘What is that?’

‘Foxglove,’ says Katherine,
suddenly feeling a pressure around her neck as if her husband’s ghost is squeezing
the
breath from her. ‘Pains of the liver and spleen,’ she
adds, her voice brusque.

‘They call it dead men’s bells,
don’t they?’

‘They do.’ Katherine’s
impatience is building with her sister’s infernal questioning.

‘Why?’

‘Because it will kill a man if the
dose is large enough,’ she snaps. ‘Poison! They are all poison, Anne. See
this … henbane will cure a toothache if you burn it and inhale the
smoke.’ She is almost shouting now and can’t stop. ‘And hemlock
here,’ she snaps off a twig and waves it in front of Anne’s face,
‘will calm a raving madman if mixed with betony and fennel seed. And a drop too
much of either will send a grown man to his grave …’

‘Kit, what’s got into
you?’

Katherine feels her sister’s hand on
her back, rubbing, soothing.

‘I don’t know, Anne, I
don’t know.’ She can feel the letter in her sleeve against her skin, has the
sense it might give her a rash or scald her or leave some kind of indelible stain like a
devil’s mark. ‘I do not feel myself.’

‘You are grieving … It is no
surprise. And all this business with the King …’ she lets her sentence
drift.

Katherine says nothing.

When Sister Anne has taken her leave
Katherine pulls the letter out, holding it between the very tips of her fingers as if
she fears the paper might be impregnated with one or other of the poisons she knows so
well. There are Italians who understand how to do such a thing. She is tempted to throw
it in the fire, never know its contents, pretend never to have met Thomas Seymour, not
have this inner throb that is set off by the merest
thought of him. It
is a feeling that might lead her to do anything, a madness. She runs her fingers over
the seal, the conjoined wings of the Seymours, dreading that it might contain just a
polite note, but dreading equally something more.

She breaks the wax, brittle red shards
scattering, and unfolds the paper. Her shallow breath fills her ears. His hand is an
untidy scrawl, at odds with the way she sees him, nothing-out-of-place. It makes her
wonder about him, whether he is the man he seems to be at all. But what does he seem to
be? Why is it that she, who usually knows exactly what she thinks, is so very confounded
by this man? The word ‘love’ leaps out of the spidery text, the sight of it
making her heart palpitate as if a bird is trapped in her breast.

My Lady Latymer,

Firstly I tender my most sincere apologies for the length of time it has taken
for me to return this. I have deliberated so on whether to bring it to you
myself but dared not for fear that you would find me too forward. I felt I
carried a little piece of you about my person but what small comfort that was.
God knows I wanted an excuse to lay my eyes on you, but feared that on seeing
your sweet face I would not find a way to check the feelings of love that have
taken root in me, growing and flourishing beneath my surface. I feared you would
turn me out. I fear it still.

There is no more distressing thing to me than the knowledge of the King’s
plans – he talks to me often of his wish that I should marry your dear Margaret.
If he commands it, I will be a lost man. His intentions to you, the rumours of
which fly about the palace like a murmuration of starlings, leave me utterly
devastated and I only pray that his desire will alight elsewhere before
long.

You have never given me cause to believe my feelings reciprocated but I needed
to declare myself, for to not do so would be to live my life
in
the knowledge that I had not been honest to the only woman who has ever truly
stirred my heart. I must see you or I fear I shall wither to nothing. I beg you
to entertain this single wish.

I await your word.

Forever your humble servant,

Thomas Seymour

She exhales deeply, standing motionless,
save for the hammering of her heart, its frantic rhythm reaching the furthest outposts
of her body – her fingertips alive with it, her belly fizzing, her knees softening,
dissolving. Another sigh leaves her. She barely recognizes herself. There are footsteps
in the corridor without and, almost before she realizes, the letter is balled in her
hand and tossed on the fire. She watches it blaze then curl and blacken before the last
bright wisps of it float up and away.

‘What is this?’ asks Cook, as
Jethro heaves a carton on to the kitchen table.

‘From the palace, for Lady Latymer.
Smells fishy,’ he says.

‘Open it then,’ says Dot, who
stops what she is doing, melting down candle stubs and pouring the hot beeswax into
moulds. But as she stands the pot of hot wax goes flying, landing in white spatters on
the flags. Under her breath she curses her clumsiness.

