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

annulment,
and
what about little Catherine Howard …?’ She pauses.
‘You were there, all the way through, all of them, you saw it all.’ She has
the urge to slap her sister.
    ‘You are not like
them
, Kit.
You are sensible and good.’
    Katherine is wondering what Anne would think if
she knew that her sensible sister had whored herself with a Catholic rebel and
administered a lethal tincture to her husband. ‘Sensible,’ she says.
‘Huh.’
    ‘What I mean is you are not driven by
your passions.’
    ‘No indeed,’ Katherine replies,
but her head is full of Seymour.
    ‘Do you remember, Kit,’ says
Anne, ‘when we used to play queens at Rye?’
    ‘Oh,’ says Katherine, her anger
dispersing in the face of her sister’s disarming sweetness. ‘Yes. With me
all wrapped up in a bed sheet and married off to the dog.’
    ‘And the paper crowns that
wouldn’t stay on … What was the name of that dog? Was it
Dulcie?’
    ‘No, I don’t remember Dulcie.
She must have been after I left to marry Edward Borough. That one must have been
Leo.’
    ‘You’re right. Leo was the one
that bit the barber’s son.’
    ‘I’d forgotten
that … Leo was Will’s dog.’
    ‘No wonder it was a biter,’ says
Katherine. ‘I’m sure Will teased that poor animal something
rotten.’
    ‘Do you remember Will in
Mother’s fine red damask stuffed with a pillow, playing the Cardinal, when he
dropped the silver cross from the chapel?’ laughs Anne. ‘It was never the
same after that, always a bit skewed. I didn’t dare look at it during prayers for
fear of the giggles.’
    ‘And when you stumbled on my bed-sheet
train and knocked into the steward with a pitcher of wine that went flying.’
    Anne’s good humour is infectious. They
were always laughing back then, when they didn’t have to be at court and on their
best behaviour.
    ‘I forgot,’ says Anne. ‘I
have something for you, Kit, from Will.’ She digs about in the folds of her gown,
pulling out a little leather pouch, which she drops into Katherine’s hand.
    She knows what it is without looking; it is
her mother’s cross. Her throat is blocked as if she’s swallowed a stone.
    ‘Why did Will have it?’ Anne
asks.
    ‘It was being mended.’ Katherine
stands and saunters to the herb beds with her face turned away so as not to reveal
anything.
    Why did Thomas Seymour not bring it himself?
He was simply toying then. Flirting with the idea of bedding a widow. Pull yourself
together, she demands inwardly. You barely know him.
    ‘And there is a letter,’ says
Anne, handing Katherine a fold of sealed paper. ‘Why does it have the Seymour
stamp?’
    ‘I have no idea, Anne,’ she
says, tucking the letter away in her sleeve.
    ‘Will you not open it?’
    ‘It is not important, just a
goldsmith’s bill I expect.’ She feels the letter might burn a hole in her
gown. ‘Come, let me show you what I have planted. Here is mandrake for earaches
and gout. See, I have labelled them all.’ She imagines the mandrake roots as
little buried bodies putting out feelers into the dark earth. ‘They say witches
make love potions from it,’ she adds.
    ‘Can it make
anyone
fall in
love?’ asks Anne, wide-eyed.
    ‘It’s claptrap, of
course,’ says Katherine bluntly.
    ‘And digitalis?’ Anne points to
one of the markers. ‘What is that?’
    ‘Foxglove,’ says Katherine,
suddenly feeling a pressure around her neck as if her husband’s ghost is squeezing
thebreath from her. ‘Pains of the liver and spleen,’ she
adds, her voice brusque.
    ‘They call it dead men’s bells,
don’t they?’
    ‘They do.’ Katherine’s
impatience is building with her sister’s infernal questioning.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because it will kill a man if the
dose is large enough,’ she snaps. ‘Poison! They are all poison, Anne. See
this … henbane will cure a toothache if you burn it and inhale the
smoke.’ She is almost shouting now and can’t stop. ‘And hemlock
here,’ she snaps