The Tutor (8 page)

She scanned the edges, the rugs and the planked floors for her lost pages. She had hungered for Sidney’s sonnets all day, and then, at the moment she started to feast, the tutor had interrupted her, and now all
the glorious morsels—the words and their rhymes, the rhythm and the form Sidney had worked so hard to create—had vanished into air.

Katharine pushed open the library door. Her candle cast shadows along the rows of bindings. She hunted the floor, then the chair by the window. She searched the seat creases with her fingers—nothing hiding there. She’d held the sonnets high as she ran from the room. Why hadn’t she struck the silly man over the head with them? When she returned to her chamber without the sonnets, she climbed into her bed, feeling empty and out of sorts.

—

“You told
the cook what?” Matilda asked.

Matilda was sitting by the window in her antechamber, alternately fanning herself and wiping her face with a white cambric cloth. Her skin glistened from the heat; dark circles of sweat stained the light blue silk under her arms.

When Katharine’s grandfather reconfigured the house more than twenty years before, he had added a great chamber for entertaining—smaller and more intimate than the ancient great hall—several parlors and withdrawing chambers, the gallery, the library, the secret chapel and the three priest holes for hiding their priests in case of a raid. Edward and Matilda’s lodgings were part of that new wing. The women often gathered in Matilda’s antechamber to sew, and though the windows were neither large nor plentiful, the colors and the fabrics made their own kind of light, for the room was dressed with a rich confection of heavy red velvets and golden brocades, tapestries of several sizes, exotic carpets from the east and a large carved stone fireplace. Usually a fire was lit, even in midsummer, but the recent relentless hot spell had vanquished any chill in the air.

“I told the cook that’s what I desired,” said Ursula, feeding her yapping dog a piece of kidney pie.

Katharine did not look up from her lace: she was making a collar for the christening of her cousin Grace’s new baby.

“What our family and our guests eat, Ursula, is my duty,” Matilda said slowly, enunciating each syllable with a thrust, as if it were a knife.

Matilda often had to scold and to reprimand Ursula as a mother does a spoiled child. But Matilda’s tone today was different, sharper, less tolerant.

“She asked me,” Ursula said, kissing her dog on its mouth.

“Next time find me,” said Matilda.

Ursula popped a piece of pie into her mouth and gave a giggle. “I’ve heard you do it a million times. Why shouldn’t I have a try?”

“’Tis not your place.”

Ursula uttered a little cry, as if she had been poked in the ribs, and plopped in a pout on the same chair as her daughter Joan. Joan looked nothing like her mother. Where Ursula was tiny at the waist, Joan was thick. Where Ursula was blond, Joan was black-haired. Where Ursula had skin as smooth as white marble, Joan’s skin was dark and pitted. Joan was a solid girl, a somewhat sad girl, who tended to her younger siblings as though she were their mother.

Katharine sat on an oak stool, and as she pushed and pulled the lace hook, she wondered what Matilda had heard from Sir Edward. She hoped, with Matilda’s permission, she could write a letter to Edward soon. In all the years she’d lived with Matilda their relationship had never been intimate. She often pondered if anyone, even Edward, could penetrate that wall, for Matilda remained aloof even with her own children. Katharine couldn’t imagine that; she dove into moments when Matilda would have held back. Katharine sometimes thought that was why Sir Edward sought her out, that Matilda made him feel lonely.

Katharine’s currency with Edward was books and writers, for his admiration for poets was second only to his veneration of the Pope and certain prominent priests. He saw no problem with his love of God and
his penchant for poetry; for him the beauty and grace of words was no different from the beauty and grace of nature. Katharine wasn’t sure Matilda could even read. She’d never seen her with a book and never dared ask, afraid of offending her.

Isabel came running, and they all looked up from their stitching.

“There’s a letter, a letter,” she cried.

Isabel, who was not yet sixteen, had large chestnut eyes and barley-colored hair. Katharine gave her lessons, and the girl already showed talent in Latin and Greek. She was playful, full of laughter, loved to dance and to sing and was the anchor of her father’s heart. Katharine prayed her glow would never dim.

Matilda rose. “From your father,” she said.

