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

Margaret Neville. It was just a
momentary whim that the gossips have got hold of.’
    He makes a little huff. His face is
scrumpled and sweet, like a disgruntled puppy. Her heart lurches. His grip on her has
become unassailable.

3
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1543
    Dot had tried to imagine what Whitehall
Palace would be like. She has seen the Tower that sits with the Thames lapping at its
skirts, slits for windows, fetid moat, iron grey; it is an ancient place, fortified,
turning in on itself, showing only the hulk of its stone shoulders to the world. People
drop their voices when they talk of that place for it is where traitors are taken and
unspeakable things happen in its dungeons. But Whitehall is nothing like the Tower; its
turrets can be seen for miles, rising up from the higgledy-piggledy streets of
Westminster, white and new and gleaming in the sun, banners rippling in the breeze.
There are no arrow slits, no moat, nothing to make you think of your enemies, even the
yeoman guards standing before the gates seem put there for decoration in their red and
gold liveries that look elaborate enough for the King himself to wear. To Dot it is
nothing less than the Camelot of her imagination.
    The place is vast; you could fit a hundred
Snape Castles within its walls. It is like an entire city and busy as the market at
Smithfield, with people rushing to and fro doing whatever it is they do. There is a main
courtyard with wide stone steps up to the Great Hall and the chapel, and in there
somewhere lie the King’s rooms – though those places are forbidden to Dot. Through
an arch are the stables, and beyond lie theouthouses: the laundry, and
the field behind, where the linens are pegged out to bleach in the sun; the barns; the
stores; the slaughter house; the kennels, where the hounds howl and generally make a
terrible racket, not so different from the hullabaloo that comes from the cockpit of an
evening, or the tennis courts when a lively game is being played. It goes on for ever,
only stopped by the river and the jakes, where on a day without much breeze there hangs
the most hellish stench.
    In the other direction towards Scotland Yard
and the courtiers’ dwellings, which is where Lady Latymer’s lodgings are to
be found, there is the tiltyard and the bowling lawn with the gardens beyond as far as
you can see, set out in squares with high yew hedges, each one like a room, and in them
are ornamental ponds and aviaries and all manner of blooms, where the courtiers amble as
if they have nothing better to do than wander about and admire the flowers. There is a
knot garden, and an aromatic lavender garden buzzing with bees, and a maze which Dot has
not dared enter for fear of getting lost; it is not for the use of the servants, anyway.
There are acres of kitchen gardens busy with women weeding and planting and uprooting
vegetables. If you walk through, past the rows of lettuces like courtiers’ caps
and the wispy fronds of fennel and the peas and beans coiling themselves upward, all you
can hear is the chink of trowels tapping at the earth. Sometimes when she is not being
watched, Dot picks a pea pod, sliding her finger along its opening to pluck the peas out
from where they nestle in their damp white velvet pockets, popping them in her mouth,
savouring the sweet crunch.
    The kitchens make a whole world in itself.
Servants scurry everywhere invisibly, heaving logs, rolling kegs, sparking up tinder,
strewing floors, turning roasts, plucking fowl, baking bread, chopping and slicing and
mixing and kneading andscrubbing. Meals for seven hundred appear in
the Great Hall, delivered by an army of unseen staff as if there has been no effort
whatsoever in the making of them. The whole palace seems, on the surface, to run by
itself: fresh linen finds its way to beds in the blink of an eye; mud from the floor
seems to brush itself away; clothes mend themselves; piss pots gleam; dust
disappears.
    Dot goes about in a bewildered