The Tutor: A Novel Read online

  The rude fellow she’d found lying on the wooden table now tipped his head at her and smiled, but did not put down his instrument. He shoved his foot from the bench and started walking around the room, embarking on another tune.

  “If ever I marry, I’ll marry a maid:

  To marry a widow I’m sore afraid;

  For maids they are simple, and never will grutch,

  But widows full oft, as they say, know too much.”

  He stepped this way and that in what looked like a jig.

  “A maid ne’re complaineth, do what so you will;

  But what you mean well, a widow takes ill;

  A widow will make you a drudge and a slave,

  And cost ne’ so much, she will ever go brave.”

  Katharine snapped her umbrella shut and marched through the door. He bowed so low his knee almost touched the floor.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  “Why, ’tis school, madam.”

  “You are . . . ?”

  “The new tutor.” He bowed again.

  “I meant, what may I call you?”

  “A rogue, a rascal. I pray not knave or a cur.”

  The boys tittered.

  “Your name!”

  “Will Shakespeare.” He bowed once more. “We met. You tutored me on a breed of horse that can never be mounted.”

  “I did nothing of the sort,” Katharine said, wondering if the steward Quib was responsible for hiring this jester, who seemed to mock her with every bow.

  “Forgive me, a breed of horse that can never be broken.”

  “Master Shakespeare, you dissemble. Not of the equestrian trade as you led me to believe, but a lesson-monger.” She shook her head, looking directly into his moss-colored eyes, and continued in a voice not quite her own. “Is this what the lessons are now? Pipers and fiddlers and filthies?”

  “No piper here, my lady, and filthies . . . well . . .”

  “These hours are for you to teach these precious young minds Latin, Greek and mathematics, not to regale them with your musical cunning.”

  “The orders issued me were that these precious young gentlemen must sing their part sure and at first sight and be able to play the same on a viol or lute.”

  “And these ditties will suffice?”

  “Madam, next you’ll catalogue dancing a plague and piping a pox. Singing is a knowledge easily taught and quickly learned where there is a good master and an apt scholar. The exercise is delightful to nature and good to preserve the health of man. The better the voice, the better ’tis to honor and service God therewith. Whom God loves not, that man loves not music.”

  “I see no music sheets here,” Katharine said, sounding much the sheriff, even to herself.

  “’Tis here, my good Minerva.” Shakespeare tapped his temple. “When I was a child I lived music—I did not have to learn it. The barber in our town drew teeth, bound wounds, let blood, cut hair, trimmed, washed and shaved, but a lute and a cittern hung on his walls and virginals stood in the corner of his shop. Every day I went and played, while the other poor sots sat in their chairs and brayed.”

  Katharine glared at him.

  He seemed to be awaiting a response to his little speech and, not getting one, he paraded on. “I crave your pardon, my lady, time passes and we must launch into Latin, for if we do not, then you’ll have to sit through several rounds of ‘Hey, nonny, nonny, nonny, noes,’ and perchance even a ‘Sing willow, willow, willow.’” Shakespeare hung the lute on a peg on the whitewashed wall. “Back to the benches, you louts!”

  Little Robert hopped down from the table, and Master Shakespeare picked up the leather-bound books from his pulpit-turned-lectern.

  “Come, my gentle jade. Now that you have charged into my school, why not graze in the pasture of the ancients and regale us with your learning?”

  Her cheeks flushed. His eyes were fixed on her: they had changed color, seemed a lighter green now, like fresh grass.

  “Art thou cunning in Latin?” he asked.

  Katharine nodded. The children were staring at her. She was trapped in this man’s volubility. “My good Minerva” was one thing, but “my gentle jade” was an utter insult.

  Shakespeare held up a dark brown leather book, with gold tooling on the cover and down the spine.

  “William Lily’s lovely short introduction to Latin grammar, which always seemed to me too long. Amo, amas, amat.” He put the book down on the pulpit without opening it, then held up another book. “Sententiae Pueriles. I pray, madam, you approve of this volume. No ditties here, I assure you.” He placed Sententiae Pueriles on top of Lily’s grammar book.

