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

Meg has enough light to read by, and piles some cushions and furs beside the
fire, where they snuggle up with the book. Dot shuts her eyes, letting the story wind
itself around her, making pictures in her head of Arthur and Lancelot and the giant
warrior knight Gawain, imagining herself as one of the fair maidens, forgetting for a
moment her too-big, calloused hands and her clumsiness and the indelible fact of the
coal-black hair and sallow skin that make her look more like a Romany than one of the
lily-skinned, flaxen-haired ladies of Camelot.
    A couple of the candles start to gutter and
Dot gets up to look in the box for replacements.
    ‘What do you want most in the world,
Dot?’ asks Meg.
    ‘You say first,’ she
replies.
    ‘I want a sword like Excalibur,’
says Meg, her eyes gleaming. ‘Imagine how you would never feel scared.’ She
strikes her thin arm through the air, gripping the imagined hilt. ‘Now you, Dot –
what is your wish?’
    Without even having to think about it Dot
exclaims, ‘I should like a husband who can read,’ and then she laughs, for
it sounds so very silly when she says it out loud and more impossible even than Meg
getting her hands on a magic sword. She feels she has broken the spell of the story by
saying it.
    Meg doesn’t say anything, seems lost
in her own thoughts.
    Dot leans over to look in the candle box.
‘There are none left,’ she says. ‘Shall I go down and fetch
some?’
    ‘It is late. We should sleep,’
Meg says, rising with a stretch and picking up one of the furs, dragging it over to the
bed.
    Dot goes to pull the truckle bed from where
it tucks neatly under the tester.
    ‘Sleep in here with me,’ Meg
says, patting the place beside her. ‘It will be warmer.’
    Dot tidies the hearth, breaking up the
embers with the poker and placing the mesh guard carefully in front of it, then slides
on to the bed, drawing the hangings tight, making a small safe place for them. Rig
scrabbles up too, scratching and fussing and turning in circles before settling into a
tight little ball, making them giggle. Dot slides between the cold covers, rubbing her
feet back and forth to generate some warmth.
    ‘You are as bad as Rig,’ says
Meg.
    ‘Some of us don’t have the
warming pan.’
    Dot feels a feather hand reach out for her,
and she shifts across the vast expanse of cold bed. Meg grips on to her, as if to let go
would unmoor her completely. Her nightgown smells of woodsmoke from sitting by the fire
and Dot is reminded of cuddling up to Little Min in the truckle they used to share. It
seems like someone else’s life she has found herself in.
    ‘If we could shape-shift like Morgan le
Fay,’ whispers Meg, ‘you could become me, Dot, and marry Thomas Seymour. He
would read to you “till the cows came home”.’
    ‘And what of you?’ asks Dot.
    ‘I would be you of
course …’
    ‘You’d have to empty the piss
pots every morning,’ Dot teases. ‘And what would
I
do with a fine
nobleman like this Seymour? I don’t think he’d fancy my dancing, for I have
two left feet at the best of times.’
    They both laugh at the thought of it and
press themselves closer together for warmth like a pair of spoons.
    ‘Thank goodness for you, Dorothy
Fownten,’ Meg murmurs.
CHARTERHOUSE, LONDON, APRIL 1543
    Katherine can hear the clatter of hooves in
the yard. She looks out of her chamber window, expecting to see one ofthe King’s pages. She had hoped that her absence from court would put her out of
the King’s mind but that has not been the case, for each day there has been a
delivery: a brooch with two good diamonds and four rubies; a marten collar and matching
sleeves; an overskirt of cloth of gold; a pair of lovebirds; a side of venison, most of
which she has divvied out to the poor of the parish, for her household is so diminished
(with Meg’s brother and his wife, the new Lord and Lady Latymer, gone to run the
Yorkshire estates and most of the staff with them) that they would