‘Dot,’ barks Cook. ‘Not
again. Clean that lot up.’

Dot grabs a knife and drops to the floor,
scraping at the warm wax and trying to ignore two of the lads who are having a joke at
her expense.

‘Butterfingers,’ one of them
says, his eyes narrowed and flashing. He holds a goose by the neck, hanging limply.

She pokes her tongue out at him. The wax
comes up on to
the knife easily in pretty ripples. She scrapes them
back into the pot, which she leaves on the shelf for the chandler.

The lid is wrenched off the carton, to
reveal a vast number of oysters packed in sawdust and ice. There is a strong briny,
female scent that Dot supposes must be the smell of the sea. She has never seen the sea,
but ever since she heard the story of Tristan and Isolde, how they fell in love aboard
ship, the idea of it has fixed itself in her head. She has stood by the Thames listening
to the cark of the gulls and tried to imagine what it might be like, all that water
stretching away to the horizon in every direction, but she cannot quite manage to make a
picture of it.

‘What in the Lord’s name am I to
do with all these?’ says Cook.

‘She will want them given to St
Bart’s to distribute to the poor, I suppose,’ says Cousins, the steward.
‘She gave me a stock of ointments to take over there. They are ridden with scurvy,
apparently. I shall take the oysters too, when you have removed what you need for the
household, Cook. Jethro, you can help me.’

‘I’ll make a stew of them for
Friday, the rest you can have.’ Cook begins prising the oysters out of the box and
flinging them into a bowl.

Dot picks one up. It is rough and cold.

‘Put it down,’ barks Cook.
‘We don’t want the whole lot scattered.’

She drops it back into the dish.

‘What about all these gifts from the
palace, Cousins?’ Cook says, lowering his voice a little. ‘Do you think the
King really wants to –’

‘It is not for us to speculate,’
cuts in Cousins.

‘But we’ve got our livelihoods
to think of. She’ll not be keeping this place going if she marries the
King.’

‘Lady Latymer would never have us
starve,’ says Cousins. ‘She’ll see us all right. She’s not the
sort to leave people wanting.’

‘True enough,’ says Cook.

‘I’ve put word out that
I’m looking for a new position anyway,’ says the squillery lad, who has
started to pluck the goose and now stands in a cloud of feathers. ‘The kitchen
clerk at Bermondsey Court says they’ll be needing a pot scrubber. I’d rather
do that than end up queuing for alms with that scurvy lot outside St Bart’s
–’

‘She won’t marry the
King,’ interrupts Dot. ‘It’s nothing but gossip. The King gives gifts
to everyone all the time.’ Dot knows only too well that people, even great ladies
like Lady Latymer, don’t become Queen. That only happens in stories.

‘And what would
you
know
anyway, Dorothy Fownten? The whole of London talks of it, so why would they be wrong and
you right? I’ve a wager on it,’ the lad says, spitting a feather off his
lip.

‘There are others talked about, that
Anne Bassett for one,’ Dot retorts. ‘What I
do
know is that
she’ll marry some lord or other in a year or two and we’ll be off to another
castle in the middle of nowhere …’ She pauses, turning, moving towards the
door. ‘Mind you, anywhere’s better than Snape.’

She slips out into the yard for a moment
alone, sitting herself on an upturned bucket in the sun, closing her eyes and leaning
back against the hot brick wall. Dot is surprised that none of the servants seem to have
got wind of the match that is in the offing for Meg. They’re too busy harping on
about Lady Latymer becoming Queen, as if it’s all signed and sealed.

There is definitely something afoot. The
Seymour page seems to be about the place constantly, letters are passing
back and forth, sometimes three or four in a day – arrangements, Dot supposes, though
how much arranging can there be for a wedding? And Seymour himself arrived today, or Dot
supposed it was he, for his page – who, if she half opens her eyes, she can see lounging
about outside the stables, slurping on a cup of small beer – is the same one who
delivers the letters. She got a glimpse of the man himself dismounting from a beauty of
a horse, red-brown and shiny as a conker with a long crimped mane and hooves oiled to a
sheen. She didn’t see his face but he was kitted out in enough velvet and fur to
sink one of the King’s great warships, and his hose were whiter than virgin snow,
which made her wonder about the poor maid who has to keep them that way.