Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (3 page)

‘No, it is
I
who should
apologize. Things have been hard for you.’ He pinches the black silk of her skirts
between his fingers. ‘You are mourning. I should be more sensitive.’

They walk in silence down the long gallery
towards Lady Mary’s rooms. Will seems to brood and Katherine suspects he might be
wishing it were he in mourning for his wife. Those two loathed each other from the
minute they met. Anne Bourchier, the sole heir of the elderly Earl of Essex, was the
prize their mother had almost beggared herself to catch for her only son. With Anne
Bourchier came great expectations, not least the Essex title to hitch the Parrs back up
a notch or two. But the marriage had brought poor Will nothing, no children, no title,
no happiness; nothing but disgrace, for the King had given Cromwell the earldom and Anne
had eloped with some country cleric. Will couldn’t shake off the scandal, was ever
beset by jests of ‘clerical errors’ and ‘priest’s holes’
and ‘parson’s noses’. He didn’t see the funny side and, try as
he might, he couldn’t get the King to sanction a divorce.

‘Thinking of your wife?’ she
asks.

‘How could you tell?’

‘I know you, Will Parr, better than
you imagine.’

‘She has spawned another brat with
that cursed cleric.’

‘Oh Will, the King will come round
eventually and you will be able to make an honest woman of Lizzie Brooke.’

‘Lizzie’s running out of
patience,’ Will whines. ‘When I
think of the hopes Mother
had for my marriage, all she did to arrange it.’

‘Well, she never lived to see its
failure. Perhaps that is as well.’

‘It was her greatest wish to see the
Parrs on the rise again.’

‘Our blood is good enough, Will.
Father served the old King and his father served Edward IV, mother served Queen
Catherine.’ She counts them off on her fingers. ‘Do you want
more?’

‘That’s ancient history,’
Will growls. ‘I don’t even remember Father.’

‘I have only the vaguest memories of
him,’ she says, though she remembers clearly the day he was laid to rest; how
indignant she’d felt at being deemed too young, at six years old, to attend the
funeral. ‘Besides, Sister Anne has served all five Queens and now serves the
King’s daughter. And it is likely I shall, too, once more.’ She’s
irritated by her brother’s ambition, wants to tell him that if he cares so greatly
to raise the Parrs, then he should start currying favour with the right people instead
of that Seymour fellow. Seymour may be Prince Edward’s uncle but it is his elder
brother Hertford who has the King’s ear.

Will begins his grumbling again but seems to
think better of it and they fall into step once more, weaving through the crowd
that’s milling about outside the King’s chambers.

Then he squeezes her arm, saying,
‘What think you of Seymour?’

‘Seymour?’

‘Yes, Seymour …’

‘Not much.’ Her voice is
clipped.

‘Do you not find him
splendid?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘I thought we might try to make a match
for him with Meg.’

‘With Meg?’ she blurts.
‘Have you lost your mind?’

The colour has dropped from Meg’s
face.

He would eat the poor girl alive, she
thinks. ‘Meg will not be marrying anyone just yet. Not while her father is barely
cold.’

‘It was only –’

‘A ridiculous idea,’ she
snaps.

‘He is not what you think, Kit. He is
one of us.’

By that she supposes he means he’s for
the new religion. She doesn’t like to be packaged up with the court reformers,
prefers to keep her thoughts on the matter close to her chest. She has learned over the
years that it’s safer to cultivate an opaqueness at court.

‘Surrey doesn’t like him,’
she says.

‘Oh, that’s nothing but a family
thing, not even about religion. The Howards think the Seymours upstarts. It has no
bearing on Thomas.’

Katherine huffs.

Will leaves them to admire the new painting
of the King that hangs in the gallery. It is so fresh she can smell the paint and its
colours are vivid, with all the detail picked out in gold.

‘Is that the last Queen?’ asks
Meg, pointing to the sombre woman in a gable hood beside the King.

‘No, Meg,’ she whispers,
pressing a finger to her lips, ‘best not mention the last Queen here. That is
Queen Jane, the sister of Thomas Seymour whom you just met.’

‘But why Queen Jane, when there have
been two Queens since?’

‘Queen Jane is the one who gave him
the heir.’ She omits
adding that Jane Seymour was the one who
died before the King could tire of her.

‘So that is Prince Edward.’ Meg
points to the boy, a pocket version of his father, mirroring his stance.

