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

herbs. Your
tinctures for Lord Latymer were little short of miraculous.’
    She looks at him strangely and he thinks he
sees a fleeting hint of fear, or something like it, pass over her.
    ‘Did you notice anything,’ she
says, ‘in my husband after he passed?’
    There it is again, the look of a beast at
bay.
    He wonders what it is that’s getting
at her. ‘Only that the tumour had eaten his guts away. It was a wonder he survived
as long as he did. I shouldn’t say it, but it would have been better if he’d
died sooner.’
    The look dissolves to nothing.
    ‘God’s way is not always easy to
understand,’ she says.
    ‘How is Meg?’ he asks.
‘How has she taken her father’s death?’
    ‘Not well really. I worry for
her.’
    ‘Have you tried a few drops of St
John’s wort?’
    ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I
shall try it.’
    ‘The King is adamant that she marry
Thomas Seymour,’ Huicke says. ‘Not a bad match for her, I’d
say.’
    ‘Not Seymour,’ she snaps.
‘Meg will never marry Seymour.’
    ‘
You
like Seymour?’ he
says, aghast.
    ‘I didn’t say that.’
    ‘No, but it is written all over
you.’
    It is – it is woven into her like the
pattern in a carpet. And Seymour of all people. The King would never sanction it. It
doesn’t even bear thinking about.
    ‘I don’t want to like him. I am
so very confused by it all, Huicke.’
    ‘You must forget him.’
    ‘I know I must. And you,’ they
are talking in whispers now, ‘you will say nothing?’
    ‘Nothing,’ he repeats.
‘You have my word.’
    He can see that she doesn’t fully
trust him. She is weighingup his honesty. He is the King’s
physician, after all. The King put him in her house.
    ‘Why did the King send you to attend
my husband?’ she asks, as if she can read his thoughts.
    ‘I cannot keep the truth from you,
my … er … Kit,’ he says, bringing his hands up to cover his
face, to cover his shame. ‘The King asked me to report back on you. He has
long
been interested in you, since you came to court a year ago to serve Lady Mary.
He
commanded
it, Kit.’
    There it is, out, his shame displayed for
her to see.
    ‘You, Huicke, a spy?’
    He can feel her slipping away, her
friendship taken back. ‘I was, maybe, but not now. I am
your
man
now.’
    He can’t look at her, looks instead at
the rows of labelled jars and pots on the shelves behind her. She turns herback to him.
He reads off the names in his head: figwort, meadowsweet, wood spurge, milkwort,
elecampane, burdock … The silence between them is unbearably heavy,
suffocating.
    ‘Kit,’ he says, eventually,
‘you
can
trust me.’ His voice has a supplicant’s tone.
    ‘How can I?’
    ‘I didn’t know you
then … I know you now.’
    ‘Yes,’ she mumbles, ‘and I
know you.’
    Is she thinking of the shared secrets that
bind them together, he wonders, feeling better for it.
    She picks up his gloves and hands them to
him, asking, ‘Do your hands feel soothed?’
    ‘They do. The itch has
lessened.’
    ‘Come,’ she moves to the door.
‘My sister is due. I shall have your horse brought round?’ She is dismissing
him.
    He feels hollow, wants to prostrate himself
on theflagstones and beg her forgiveness. But her polite coolness has
rendered him incapable. He follows her back through the dark passages to the hall where
she calls her steward.
    ‘Doctor Huicke is leaving, Cousins,
will you let the groom know and see him out.’ She lifts the back of her hand for
him to kiss.
    ‘Friends?’ he asks.
    ‘Friends,’ she replies with a
vague smile, but she is inscrutable.
    Katherine strolls in the Charterhouse
gardens with her sister. Anne’s usually luminous skin is greyish and the milky
bloom of a month ago has gone. She has lost the baby but is sanguine. ‘There will
be others,’ she’d said, when Katherine offered her sympathy.
    It had rained earlier, a brief fine spray,
leaving the new leaves sparkling. The sky has now cleared completely of