  Katharine had studied both books.

  “Ah, but my heart is tender for this.” He held up a book. “Ovid. Pray, my patroness of heavenly harmony, be seated.”

  My patroness of heavenly harmony? From where did he pluck these words? He had a calling, surely: not as a schoolmaster but as a court fool. He riffled through the pages of a worn copy of Ovid, muttering, “We might read this. Or this. Or this. Aha, this, yes, this. ‘Pygmalion.’” He addressed his pupils: “I will read the Latin, repeat after me, then try to pen its equivalent in English. Those who are not as proficient, try a word or two you recognize.” Then he turned to Katharine: “Will you join us, my lady?”

  “No, gramercy. My duties at the hall await me.”

  He bowed and began: “Quas quia Pygmalion aevum per crimen agentis . . .”

  Katharine started to leave. When he finished the fourth line, she stopped, turned and translated out loud what he’d read: “Pygmalion had witnessed the wicked ways of the women, and, disgusted by their sinful and deceitful nature . . . offended by their shameful conduct . . . their life of vice, he had forsworn all women.” She glowered at the tutor. “Ah, a lesson in the wantonness of womankind. Was this an order issued you as well, Master Shakespeare?” she asked, and, not waiting for his response, she trotted out the door.

  After supper she hunted down Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the library. She hadn’t read “Pygmalion” in years. With two candles lit, she read the original Latin. Pygmalion takes no wife. To pass the time, he carves a maid out of ivory. His skill is so great, when he kisses the statue it seems to kiss him back. He fears that if he holds her hard, there will be bruises where his hands have been. He caresses her, whispers words of love and lavishes her with gifts. He drapes her with rich robes and gives her rings with fine gems. He hangs pearls from her ears and sets her on his couch, her head on feather cushions.

  At the feast of Venus, Pygmalion prays at the goddess’s altar, and Venus hears and understands him. He has wished for a wife of flesh like his maid of ivory. A flame leaps forth from Venus’s altar three times, darting high into the air. He races home and kisses his ivory lover. Under his lips, there’s warmth. He puts his mouth to hers again and touches her breast. The ivory becomes soft, like wax beneath the sun. With his hand, he satisfies his wishes, again and again. Her pulse throbs under his thumb. He presses his mouth to the maid’s: lips on lips, she blushes, then raises her timid eyes to him.

  The words warmed Katharine right down to her very loins, and she worried the tale was too lewd a conceit for young boys, with the kissing, the touching again and again, the hard ivory turning into pliant flesh. “Pygmalion” was surely a lesson of Eros, with all its tantalizing passion. The new tutor seemed determined to shock and to make his mark at every occasion.

  By the time Katharine replaced the book on the shelf and made her way to her chamber, the grand house was dark and mostly quiet—though she could hear singing and laughter coming from down in the buttery or maybe from out in the barns.

  4

  he hour was hot, the house hushed. Even the servants hid from the sun, staying within the cool confines of wood and stone. No pots clanged in the scullery, no dogs barked in the courtyard,
even the stables were silent.

  Katharine had written to Ned. She’d been careful in her letter—for it could fall into the wrong hands—saying only there had been trouble and that it had passed. After Katharine returned to Lufanwal a widow, she and Ned were—as they had been as children—inseparable, walking, reading, laughing, lying on her bed for hours telling each other tales. When Ned left, she inured herself to his absence. The first year was the most difficult, for they were accustomed to sharing every shred of their lives, and to be unable to seek him out was indeed a bitter draught. She tried to keep a steady correspondence with him, but as time went on their letters grew farther apart. Several years earlier he had sent a sketch an Italian friend had drawn of him. She kept it framed by her bed. There was no taming Ned’s beauty: it burst through the lines. Whenever she gazed at his portrait, she painted in the violet color of his eyes and the sable sheen of his thick black hair.

