Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr (6 page)

‘As if she’d let us
forget.’

A page brings their furs, which Katherine
and her stepdaughter fold themselves into against the cold, and they bid goodbye to
Sister Anne, who disappears up the stone steps. Katherine will miss the easy familiarity
she has with Anne; the beckoning gloom of Charterhouse is not appealing, though she will
be glad to be away from here.

They wait for the horses on an alcove bench.
Meg looks drawn. Katherine closes her eyes, letting her head drop back to the cold stone
wall, thinking of Latymer’s prolonged agony, of how difficult it must have been
for the girl.

‘My Lady Latymer,’ says a voice,
drawing her out of her thoughts.

She opens her eyes to find Seymour standing
over her. Her stomach lurches.

‘Margaret,’ he says to Meg,
smiling like a man who always gets what he wants. ‘Would you be very kind and make
my excuses to your uncle. He waits for me in the Great Hall and I have some business to
discuss with Lady Latymer before she leaves.’

‘Business?’ questions Katherine
as Meg disappears up the steps. ‘If you’re intending to ask for
Margaret’s hand –’ she starts, but he interrupts.

‘Not at all. No … though she
is a lovely girl … and with Plantagenet blood to boot,’ he gabbles as if
slightly disarmed.

This surprises Katherine, for she is feeling
the same, confronted by this man alone. He stands a little too close to her, closer than
is correct. The planes of his face all seem to agree with each other, his jaw defined,
his cheekbones high, his forehead lofty with a point of hair at the centre, like an
arrow.

‘Oh,’ exclaims Katherine.

He smells male and musky and is looking at
her again with those blue, blue eyes. Her belly feels liquid and she would run if she
could, but she is at bay to her good manners and those eyes that have paralysed her.

‘No, it was this.’ He is holding
something in the outstretched palm of his hand. ‘Yours, I believe.’

She looks. It is a pearl.

‘I think not.’ As she says it
her hand reaches up to her mother’s cross, feeling just an empty place where the
central pearl should be and the jagged ends of the broken link.

How did it come to be lying in this
man’s palm?

She is bewildered, as if he has performed
some kind of sleight of hand on her, like the copper Will Sommers pulled from behind
Meg’s ear. She stares at it for some time, angry with him, as if he’d ripped
it from her throat deliberately.

‘How did you get your hands on
it?’ Her voice is clipped and cross and she’s annoyed with herself for
revealing too much in her tone. She feels his eyes still boring through her. Her breath
sounds loud in the silence.

‘I saw it drop from your pendant in
the long gallery and tried to get your attention. And then again in Lady Mary’s
rooms but the King …’ He stops.

‘The King,’ she repeats. She had
all but forgotten about the King’s approach.

‘I’m so glad I found you before
you left.’ His face opens up into a wide, beguiling smile with his eyes creasing
at the
corners, and suddenly they are no longer menacing but bright and
captivating.

She doesn’t return his smile but
neither does she take the pearl, which still sits in his palm waiting to be claimed. She
can’t get away from the feeling that she has been tricked.

He sits down on the stone bench beside her,
saying, ‘Take it.’

But she doesn’t move.

‘Or better still,’ he adds,
‘give me the necklace and I shall have my goldsmith mend it for you.’

She turns to look at him, wanting to find
fault. Everything is so perfectly put into place, the careful ruffle of his silk shirt,
the neatly clipped beard, the way his cap sits firmly over one ear, and that infernal
feather, so showy. The crimson satin spilling from the slashes in his doublet makes her
think of bloodied mouths. She wants to reach out and scuff him up a little. The snow has
spotted his velvet shoulders and the tip of his nose is red. She smiles and turns her
back, surprising herself, lifting her hood to expose the nape of her neck. He slips the
loose pearl into her hand and unclasps her necklace with warm fingers. She had not
intended to do that, but something in this man’s open smile and the sweet ruddy
tip of his nose makes her feel, in spite of herself, that she has misjudged him.

He takes the necklace, bringing it briefly
to his lips before stashing it somewhere inside his robe. A melting sensation passes
through her as if it had been her throat he’d kissed rather than the necklace.

