The Tutor (30 page)

Katharine expected Molly would be asleep when she finally returned to her chamber. But the poor girl’s eyes were wide.

“Might there be a letter for me?” asked Katharine.

“No, my mistress, nothing from him,” answered Molly. Her lip was quivering, and she was wringing her skirt.

“Molly, dear, what ails you?”

“’Tis what ails this house, should be more the question! The rest of them in the scullery and the stables and such are talking now that ’tis verily bewitched, this house. First the leaving of the rooks. ’Tis an ill omen. Foretells the downfall of a family. Then the hags put a spell on the hall the night they were chained in the cellars. ’Tis topsy-turvy, with all the family dying or being dragged off as traitors!”

All did indeed seem topsy-turvy. “’Tis more the time, Molly, than witchery,” Katharine said finally. “’Tis our burden, our lot, the path of suffering God has set for us.”

Molly nodded, but her eyes were filled to the brim, and she did not seem the least convinced. Katharine, in truth, was not at all sure she was convinced herself. She took Molly by the shoulders and hugged her.

“You are right to weep, Molly.” Katharine started to cry as well. “This house is filled with sorrow. But we shall get Richard back, and it was Ursula’s time to go, we just did not know it yet. She had been disappearing before our very eyes and we were blind to it. She wished to vanish.”

“They say she didna eat more than a bite or two a day for months,” added Molly, wiping her eyes with her skirt.

“She was stricken,” said Katharine.

“I never heard of such a thing. Stepping off a roof.”

“’Tis, we must assume, God’s work,” said Katharine.

“Or the work of the devil,” said Molly.

“Not that, I do not believe that.”

“And now my lord Harold has taken ill,” added Molly.

“He was riding for days and perchance the cold has taken hold of him,” said Katharine.

“’Tis not an illness of the throat or lungs, they say, but deeper down. The pains shoot through his stomach.”

They were quiet for a while.

“If there is a letter,” Katharine said, “even if ’tis very late this night, prithee would you slip it under my door?”

“Yes’m.”

Molly helped Katharine out of her bodice and her skirt. When Katharine was sitting in her smock, Molly began to brush her hair. “Might I be so bold as to ask you something?”

“Yes, Molly.”

“’Tis not my business, nor my place . . .”

“Charge ahead. I am captive beneath your brush.”

“Have you lost your heart to him?”

Katharine sighed and was quiet. “I have,” she said finally.

Katharine expected Molly to be thrilled by the mention of love, for she was a young girl, her head probably full of such thoughts, but she was not.

“I worried you might’ve,” Molly said gravely. She was braiding Katharine’s long tresses now.

“Molly, do not worry about me, and pray do not worry about the house. Ned will be here. Ned will make this house strong again, bring this house right.”

Katharine was not certain of this, but she wanted to say something to comfort Molly. Ned had, in the past, been more inclined toward merrymaking than management of his own affairs. Perhaps his years in Italy had reined him in, brought wisdom where there had been frivolity.

After Molly left, Katharine checked twice before she snuffed her candle to see if a letter from Will was under the door, but the wooden floor was bare. She got into bed feeling bereft. She remembered the day when Ursula was on her back in the grass staring at the sky. She had said she wanted to be free, and now perhaps she was. Ursula might have, with time, become sane again. Yet, she was gone now. And Richard. Was Richard involved in a plot against the queen? That prospect seemed as
unlikely as Katharine herself being involved in such a scheme. The house had lost its rhythm. She couldn’t remember the last time she had read to the children. When the women had gathered around Joan that night, they spoke of Harold going into exile now, too. Katharine had grown up immersed in the ancients and now felt she was living in their world: Ovid exiled; Seneca exiled, too, and then forced to take his own life for a supposed conspiracy; Lucretius, driven mad by a love potion, had also committed self-murder.