“No, no, Mother, from Ned. He’s coming home! He wrote to me.”

“Read to us, then,” said Matilda.

Isabel sat on the windowsill and, leaning into the light, read: “‘My dearest sister, Father’s haste has caused me much grief, but I find solace in his safety and assure you he will be home before the summer crops are sown. I will depart from these burnished hills forthwith and promise to be by your side by the first day of Advent. Kiss mother for me and pray read her this letter . . .’”

Isabel leapt up, kissed her mother on the cheek and continued, “‘Prithee, tell the family I am eager to return. Your servant and brother, Edmund.’ He signs it Edmund, not Ned, he’s all grown-up now,” she said. “I knew he would come. How I’ve missed him. I’ve grown! He will never recognize me.”

“He will recognize you, treasure. Your spirit remains the same. Even a blind man would recognize you.” Matilda kissed Isabel on the top of her head.

Katharine had rarely seen Matilda display such warmth and assumed the news of Ned answered one of her prayers; indeed, she made the sign
of the cross as she walked toward Priscilla, who, frail and almost blind, was dozing in a chair by the window.

“Mother,” she said loudly.

Priscilla awoke. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“Mother.” Matilda bent down and spoke to Priscilla as if she were a child. “Ned is coming home.”

Priscilla smiled and promptly went back to sleep. Matilda left the room, Katharine imagined, to kneel in front of the altar in the hidden chapel.

Isabel threw her arms around Katharine. “What gifts will he bring? I know you asked him for books, but I begged him for a prince.”

“If he forgets, we’ll find one for you,” Katharine said.

“For you, Kate, I begged him to bring home a prince for you.”

“Your kindness overwhelms, but I’ve no need for princes.”

“I need princes!” Ursula declared, plucking the letter from Isabel’s hand.

“You have a prince,” said Isabel, snatching it back again.

“Who?”

“Richard,” said Isabel, speaking of her half-brother.

“Richard is no prince. If my parents had not been so eager, if they had been patient—”

“Let us not talk of gifts or princes,” Mary, Harold’s wife, said quickly, cutting Ursula off. “Let us pray to God for Ned’s safety and health, for he has a long journey home.”

Mary favored dark colors to light, and coarse fabrics to smooth. She wore no ornamentation around her neck, and her hair was always pulled tightly into a plain cap. A simple gold band was all that adorned her fingers. Mary had wanted to become a nun, but her parents had considered the match with Harold too advantageous and refused her the veil.

“Isabel,” Mary continued, “rather than imagining the Venetian
trinkets Ned will bring you, why don’t you sit down and put that beautiful handwriting to good use? Write a letter to your sister telling her of your brother’s plans. She will rejoice in the good tidings.”

“Cousin Kate, come with me. You will write to Grace. You always sound so natural, where I sound silly and stiff.”

“You flatter me to make your work shorter,” said Katharine. “I am weak and will do as I am bade. My fingers cramp with this stitching, though I doubt they will fare much better wrapped around a quill. Come, dear Isabel, come.”

Isabel sprang from her chair and grabbed Katharine’s hands in a dance. “Ned, dear, gentle Ned, is coming home!”

—

She would not
go down. He was sitting under a tree in the rose garden. She was in the library, at the window. The last time she had seen him, she had run from him, run out of the very room she was standing in now. It had been three days, and she had still not found Sidney’s sonnets. With Sir Edward gone, no one else at the hall would know what the pages were, or even care.

She would not go down. He was working with his hands, with a penknife. Carving a piece of wood, perhaps. He was careful, precise, swift in his movements. She thought of his father, the glover in Warwickshire, a man in a leather smock with hides and skins as neighbors, a man who clocked the hours of the day with tanning, dying, snipping, trimming and sewing the lines of a hand. Why had this young man not gone into glove-making with his father?

