The Tutor (33 page)

She knew, for he had told her, of his passion for men, but there were moments in the spring of their youth when their bodies were drawn to each other—more as softness and flesh and the tenderness of trusted love, than as man or woman. She remembered they would kiss on the mouth sometimes, but they would not linger there, and she wondered now if their reluctance to spend one more second lip to lip was because in spite of his preference they might travel from closed to open mouth and from there, well, they would untie, unbutton and unhook. Katharine looked down now at Ned’s beautiful face; his countenance had lost its childish smoothness: the skin around his mouth had manly creases, mayhap from the Italian sun, mayhap from smiling. His dark wavy hair cascaded to his shoulders; his black beard was like night upon his pale face.

She gently took a strand of his hair and wrapped it around her finger, slid her finger from the coil and watched the curl fall on her pillow. God had granted Ned many gifts while on this earth, and now, humble and devout, with his future full of risk and danger, Ned was returning those gifts. Katharine placed her shawl over her cousin, snuffed the candle and climbed under her
blankets.

22

e’s in agony, he is,” Molly told Katharine. “He claws at his stomach. The gashes bleed and the skin throbs and swells and erupts with pus!”

Harold’s pain now issued from his flesh, where he dug at his own hide, as well as from within, where the torment in his guts worsened daily. Servants hurried from his chamber carrying cupping glasses filled with blood. The doctor ordered his hands bound to prevent Harold from scratching through fresh layers of skin, and Mary ordered his mouth stuffed with lamb’s wool and tied with a cloth, so that his cries would not disturb the house.

On the morning of Sir Edward’s burial, the doctor was called anew: Harold had started to vomit bile similar to Guinny’s, Ursula’s poor deceased pup. Mary told a servant girl, who then told Molly, that the venting of bile was good, for Harold had an excess of wrath, and the successive vomiting was a sign that he was finally ridding himself of his rage. The doctor was not convinced that Harold’s spleen had anything to do with his current illness and was said to have asked several attendants and finally Mary if Harold had any enemies in the house.

“Enemies?” Mary asked blankly.

“People who might seek your husband’s death,” said the doctor.

Mary’s face had gone pale. She collapsed by her husband’s bedside and was carried off to her own chamber. The doctor was with Harold when Ned began the
missa defunctorum
for his father.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and let perpetual light shine on them.

Ned held the requiem mass in the hidden chapel. Harold’s cries for mercy could be heard faintly but relentlessly as Ned moved from the
Kyrie eleison
, through the mass to
Dies irae
, then to
the absolution and the prayer for Sir Edward to escape the avenging judgment,
Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo
, and on to the
Pater noster.
Ned did not wear a chasuble or a black cope.

Matilda had regained some of her stature since Ned’s return. She stood erect and proud while her son led the mass.
In media vita
, in the midst of life we are in death, and this was true for this house and this family. Seneca’s line, “He will live badly who does not know how to die well,” befitted Sir Edward. He had died well—pious, honest, in God’s hands—and now he would be buried well. He had made plans for his burial years before. The simple monument had been carved in stone and was now fetched from the local sculptor. He would not have a magnificent tomb in the local parish church, for the local church was no longer of his faith, nor was the parish, nor was the entire country. He would not be interred in his own family chapel, for that had been stripped of its sanctity when the queen had continued the assault her father had begun. Sir Edward’s bones would reside in his land, packed deep within the earth he loved. From the sculptor’s chisel emerged the De L’Isle family coat of arms with its two unicorns and griffin’s head, framed by a toad, a mouse and a serpent entwined with dandelions, holly and a thistle with a cicada on its thorn.

The men had been up most of the night warming the hard ground
with torches and then hacking and scraping the earth as best they could. The air had turned bitter again, and Katharine stood with the small group of mourners as Sir Edward was lowered into his final resting place and dirt was cast upon his coffin. On this gray morning, Saint Lucy’s Day, with the Christmas season fast approaching, the flame of this noble family had all but gone out: their figures cloaked and hooded, indeed shrouded in black. How, Katharine wondered, could the Protestants champion the idea that the fate of the soul was sealed at death and the actions of the living gave no influence on the dead? It was preposterous. How could the Protestants sleep at night with such uncertainty of the hereafter? Did they believe the virtuous soul went straight to heaven? Whither the Resurrection? Whither the Judgment? Katharine would continue her prayers for Sir Edward and Ursula and try her best to order her life for their salvation.
Requiescat in pace. Requiescat in pace.

—

The gray soon
turned dark, for the days were ruled by night this time of year. Katharine found Henry in the library, his chair pulled close to the fire, his eyes squinting at a book—Saint Augustine’s
Confessions
.

“How can you see the words? You will ruin those beautiful blue beams.” She lit several candles and lamps and then sat on a stool next to Henry.

“Today is the Feast of Saint Lucy,” he said. “They gouged her eyes out.”

“They did indeed. She often carries her eyes on a plate in paintings. Henry, what happened to the rakish pamphlets by the men Master Shakespeare calls his friends? These writers of riot no longer hold your interest?”

Henry smiled.

“Oh, Henry, it seems ages since I’ve sat and talked with you, and we live in the same house. Where have you been? Where have I been?” She
knew where she had been: she had been swimming in a sea of Will. She had put her toes in first, waded, then slid her whole body in, and now she was afraid her head was under and she was drowning.