‘It is, and they,’ she indicates
the two girls hovering about at the edges of the picture like a pair of butterflies with
nowhere to alight, ‘are Ladies Mary and Elizabeth.’

‘I see you are admiring my
portrait,’ comes a voice from behind.

The women turn.

‘Will Sommers!’ Katherine sings.
‘
Your
portrait?’

‘Do you not see me?’

She looks again, finding him in the back of
the image.

‘There you are. I hadn’t
noticed.’ She turns to her stepdaughter. ‘Meg, this is Will Sommers, the
King’s fool, the most honest man at court.’

He stretches out a hand and pulls a copper
coin from behind Meg’s ear, provoking a rare delighted laugh from her.

‘How did you do that?’ she
squeaks.

‘Magic,’ he replies.

‘I don’t believe in
magic,’ says Katherine. ‘But I know a good trick when I see it.’

They are still laughing when they arrive at
Lady Mary’s apartments, where Mary’s favourite, Susan Clarencieux, in
egg-yolk yellow, looms over the inner door shushing them like an adder.

‘She has one of her headaches,’
Susan hisses with a tight smile. ‘So keep the noise down.’ Looking her up
and down, as if totting up the cost of her dress and finding it wanting, she adds,
‘So very dull and dark; Lady Mary will not approve.’ Then her hand swoops to
cover her mouth. ‘Forgive me, I forgot you were in mourning.’

‘It is forgotten,’ replies
Katherine.

‘Your sister is in the privy chamber.
Excuse me, I must deal with …’ She doesn’t finish and slips back into
the bedchamber, closing the door silently behind her.

They move through into the room where a few
ladies are scattered about with their needlework. Katherine nods at them in greeting
before spotting Sister Anne in a window alcove.

‘Kit,’ says Sister Anne.
‘What a pleasure to see you at last.’ She stands and draws her sister into
an embrace. ‘And Meg.’ She kisses Meg on both cheeks.

The girl has relaxed visibly now they are in
the women’s rooms.

‘Meg, why don’t you go and look
at the tapestries? I believe your father is depicted in one. See if you can find
him.’

Meg wanders to the other end of the room and
the two sisters seat themselves on a bench in the window.

‘So what’s the occasion? Why do
you think I have been summoned?’ Katherine can hardly tear her gaze away from her
sister, her easy smile, the translucent glow of her skin, the pale tendrils of hair
escaping from her coif, the perfect oval of her face.

‘Lady Mary is to stand godmother.
Quite a few have been asked to attend.’

‘Not just me then … I am
glad of that. So who is to be baptized?’

‘It is a Wriothesley baby. A daughter
called …’

‘Mary,’ they say simultaneously,
laughing.

‘Oh Anne, how good it is to see you.
My house is a gloomy one indeed.’

‘I shall visit you at Charterhouse
when Prin–’ She cups both her hands over her mouth with a gasp. ‘When Lady
Mary gives me leave.’ She leans right into Katherine’s ear and
whispers, ‘Lady Hussey was sent to the Tower for addressing her
as Princess.’

‘I remember that,’ says
Katherine. ‘But that was years ago and she was making a stand. It was different. A
slip of the tongue wouldn’t be punished.’

‘Oh Kit, you have been long away from
this place. Have you forgotten what it is like?’

‘Nest of snakes,’ she
murmurs.

‘I hear the King sent Huicke to attend
your husband,’ says Anne.

‘He did. I don’t know
why.’

‘Latymer was certainly pardoned
then.’

‘I suppose so.’

Katherine had never fully understood
Latymer’s part in the uprising. The Pilgrimage of Grace, they’d called it,
when the whole of the North, forty thousand Catholic men it was said, rose up against
Cromwell’s reformation. Some of the leaders had come to Snape armed to the hilt.
There had been heated discussions in the hall and a good deal of shouting but she
couldn’t get the gist of what was being said. The next thing she knew Latymer was
preparing to leave, reluctantly, he told her: they needed men like him to lead them. She
wondered what kind of threats they’d made, for Latymer was not the sort to be
easily coerced even though he thought their cause justified, with the monasteries razed,
the monks strung from the trees and a way of life destroyed with them – not forgetting
the beloved Queen cast aside and the Boleyn girl turning their great King about her
finger like a toy. That was how Latymer described it. But to take arms up against his
King; that was not the husband she knew.