Smoke was in the air. A black coil twisted into the blue sky. More brush fires. It was Michaelmas, Saint Michael the Archangel’s feast day and one of the few celebrations the queen allowed. There seemed a sordid vengeance from above, for the crops that had been salvaged from the drought were now in danger of being consumed by flames. In the last
fortnight, three leas of wheat, ready for reaping, had been swallowed by fires. The farm laborers, the stable hands and the kitchen help from Lufanwal and the neighboring estates had battled the smoldering stalks through the night. They had worked in a long chain, passing leather buckets from the well—the barrels were empty of rainwater and the ponds and river had dried up. Everyone lived in fear that timber or thatch would catch fire and the barns and huts, like the uncut hay, would burn. But they had managed to contain the embers. The men and women had returned from the fields at dawn, coughing, their faces, arms and hands dark with soot.

Katharine pulled the window shut against the acrid smell. There had been hope of rain a few days past, the sky growing dim with clouds, and then after a tease of a shower the sun had come out and left the land gasping for more. Would the ancient roots of Lancashire shrivel and die and the soil become sand? She had read of deserts in faraway lands—in an account by Raleigh or Drake or Hawkins, she couldn’t recall—where waves of sand stretched as far as the eye could see and shot up as high as mountains.

She sat down with Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
on her lap. Her fingers drummed the amber-and-gold-leathered cover. She had wanted to read but now had no inclination for it. In a whirl, she tossed the book on the table, descended the stairs two at a time, picked up her skirts and jumped over the last three steps—flew, really. She pushed the door, the hinges groaning in complaint; as soon as the sluggish oak was behind her, she hurried over the cobblestones and through the archway to the back garden. Her journey, she tried to convince herself, was for the sole purpose of discovery. She wanted to find out if he had picked up Sidney’s poems, and she wanted to see what he was making.

Once she rounded the corner, she bridled herself, forcing a walk, and she took her breathing down, so her bodice rose and fell gently instead of heaving from the passion of exercise. She strolled, as if she’d
been intent on that: strolling, not discovering. He was focused, but she knew he knew she was nearing; there was a certain tilt to his head, a self-conscious way in which he held himself, always an actor on a stage: his hands his soliloquy. He had cut the feathers off a goose quill. Now he was sharpening the end. The hairs on the back of his hand were fine, his fingers surprisingly long and graceful, not thick or rough, and his fingernails were clean.

She stood over him, but he did not look up until he stuck the nib in his mouth. With the fashioned feather between his lips, he raised his eyes to hers and smiled. He had a strong chin. He pulled the quill from his mouth and examined the nib. It would take a master like Nicholas Hilliard to draw lips so perfectly shaped: they were full but not feminine.

“Ever make your own pen?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Thought not.”

She didn’t want to be drawn into his game of words. Every time they met, it was riposte after parry, and she said things she never usually said, in ways she didn’t usually say them. He compromised her tongue.

“My father taught me how to make a quill before I knew how to write,” he continued. “Always plenty of geese. Ink harder to find. Had to make that, too. Ever make ink?”

“No.”

“You missed one of the joys of youth. We were wizards or witches making a potion: eye of newt, tongue of dog . . . burnt wool or lampblack crushed into powder, gum of Arabic or galls of oak, and wine or vinegar, maybe a drop of rainwater, let it stand, stir, then . . .”

“Then?”

“Dip the quill, of course, then think, then write. Or write before you think. Lampblack is best for darker paper.”

“Darker paper?”

“Not everyone in this land has linen the color of clotted cream. Perhaps if you are Sir Philip Sidney’s scribe you do, but we common folk are used to making our marks on murky sheets of brown or gray, the color of the Thames.”

There again was the swift current: his mind traveled from the nib of a quill to the color of the Thames.

“You found them!” she exclaimed.

“Ahhhhh!” He handed her the finished black quill, picked up another feather and started whittling. “To be rich and to be a writer is a blessing, never a curse, to make riches on words is a chest of gold few stumble upon.”

“You have the Sidney!” she said.

He jumped to his feet. “Sounds like an ague when you word it thus. The pox, the plague, the gout, the Sidney.” He held out his arm. “Doctor, I am ailing, leech me, call for the cupping glasses . . .”

“May I have them back? I had but only started when you interrupted—”

Then he interrupted her again:

“Queen Virtue’s court, which some call Stella’s face,

Prepar’d by Nature’s choicest furniture,

Hath his front built of alabaster pure;

Gold in the covering of that stately place . . .”