‘Take care of it. It was my
mother’s and is very precious to me.’ She has managed to gather the drifting
bits of herself together and injected her voice with its usual straightness.

‘I can assure you, my lady, I
shall,’ he replies, adding after
a pause, ‘I am truly sorry
for your husband’s passing. Will tells me he suffered greatly.’

She doesn’t like the idea of her
brother discussing her or her husband with this man, wonders what else might have been
said. ‘He did suffer,’ she says.

‘It must have been unbearable for you
to see that.’

‘Yes.’ She is still looking at
him and his face seems to register genuine concern. A curl has escaped above the whorl
of his ear and it is all she can do to resist stretching out her hand and tucking it
away. ‘Unbearable.’

‘He was a lucky man to have you to
take care of him.’

‘You think he was lucky,’ she
snaps. ‘He wasn’t lucky. Not lucky to be struck down like that.’ Her
voice is sharp. She can’t help it.

Seymour looks chastened as he says, ‘I
didn’t mean to –’

‘I know you meant no harm,’ she
interrupts, seeing Meg descending the steps. ‘Meg is back, it’s time to
go.’

She stands and notices Rafe outside, waiting
with the horses. Meg goes straight to him and Katherine wonders if she is avoiding
Seymour after all that talk of a match.

‘And the pearl,’ Seymour
says.

Momentarily confused, she opens her hand and
finds the pearl nestled there. She feels tricked again, can’t remember taking it
from him. ‘Oh yes, the pearl.’ She hands it over.

‘Do you know how a pearl is
made?’ he asks.

‘Of course I do,’ she snarls,
suddenly angry with herself at being taken in by this man with his sweet talk and
platitudes, imagining all those giggling maids hanging on to his every word as he
describes the making of a pearl, twisting and turning the metaphor for them until they
are talked into bed and into revealing their own oysters. ‘And
you
are a
grain of sand in my shell,’ she spits, turning to leave.

Seymour will not be rebuffed so easily and
takes her hand, plants a wet kiss on it, saying, ‘But perhaps in time I will
become a pearl,’ before mounting the steps two at a time, his gown swaying from
his broad shoulders.

She wipes the back of her hand on her dress
and makes a little huff, blowing out a cloud of condensation that may as well be smoke.
She wishes she’d made it clear that if he’s after a tumble with a widow, she
wouldn’t be that widow for a thousand gold pieces. She is struck with a sense of
loneliness, feels unmoored without her husband, misses him desperately, wishes she were
going back to him.

There is a commotion on the stairs, a
clatter and a gust of laughter. She looks up to see one of the young pages on the floor
with an upturned plate of tarts that are scattered everywhere. People pass, kicking the
tarts about, treading them into the floor, taunting the boy. She can see the humiliation
in his crimson little-boy cheeks. She moves forward to help him but, as she does so, she
sees Seymour drop to the floor on his silk-clad knees and begin to gather up the tarts.
This silences the wags, who drift away shiftily for they know Seymour is the
King’s brother-in-law and that they all ought to be scraping to him. You’d
think by the looks on their faces that he’d turned the world on its head by
getting down on his white-stockinged knees to help this nobody.

He pats the boy on the back, teasing a smile
out of him. They sit there a while, chatting happily, then Seymour helps the boy to his
feet and Katherine hears him say, ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll talk to the
cook.’

As they ride off Katherine absently feels
for her mother’s cross, finding only an empty place where it should be, and
wonders if she should have given it over to Seymour so lightly when she barely knows
him. He is Will’s friend, surely
that is enough to recommend his
honesty, and how kind he was to the page with the tarts. Perhaps she has come to
distrust all men since Murgatroyd did his damage.

‘Mother,’ says Meg. ‘Look
what Uncle Will gave me.’ She pulls a book from beneath her cloak, handing it to
Katherine.

She is suddenly angered with her brother yet
again, thinking it one of the banned books, Zwingli or Calvin, and that he is trying to
draw Meg into something she’s too unworldly to understand. The intrigue of
religious factions at court is dangerous indeed. But she looks at the title, finding it
is only
Le Morte d’Arthur
.