‘You have never talked of it,’
says Anne. ‘The uprising, I mean. What happened at Snape.’

‘It is something I’d rather
forget,’ Katherine says, closing the conversation.

A version of events had spread around the
court at the time. It was common knowledge that when the King’s army had the
rebels on the back foot, Latymer had left for Westminster to seek the King’s
pardon and the rebels thought he’d turned coat, sending Murgatroyd and his men to
hold Katherine and Meg hostage, ransacking Snape – it made a good story for the gossips.
But even her sister knew nothing of the dead baby, Murgatroyd’s bastard son. Nor
that she’d given herself to the brute in desperation, to save Meg and Dot from his
clutches, the darkest secret of them all. She did save the girls but wonders what God
thinks of that, for adultery is adultery according to the Church. Katherine has often
wondered why it was that all the other leaders had swung, and Murgatroyd too – two and a
half hundred put to death in the name of the King when the uprising failed – but not
Latymer. Perhaps he
had
betrayed them. Murgatroyd had certainly assumed so. She
prefers to believe that Latymer was loyal, as he’d maintained, otherwise what was
it all for? But she will never know the truth.

‘Did you ever hear anything, Anne,
about Latymer and why he was pardoned? Were there any rumours at court?’

‘Nothing reached my ears,
sister,’ says Anne, touching Katherine’s sleeve, letting her hand rest there
a moment. ‘Don’t dwell on it. The past is past.’

‘Yes.’ But she can’t help
thinking of the way the past erodes the present like a canker in an apple.

She looks across the chamber at Meg,
who’s intently searching the tapestry for her father’s likeness. At least
his image has not been stitched over like some. She looks back to Anne – sweet, loyal,
uncomplicated Anne. There is something about
her, a freshness, as if
she has more life in her than she can possibly contain. It strikes Katherine suddenly
why this is. Her heart gutters and, leaning forward, she puts a hand to Anne’s
stomacher, asking, ‘Is there something you are keeping from me?’ She wonders
if her smile hides the surge of jealousy that comes in the face of her sister’s
fertility. It is written all over her, the flush and bloom of pregnancy that Katherine
has wanted so very much for herself.

Anne reddens. ‘How is it you know
everything, Kit?’

‘That is wonderful news.’ The
words stick in her throat; her widowhood is a hard unassailable fact, with the
possibility of a child nothing but a distant fantasy now at her age, with not a single
living infant to her name, only the dead baby that is never spoken of.

Her thoughts must have seeped through the
surface of her, for Anne places a comforting hand over hers with the words, ‘There
is still a chance for you, sister. You will surely marry again.’

‘I think two husbands are
enough,’ Katherine replies, firmly closing the subject, though continuing in a
whisper, ‘but I am happy for you. I know
this
one won’t be a little
Catholic with Lady Mary as its godmother.’

Sister Anne brings a finger to her lips with
a ‘shhh’ and the sisters share a secret smile. She stretches out a hand to
the cross that hangs from Katherine’s neck. ‘Mother’s diamond
cross,’ she says, holding it up so it catches the light. ‘I remember it
bigger than this.’

‘It is you who was smaller.’

‘It is a long time since Mother passed
on.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine says, but all
she can think of is the length of her mother’s widowhood.

‘And these pearls,’ Anne is
still fingering the cross, ‘they
are almost pink. I’d
forgotten. Oh dear, one of the links is loose.’ She leans in closer. ‘Let me
see if I can mend it.’ The tip of her tongue sticks out in concentration as she
presses the open ends of the link between her thumb and forefinger.

Katherine enjoys her sister’s
closeness. She can smell her scent; it is sweet and comforting, like ripe apples. She
turns a little towards the panelling so Anne may better get to her throat. On the wood
she can clearly see where the initials CH have been scraped away. Poor little Catherine
Howard, the most recent Queen, these must have been her rooms. Of course they were, they
are the best in the palace, save for those of the King.

‘There,’ says Anne, letting the
cross drop back to Katherine’s dress. ‘You don’t want to lose one of
Mother’s pearls.’

‘How was it, Anne, with the last
Queen? You have been quite silent about it.’ Katherine’s voice has dropped
to a whisper and her fingers absently stroke the scraped place on the panelling.