Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr by Elizabeth Fremantle

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.
    ‘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