—

Ursula’s burial
was unadorned, without the pomps and vanities she had come to display while upon this earth. Harold was not present because Harold was in bed writhing in pain. His stomach had worsened. The pains that attacked him after supper had sharpened, becoming deep and frequent. In another time, when their religion was not against the laws of the land, a priest would have been called to Harold’s bed to perform unction with
oleum infirmorum
, the oil for the sick that had been blessed by the bishop. But there were no oils and no unctions. Harold refused to eat. Mary was stuck to his side, they said, silent, unmoving, a fly gummed in pine resin.

Ursula’s grave was dug. The family gathered and prayed. Her three young children stood like little soldiers, straight and silent. Katharine planned to read to the children in the library the afternoon after the burial. She would do her best to bring them away from their hour of woe with a tale or two of brave knights and strong women. A few minutes before she was set to go, Molly brought a letter. Will wanted to see her, and he had sent more of his poem. All of a sudden Katharine’s body hummed again. It was unseemly at such a time of tragedy, but she could not resist him. She sent word to change the time for the children, and then she stood in front of the looking glass in her room and stared at herself: she was
dressed plainly and darkly. Her chestnut hair was bound in a black caul; the blue turquoise Will had given her was round her neck.

She waited on the same bench on which she had sat with him the day before and many days before that. As a girl of ten, she had sat one night in the chapel lit with the wavering flames of tapers, listening to Father de La Bruyère lecture her on grief: she was not to carry on about her family, for tears and wailing and other such laments, he said, would show the world that she did not believe the souls of her loved ones would land in heaven. She should pray, not cry. She should pray, not weep. She should pray. And that was what she did.

Katharine unfolded Will’s pages and started to read. In his fresh verse, Adonis’s escape was impeded by the flight of his steed, which upon the sight of a lusty breeding jennet “young and proud” did break his rein and rush after her.

“Ah,” Will said.

Katharine looked up from the paper. She hadn’t heard him enter. He was light and easy in his step. His beard was neat and newly trimmed. Her face turned hot; her cheeks flamed as if with fever.

“What competition your eyes do give that stone about your neck,” he said.

She flushed anew and reached with her fingers for the turquoise hanging from the black silk cord. He sat opposite her. She was thankful the table stood between them; a moat perhaps would have been even better.

“You have covered much ground,” she said.

“The sad tidings made sleep impossible. I burned one candle and then another. How fares the family?” he asked.

“One wonders if they can welcome any more grief.”

“The children?”

“A blow. They will learn to live with their history,” she said.

“As you did.”

“Yes.” Katharine was wrung tight, like the skirt in Molly’s hands the previous night. Katharine was not prepared for the rush of tears, but they came, spilling down her hot cheeks. Will handed her a cloth the children used to wipe their hornbooks. “Sweet Kate, your time is precious, and I am not worthy of it.” He stood.

“No, prithee, sit, sir. There is nothing to be done this moment,” she said, wiping her eyes.

“Read to me,” he said.

She looked at him and cocked her head.

“Where you left off when I did enter. Read to me. Let me hear my verse from your soft lips.”

“As you please.” Katharine squared her shoulders, straightened the paper and read out loud Will’s keen and delicious detail of Adonis’s errant charger.
Katharine stopped reading and looked across the table at Will. He was smiling. He had written much the same words he had spoken to her when they first met, in the very place they were sitting now.

“That first night here, you described
me
thus!” she said. “A horse trader! You have no shame!” She laughed. She had no shame, having fun while the rest of the house was in pain.

“My humble words turn proud when ’tis your voice that speaks them,” he said.

She looked across at him. He stunned and beguiled her. She was helpless to it.

“I will away for Christmas, Kate.” He saw her look. “Come, come. ’Tis no eternity but little more than a fortnight. I will, while there, write you a sonnet, my New Year’s gift to you, for writing of you, my constant Kate, will bring me solace.”

Katharine wished to ask him why he returned to the family in Stratford from which he seemed askance. She felt like a loom, the different threads running in and out of her, the shuttle pushing the loose threads
taut. While Will was now writing from his core—the words spilling from his pen—she was confused right down to her very core. He was across from her, the table now as wide as the sea, and she would have to swim a thousand leagues to stand and walk over to him. What if he, like Adonis, turned away from her advances? She shuddered at the shame of it, and then, out of desperation, she tried a different tack.