  Katharine’s room had originally been part of the keep built by her Norman ancestors: the turret used as quarters for sentries, who slept on hay. Her oak bed with four carved columns and canopy overpowered the scant space. A few centuries back, the circular walls had been paneled in wood as gloomy as the rest of the dark oak furniture—the cupboard, small table and a chair—that crowded the room. When Katharine returned to Lufanwal after her husband died, she’d tossed out the faded red and green curtains and bedcover and replaced them with muslin, canvas and bleached linen, hoping the blond cloth would brighten the room, for there was only one small window.

  The ink dry, she was dripping wax when shouting, sharp and sudden, made her spill the red liquid across the paper. Quickly pressing the seal, she went to the door—left open with the hope of a breeze. She would have expected Ursula and Richard to be the players of these harsh chords, but it was not their voices that rang through the halls. The unlikely duet was Sir Edward and Lady Matilda.

  Katharine stepped from her room. She had never heard her aunt and uncle raise their voices, yet she recalled all too clearly how her own parents had battled hard into the night: sometimes the walls and floors of their timber house seemed as thin as parchment. As a child, she would climb out of bed, venture to the stairs, sit on a step and listen; often her brother and sister, awakened by the clamor, came to her side. She had, those nights, put her arms around them and vowed to let no harm come to them.

  As she crept toward Edward and Matilda’s lodgings, she heard fragments of what they were saying: Informers . . . a plot to kill . . . the enemy within . . . Sir Edward, Sir William and Sir Rowland Stanley, Thomas Langton charged with harboring seminary priests . . . imprisoned in the Tower . . . Oh, Edward, you mustn’t, you mustn’t . . . What will we do? . . . What will I do?

  Katharine was at the door of their antechamber when Edward burst out.

  “Sir Edward, I . . .”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes brimming with grief. “Kate, Lord Molyneux’s priest is dead, murdered with his men on their way back from our estate. His head was piked on Preston Road.”

  “Dearest uncle,” Katharine began.

  Edward sighed and added wearily, “’Tis a wretched world we live in.”

  Katharine was searching for something of comfort to say when he turned abruptly, went back into his rooms and shut the door.

  —

  Three nights later, Katharine awoke to the sounds of horses neighing and to her uncle’s grave and commanding voice. She rose from her bed and went to the window. A group of men were on horseback, Sir Edward’s hair lucent in the moonlight. She could see his noble profile. There was urgency in the way the horses moved, nervously clattering on the stones, then thudding away on the hard earth. She watched the band of riders drop below the rise. One second they seemed a small army, and then they were gone.

  There was no bloodshed, yet Katharine felt the night oddly pillaged. She stayed at the window. Before the first cock crowed, when the moon was down, the stars fading into the hoary blue, she heard the raucous sound of rooks cawing. The noise grew, becoming loud and fierce, and then the rebellious birds burst forth from the rookery, swooping and plunging, steering wide, then rising into the sky. She waited for them to settle down and come back round again, but they did not. Instead, they shot out into the distance, in the same direction as Sir Edward, and then they, too, vanished. Had the rooks deserted the rookery? Never before, to Katharine’s knowledge, in the history of the De L’Isle family, had they lost their rooks. It was a disturbing sign.

  The first beams of light were now climbing the rough-hewn façade, creeping into her room and warming her skin. She untied the ribbons of her smock and watched the crimson streaks kindle the sky. A thrush started singing. She was about to pull her head in, when she saw the tutor walking swiftly. When he got to the gatehouse he turned, retraced his steps, then turned again and embarked on the path anew. His mouth was moving, as if he were talking to himself. She watched him walk back and forth, again and again. At one point he tore off his doublet and threw it onto a bush. Then, after another round, he unbuttoned his blouse. His skin glistening in the morning heat, he looked more a chanting druid than a schoolmaster. When he finished whatever ritual he was enacting, he grabbed his doublet and blouse and disappeared from view. Katharine pulled the window shut and knelt down to pray.