“I have been in my chamber reading.”

“For months?”

“For months.” His voice had deepened and was lower even than his father’s.

“And are you learned now?”

“I am.”

She laughed. His beard had grown in, fine and blond. He’d cropped it short and close to his chin.

“Do you know the ancients?” she asked.

“Intimately.”

“You will teach me, then.”

“You are, Cousin Kate, still leagues ahead of me.”

“I am not so confident,” she said.

She noticed another change in Henry more disturbing than the depth of his voice or the length of his beard: a sadness in his eyes. How could this young man, who as a child overflowed with joy, be shouldered with such sorrow? She guessed the answer. The ugly dance between his father and mother had taken its toll, as had the news that his stricken father was getting worse by the minute. Henry could not escape the pall that hung over Lufanwal: no one could. Katharine hoped and prayed that Ned would save them all somehow.

“I have decided to go abroad to study,” Henry said. He closed the
Confessions
. The book lay heavy on his lap. He opened his strong hands wide and laid them, the fingers splayed like a fan, on the leather cover.

Katharine had imagined those hands in the future rough with sport, from jousting pageants, archery and hunts. But ’twas not to be. She knew the path before he even explained it to her. He would follow his cousin Ned to the English College in Rome, and she knew that he, too, would
become a priest and that if the tides did not change for their religion, he, too, would be a condemned man if he ever set foot back on English soil.

“Oh, my dear boy,” she said, springing to her feet, her eyes full of tears. She clasped Henry tightly to her. She never wanted to release him. In a different time, a different hour, a different minute, it would have been a battle she was sending him off to—his life just as dear and endangered. She would lose him now to study and to vocation.

“I want to go,” Henry said, still holding on to her.

She nodded, the tears spilling down her cheeks.

“Sweet coz, I am not going to the gallows . . . yet. I have mountains of study in front of me, and who knows what the state of England will be . . . in five years, even in a year, or tomorrow?”

“Oh, Henry, I am so sorry. It all came over me in a rush,” she said, sniffling. “I’ve just about flooded your shirt and your Saint Augustine. You are right to go, and I will miss you and pray for you.”

“Ned is arranging my passage, and I will settle through his contacts there.”

“When do you depart?”

“After Candlemas.”

“You are brave and you are wonderful, Henry, and I’ve loved watching you grow into such a strong and noble man.”

At the door, he leaned down and kissed the top of Katharine’s head.

—

Saint Clement
and Saint Barbara, Saint Nicholas, the Conception of Mary, Saint Lucy, Saint Thomas the Apostle, Saint Stephen, Saint John the Evangelist, Holy Innocents, Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Saint Sylvester the Bishop—for centuries these holy days had threaded through the dark Decembers from Advent to Christmastide, with masses and prayers and fasting or feasting. But with the shifts from Catholic to Protestant and back and forth again, some feasts were banned, revived,
observed and then abandoned again. Customs like dressing a boy in vestments on Saint Nicholas’s Night and parading the child bishop from house to house were suppressed, then brought back, only to be abolished for a second time.

Sir Edward had steered his own course through these choppy waters: the family was Catholic and would follow the Pope’s calendar. This year, without a priest or Edward, the religious proceedings at the hall had halted; Richard and Harold seemed to lose interest in their faith as soon as Edward sailed away. In the days that followed Ned’s return, he held masses in the hidden chapel, for his mother, sisters, Katharine and young Henry. It was a select group, sworn to secrecy, for Ned did not trust the rest of the house, the soup still at too much of a boil from recent events—he would wait until it simmered.

Usually on Christmas Eve the great hall was adorned with rosemary, bay, holly, ivy, laurel and mistletoe, and the house was abuzz with preparations for a banquet. Where were the candles in the windows this year? Where were the smells of roasting capons, hens, turkeys, geese and ducks? The sides of beef, the legs of mutton? The nuts, pies and cakes? The plums and spice? The sugar and honey? Lufanwal was still in mourning and awaiting news of Richard when, on Christmas Eve morning, the family was dealt another blow. Harold passed on.

Harold had been in torment: the convulsions, delirium and vomiting would not stop, and when all the juices in his stomach were gone, the very flesh of his insides, it seemed, were coming up. When the doctor confirmed that Harold had gasped his last gasp, Mary could be heard wailing, but it was not from her husband’s death that her voice reached such a pitch, it was because the doctor had gone to town and inquired at the local apothecary’s. Mary had bought a jug of arsenic at the beginning of December, telling the shop owner she was buying the powder for all the women at Lufanwal, for arsenic mixed with vinegar and chalk was known to whiten skin and prevent creases. The doctor grew suspicious
when Harold’s fingernails changed color. On the very morning of Harold’s death, the doctor returned to the hall with the high sheriff, the same man who had arrested Richard, but now it was Mary’s turn to be hauled away.

“I found him in my own bed with a serving wench!” she screamed as they dragged her out the door. “She left strands of her yellow hair on my pillow! It was long and blond—a Saxon whore! I have short, dark hair!” Mary pulled her dark coif off her head. “See? My hair no longer grows!” she screamed at the sheriff. “He didn’t even use his bed! My bed! Mine! He promised to come back to me after Ursula, to me and me only! Do you understand? He deserved to die. I warned him I would murder him if I ever caught him at it again, and now I have.”