‘That is lovely, Meg,’ Katherine
says, handing it back, thinking how suspicious she has become. She kicks Pewter into a
trot, feeling the reassuring strength of him beneath her, wanting to get back home to
Charterhouse all the sooner. Gloomy it may be, but at least she knows what goes on
within its walls.

‘I can’t wait to show it to
Dot,’ says Meg, referring to her maid. The two have become close as sisters since
the business at Snape, and Katherine is grateful for it. ‘She likes me to read the
romances to her.’

‘So tell me,’ says Dot, who is
combing out Meg’s wet hair by the hearth in her bedchamber. ‘What was it
like at court? Did you see the King?’

‘I did,’ Meg replies.
‘I’ve never been so frightened in all my life.’

‘Is he really as big as they
say?’

‘Bigger, Dot.’ She holds out her
arms to indicate the size of his girth and they both giggle. ‘He was disguised as
a minstrel, and though everybody knew he was the King, they all pretended not
to.’

‘That
is
odd,’ muses
Dot. ‘I wouldn’t think the King given to games like that. I’d have
thought him more …’ She searches for the right word. But actually Dot
hasn’t much considered that the King might be a real man. He is more like some
monster from an old story, who chops off the heads of his wives. ‘I’d have
thought him more serious.’

The comb snags in a tangle.

‘Ow!’ cries Meg.

‘Hold still,’ says Dot,
‘you’re making it worse … There,’ she throws a little knot
of hair into the fire.

‘Everything at court is odd,’
says Meg. ‘No one says what they mean, even Mother talks in riddles. And all
anyone had to say to me was to ask me when I am to marry and to whom.’
She pulls a grimace. The spaniel puppy Rig jumps up on to her lap and
she takes him in her arms, saying, ‘If I had it my way I’d never
marry.’

‘You will have to, whether you want it
or not. And you know it.’

‘I wish I was you, Dot.’

‘You wouldn’t last an hour with
all the skivvying I have to do,’ Dot teases. ‘See your beautiful white
hands.’ She holds her own calloused hand up to Meg’s. ‘Your hands are
not made for scrubbing and such like.’ She kisses the top of Meg’s head,
then begins to plait her long hair, twisting the strands deftly and pinning them in
place before slipping her nightcap over them.

‘But
you
can marry whom you
please,’ says Meg.

‘Fine choice I have. Have you
seen
the kitchen lads …’

‘There is the new squillery
boy.’

‘What, Jethro? He’s more trouble
than a bad tooth, that one.’ Dot says nothing about the fumble she’s had
with Jethro in the stables. She never talks of those things with Meg.

‘Uncle Will would have me marry his
friend Thomas Seymour,’ says Meg.

‘And what is he like, this Seymour
fellow?’

She grabs Dot’s hand, so tight that
her knuckles turn white. ‘He reminds me of …’ Her breath is suddenly
short and shallow, as if she is choking on the word, and her eyes are dark. Dot stands
her up, scattering Rig, and takes her in her arms, holding her tight. Meg tucks her head
into Dot’s shoulder.

‘Murgatroyd,’ Dot says.
‘You mustn’t be afraid to say it out loud, Meg. That way it is out, and out
is better than in and festering.’

Meg feels so thin under Dot’s grasp,
as if there’s nothing of her. Dot has seen how little she eats, as if she wants to
starve herself back to childhood. Perhaps that is the point.

Though only a single year separates them, Dot
feels older by far in spite of Meg’s cleverness: the reading, the Latin, the
French. She has a tutor, a pale man dressed in black who feeds her all that knowledge.
Dot’s head floods with unbidden memories of sitting in the stone corridor outside
the turret chamber at Snape, cupping her hands over her ears so as to block out
Murgatroyd’s grunts and Meg’s muffled cries. He had locked the door and Dot
could do nothing. The poor child, for she was a child back then, was lacerated down
there when he’d finished with her. No wonder she doesn’t want to marry. That
is the secret that binds Dot to Meg, and it is a heavy one indeed. Even Lady Latymer
doesn’t know what truly happened. Meg swore Dot to secrecy – and one thing Dot is
good at is keeping a secret.