“I have fallen in love with you,” she said simply.

His eyes glinted.

“And we will love each other and continue on,” he returned.

Her heart trilling, she wondered: What next? Perhaps he had needed to hear those words, before he could truly love her back. Perchance this was where Venus had gone wrong. She had crowded Adonis with lust, but left little room for love.

He stood. She stood. What next?

“We will speak of this anon,” he said, gathering his papers, gazing at her, his eyes full of thought.

“When go you hence?” she said, her voice weak, displaced, uneven.

“Now, dearest Katharine . . .”

He had called her by her full name. There was love in that, she was sure of it.

“I leave tomorrow,” he said. “I will return by Candlemas.”

’Tis too long, she thought. She was afraid after his departure she might never see him again: she would die. He had breathed life into her. The poem, his presence, had awakened her. She remembered when Harold had dragged Ursula across the floor of the hidden chapel. Her eyes filled with tears.

“’Tis harder for you than ’tis for me,” he said.

She nodded. His voice was soft, his eyes loving. His words puzzled her.

“I am here, Kate, look at me. I am standing here next to you. I may
go off, to Stratford or to London, but I will return. I am, in truth, not going anywhere. You were, at a tender age, unmothered and unfathered. I will not abandon thee. What we have is special.”

She nodded.

“Let me hear it from your tongue.”

She wiped the tears from her eyes and slowly repeated his line. “What we have is special,” she said. She felt as if he had asked her to undress in front of him. She added, “You will not live here always, that I know.”

He did not move to her but looked intently at her. “We have the rest of our lives, Kate, you and I. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, God willing. You must not leave me. I will buckle at the knees and fall if you do. You must remain by my side.”

“But you will leave,” she said. “It takes no soothsayer for such a prediction.”

“Well, if I do, you will come with me.”

“How . . . can . . . that be?”

“If I make my perch in London again, well, dear Kate, you will come with me.”

“Verily?” She sat back down on the bench, for she could not trust her legs to hold her.

“Yes. How can I write without you? For writing is living now. I will cease to write when I cease to breathe. You urge me on, you command me. Night after night, as I sit in that damp chamber scratching my quill across the page, I write for you. I have been mapping plays for the playhouses in London whilst here at Lufanwal. When the time is right, I will show you all I have.”

Katharine was filled with the promise of what was to come. She let herself peer into the future: a life, somehow, with Will in it. After weeks of his calling her brilliant and beautiful, she had begun to feel brilliant around him, and beautiful, too.

Will helped her on with her cloak. They parted with a tender
embrace.
What might be
—those words coursed through her body. She could step away from the misfortune that circled round her. They might live in London in a house with a small garden, not too far from the playhouses. They would, their heads bent over his pages, stay up late, burn one wick after the other, until the dawn itself would light their work. She imagined Will’s first book, their book, the leather the color of wine, gilt leaves sprouting up the spine.
Venus and Adonis
by William Shakespeare—her name written on a page in thanks and dedication and love. She saw stacks of his burgundy books sold by a bookseller in St. Paul’s churchyard in London. On future books, she would fix rhyme and meter, deliver one image when another did not fit, tame his errant spelling, make constant the marks he used between words and clauses. The sheets of paper with writing scattered across tables and chairs would be their children. She had lived a life of reading books—now she would live a life of helping to create them.

She was hurrying down the path, her head dizzy with such thoughts, when she bumped into someone.

“I crave your pardon,” he said, bowing low.

“Oh, Mr. Smythson,” she said.

“Madam,” he said. His dark breeches and doublet were covered in white dust.

“I was saddened to hear what happened and hastened here to tell you—” he said.

“You hastened here to tell me? Why me?” she asked, but then was sorry she had said it. She saw the confusion on his face and quickly came to his aid. “I am grateful to you, Mr. Smythson. These are, indeed, trying times for us all.
Gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle
.” She was eager to be alone, dreaming of a life with Will.