Read Online Queen's Gambit: A Novel of Katherine Parr by Elizabeth Fremantle - Free Book Online

have struggled to
finish the meat before the maggots got at it. These are the gifts of a man who wants
something, but the idea of becoming the King’s mistress doesn’t bear
thinking about. Besides, there is no space in her mind, for the part of it that is not
filled with grieving for her husband is filled with Thomas Seymour.
    Thoughts of him find their way into her head
unbidden and she can’t help but long to find a page clad in the red and gold
Seymour livery, in the courtyard below, with a letter, a token, the return of her
necklace. But there is only, daily, the green and white livery of the Tudors with more
unwanted and seemingly endless offerings. She has tried to send them back but the page
told her in a polite, wavering voice that the King would punish him for not having
persuaded her to keep them. So she has kept them, reluctantly, but each one makes her
feel a little emptier, as if she is an hourglass and her sand is almost run through.
    She would exchange them all for the
slightest thing – a dandelion, a thimbleful of thin ale, a glass bead – brought by a
Seymour page. She can’t take control of her feelings. Why is she waiting like a
lovesick girl for some petty token from that shallow man? But he has embedded himself
deeply at the core of her, and he will not be excised by reason. She tells herself it is
her mother’s cross she longs for, but she knows she deceives herself. It is
him
she wants. He skits through her thoughts with that infernal bouncing
plume, and she cannot eject him.
    She opens the casement, craning her neck to
see who is dismounting. It is Doctor Huicke, the physician who cared for her husband,
back from Antwerp. If it is not to be a Seymour page then Huicke is who she would have
hoped for. She wants to shout to him from the window, realizing how lonely she has been
in her mourning. She has itched for company and here is Huicke, one of the few, aside
from family,she feels entirely herself with. She had felt an
inexplicable affinity with Huicke from the outset; he had come each day to tend Latymer
and they had become close over those months. He had been a support to her. It is not
often in life, she thinks, that one encounters a true friend – once in a decade,
perhaps.
    She dashes down the steps, excited like a
girl, arriving in the hall just as Huicke is shown in. She wants to fling herself into
his arms but Cousins, the steward, is standing by and decorum won’t allow it.
    ‘So glad to see you,’ she
says.
    His look dances over her and his face opens
into a smile. He appears, with his dark eyes shining like two fat drops of molasses and
his thick tar-black curls, like he might have walked out of an Italian painting.
‘The world is dull indeed without you, my lady.’
    ‘I think we know one another well
enough now to dispense with the formalities,’ she says. ‘Call me Kit, then I
can pretend we are brother and sister.’
    ‘Kit,’ he says, seeming to taste
the word as one might a French wine.
    ‘But I shall continue to call you
Huicke,’ she adds, ‘as I know far too many Roberts.’
    He nods with another smile.
    ‘So tell me about Antwerp.’ She
leads him to a seat in the window where the April sun washes in. ‘Did you learn
anything?’
    ‘Antwerp. There is so much going on
there. All the talk is of the reformation. The printing presses are churning out books.
It is a city of great ideas, Kit.’
    ‘Reform has become a force for
reason,’ Katherine says. ‘When you think of all the horrors that have been
done in thename of the old Church.’ She cannot help but think of
all that has been done, to her and to her family in particular, in the name of
Catholicism, though she would never say it, not even to Huicke. Besides, the idea of
reform pleases her; it seems so reasonable. ‘And did you meet this Lusitanus
fellow?’
    ‘I did. He has such notions, Kit, of
the way blood circulates. I sometimes think that our generation, more than any yet,
stands on the brink