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

of change. Our sciences, our beliefs, are in such a state of flux.
It excites me.’
    Katherine watches him speak, animated,
mimicking with his gloved hands Lusitanus slicing open a cadaver or a dead vein to
expose its intricate workings, talking fervently all the while. She has never seen
Huicke ungloved, even when he came to examine her husband. She reaches out, catching his
fingers in mid-air.
    ‘Why do you never take these
off?’
    Huicke says nothing, but he begins to peel
back the lip of his glove, exposing a sliver of skin that is covered with raised, red
welts, then looks at her, watching, waiting for her to turn away in disgust. But she
doesn’t. She takes his hand and strokes the deformed skin with the tip of her
finger.
    ‘What is it?’ she asks.
    ‘I haven’t a name for it. It is
not catching but all who see it are disgusted. They think me leprous.’
    ‘Poor you,’ she says, bending
down and pressing a feather-light kiss on to his ravaged skin, ‘poor, poor
you.’
    He can feel the prick of tears behind his
eyes. It is not that he has never been touched, for he has. Lovers have touched him in
all sorts of ways, but even in the thrall of Eros he can see revulsion in the set of
their mouths and their squeezed-shut eyes. What he sees in Katherine is something else,
something entirely sympathetic.
    ‘It is everywhere, save for my
face.’
    She grabs both his hands and, standing,
pulls him to his feet too, saying, ‘Let’s go to the still room. We can
concoct a balm.’ There is a sparkle in her. ‘There must be something that
will cure it.’
    ‘Nothing I have found yet. Though it
can be soothed a little with certain unguents.’
    They walk together through the dark panelled
corridors that wind through to the rear of the house.
    ‘Who would have imagined friendship
could have come through such adversity,’ she says.
    ‘True friendship is rare
indeed,’ he agrees, but he feels disingenuous for there is a secret he is keeping
from her, a subterfuge he fears would break their bond. He has come to see her as more
than a friend, could not bear to lose her; he cares for her in the way he imagines
caring for a sister, though as an only child he has no measure for that. His deceit
prods at him. ‘Particularly,’ he adds, ‘when most of one’s time
is spent at court.’
    It is true there is no such thing as
friendship at court with everyone vying for position. Even the King’s physicians
play a constant game of one-upmanship. He knows they don’t particularly like him,
for he is a good decade younger than most of them and a better doctor already.
    She slips an arm through his.
    He wants to make things even with her, give
her a hold over him in return for his deception. ‘In Antwerp –’ he begins,
but stops abruptly.
    ‘In Antwerp what?’
    ‘I have become …’ He
doesn’t know how to phrase it. ‘I m-met …’ He stammers. ‘I
fell in love.’ But that is only the half of it.
    ‘Huicke.’ She grips his hand,
seeming to enjoy his confession. ‘Who is the lady?’
    ‘It is not a lady.’
    There, he has said it, and she is not
reeling in shock.
    ‘Ah!’ she says. ‘I had
suspected as much.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘I have known men who prefer the
intimacies of …’ She pauses, dropping her voice, ‘… their own
kind.’
    He has given her something that will bind
him to her. This information in the wrong ear could see him hang. He feels a comfort in
having redressed the balance.
    ‘My first husband,’ she
continues, ‘Edward Borough. We were both so very young, no more than children
really.’
    A servant lad passes with an armful of
freesias. Their spring scent hangs in the air.
    ‘Are those for my bedchamber,
Jethro?’ she asks him.
    ‘Yes, my lady.’
    ‘Give them to Dot, she will see they
are arranged.’
    He dips in a little bow and moves on past
them.
    ‘Edward Borough was completely
unaroused by me.’ She picks up where she left off. ‘I thought it was
inexperience.