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

were stretched out in the sun
and brightly dyed, big splashes of colour, the smell was at its most intense. It is a
comforting scent. She wonders what her ma is doing now, imagines her sweeping snow off
the stoop, making a picture of it in her head: Ma’s sleeves rolled up, capable
hands holding the broom. Her sister Little Min helps, spreading grit on the path, and
her brother Robbie, with thatch dust in his hair like Pa always had, is cracking the ice
in the water butt. But she knows that picture is all wrong, that Little Min is not so
little any more and Ma’s face is a map of lines. She feels the heart-tug of
missing them, but it’s so long ago and she has grown into the wrong shape for that
life, couldn’t fit herself back into it.
    She was twelve when she left for Snape
Castle all the way up in Yorkshire, to work for Lady Latymer whom her Ma’s ma had
wet-nursed as a baby. The Parr family at Rye House more or less kept the entire village
of Stanstead Abbotts employed back then, when Ma’s ma was still alive, or so it
was said. Dot left at the time when Pa had fallen off a roof thatching and broke his
neck. Ma started taking in washing, but there was never enough to go round even with
Robbie taking over the roof work. Dot remembers hunger gnawing at her belly at night,
when all there’d been was a half ladle of pottage each for the girls and a whole
one for Robbie whoneeded his strength for climbing on roofs and
hauling great sheaves of thatch about. They had to count their lucky stars that there
was a position for Dot at Snape, for that left one less mouth to feed at home.
    Ma had given her a silver penny as a
keepsake, which is still stitched into the hem of her dress for good luck. She remembers
saying goodbye to her best friends, Letty and Binny, who seemed not to realize that
Yorkshire was almost as far as the moon, for they kept talking about what they would do
when she came back to visit. There was a tearful moment with Harry Dent too, a handful
of a lad whom she was sweet on and whom it was generally assumed she would marry in the
end. He said he’d wait for her for ever. She wonders at the heartache she had over
Harry Dent when she can hardly even picture his face now. Dot thought she might never
return, but she didn’t say so for they seemed so very sad about it all as it was.
She did go back to Stanstead Abbotts, though, on the journey down to London from Snape.
Lady Latymer had given her a couple of days off to spend with her family. But Letty had
passed away from the sweats and Binny had married a farmer from Ware. Harry Dent had got
a girl in the family way and had disappeared himself – so much for him. Robbie was
drinking more than he should and everyone was thinking he’d fall off a roof and go
the way of Pa, though no one said it.
    Everything was different but most of all it
was she who had changed; she felt out of place in the cottage, kept banging her head on
the beams. She’d got used to a different kind of life.
    ‘It’s a book Uncle Will gave to
me.
Le Morte d’Arthur
,’ says Meg, jolting Dot back to the
present.
    ‘That is not English,’ says Dot.
‘What tongue is it?’
    ‘The title is in French, Dot,’ Meg
replies, ‘but the rest is English.’
    ‘Shall we read it?’ Dot says,
really meaning for Meg to do the reading and she to do the listening. She runs her
fingers over the embossed letters of the title, whispering, ‘
Le Morte
d’Arthur
,’ trying to get her tongue around the strange sounds,
wishing she could understand how these lines and squiggles transformed into words,
thinking it all a kind of alchemy.
    ‘Oh let’s,’ replies Meg.
Her mood thankfully seems to lift at the thought of it, and it strikes Dot that she –
plain Dorothy Fownten, a thatcher’s daughter from Stanstead Abbotts – is having
romances read to her by the daughter of one of the great lords. That is the extent to
which she has changed.
    Dot gathers together all the candles she can
find so