  5

  er cousin Richard called a meeting in the great hall. The darkness blinded Katharine when she came in from the sun-baked gardens, but once the lamps were lit and she was sitting, her eyes adjusted to the dimness. The cool gritstone provided some relief from the heat, but the linen hanging in the windows did nothing to keep the flies out. Richard, his short legs dangling, looked like a child perched on his chair. The large Flemish tapestry of a boar and bear hunt that hung behind Richard only dwarfed him further: the hunters woven into the piece were twice his size. The family was sitting on chairs and stools, fans aflutter, with the younger children scattered on the stone floor. The rest of the household stood in back.

  If only Ned were here, Katharine thought, to stand by his mother during this troubled time. But he had never taken any real interest in family matters. He loved his painters and his poets, and the way the light in Italy made “everyone and everything look as if they had been kissed by gold.” Barred from attending Oxford and Cambridge because of his Catholic faith, he had pursued his studies on the Continent. After touring Paris, Venice and Vienna, he had circled back to Italy, where he took up residence in Florence and then in Rome.

  A servant rang a bell and the room hushed. Richard started to speak. “Our great family . . .” He coughed and cleared his throat before continuing. “Our great family has resided in Lancashire for centuries upon centuries. Our esteemed ancestor, the courageous Walter Grancourt, was a great companion to William the Conqueror, and our lineage on the maternal line is descended from the great Lady Wenlock, wife of Prufroc, Earl of Bucknall. The good Lord has smiled upon our deeds and our lands have grown and we have as a great family prospered. We are now and always have been the most loyal of subjects to great England, our motherland. Thus it is with great sadness that I relate to you that certain recent events have caused us great concern and that because of these events, my esteemed father, Sir Edward, has found it necessary to leave this country for France. He has safely made passage . . .”

  It was true, then, the rumor Katharine had heard from her maid Molly, who had heard it from Ursula’s maid Audrey, who had heard it from Harold’s manservant. That was how news traveled at Lufanwal: as if the dairy barns, hawk houses, chicken coops, stables, kitchens, nursery, schoolroom and maids’ chambers were all inns along a post road, where tales of indiscretion, sickness and death stopped for a brief rest.

  Richard droned on. How many times could he use the word great in one address? The word should have been hoarded and used only once, to describe Sir Edward, for he was a great man and certainly more eloquent than his eldest son. And “certain recent events”
seemed a tame way to describe the gruesome tales that arrived daily: the beheading of Lord Maltby on Shrove Tuesday for his supposed ties to the Irish rebels; the jailing in the Tower of the Jesuit Christopher Bagshaw, upon his return from France—Bagshaw would probably never make it out of his cell alive.

  On the way back to her chamber, Katharine heard Harold’s youngest son, Thomas, say to his older brother, Henry, “I think it shows a weakness, the running away. I would have stayed. Even if they locked me in the Tower. Even if they chopped my head off.”

  Henry, who was now fifteen, tapped the side of his little brother’s head and said, “’Tis complicated, Thomas. You are still a child and know nothing of this world.”

  I know nothing of this world, Katharine thought as she climbed the stairs. She had felt Sir Edward’s exile the night she watched him leave under the moonlight but had not wanted to admit it to herself. He was gone. He was across the sea.

  —

  Ursula rarely played with children, hers or anyone else’s, but today she was gamboling across the tilt field with her little spaniel Guinny, and the younger children were running after her.

  Lufanwal Hall was on a hill. When it was first built in the eleventh century, the steep incline made it a natural fortress. The surrounding valley was rich with rectangular fields, apple orchards, plots of woad and weld and madder. Even with the dearth of rain, the land below seemed the stuff of a weaver’s loom, with warp and weft of orange, red, purple and green.

  “Put that book down and join us!” Ursula squealed as she scampered past Katharine, who was reading The Faerie Queene.

  After Sir Edward left, a servant had brought Spenser’s leather-bound volume with a note tucked in its pages: Though we started this together, you may take the virgin read. I will resume when I return.

  Ursula wore no cap, and her blond hair was spilling out of its pins. She looked more a girl than a mother of four. She had tiny hands and tiny feet, and her waist was the size of a man’s neck. Katharine reckoned she could put her hands around that waist and her fingers would touch. Ursula’s eyes were light blue and her skin naturally white. She began to twirl, and the children watched her with glee.