The Tutor: A Novel Read online

  “The world is turning,” she cried, her skirts and her petticoats swirling around her. “Round and round and round.” Ursula kept on so long Katharine began to worry. She finally came to a giggling stop, walked unevenly toward Katharine, fell to her knees beside her, then dropped all the way onto the grass, her chest heaving. “’Tis still spinning!”

  The children were twirling now, with Guinny nipping at their heels.

  “I might vomit,” little Lucy said.

  “Perhaps you all should play another game,” Katharine called.

  One by one the children dropped to the grass, then they started rolling down the hill.

  “See what you’ve started?” Katharine said, smiling.

  “’Tis better than wine!” said Ursula.

  Katharine chuckled. They were quiet for a time. Ursula turned on her side facing Katharine, who was sitting on a stool.

  “I want your life,” Ursula said solemnly. The blue of her bodice and the white of her skirts and skin made her look like a piece of china.

  “My life?”

  “You are free.”

  “How so?”

  “You have no husband and no children and you can lose yourself in all those books you so love.”

  “All true. But my life is nothing to covet.”

  Ursula rolled onto her back and gazed up. “’Tis endless.”

  Katharine wondered if Ursula was talking about the sky or her marriage to Richard or her life.

  “I married young because I was with child,” Ursula continued. “I should have become a nun.”

  When Richard had traveled to Antwerp to meet Ursula for the first time and to marry her a week later, she was fifteen and pregnant with someone else’s child. She gave birth to Joan only four months after the wedding; Ursula’s parents, no longer able to invest in her virtue, had offered Richard a dowry he could not refuse.

  “A nunnery seems not the life for you,” Katharine said.

  Ursula laughed at Katharine’s joke, for the word nunnery meant a brothel as well.

  “In truth, marriage to God must be better than marriage to a mortal,” said Ursula, still staring at the blue sky.

  Ursula usually seemed far younger than her years, childlike, even silly, but today her current had changed.

  She sighed. “Come down off your stool,” she beseeched Katharine, “and feel the ground beneath your back.”

  “My farthingale will surely pinch.”

  “I don’t have one on!”

  “Ursula!”

  “I hate them. As if our lives are not prisons enough, why do we have to wear such . . . such cages?”

  Katharine shielded her eyes from the sun and watched a goshawk stooping and soaring. The hawk whooshed up into the sky, circling. What? Looking directly below, she saw Ursula’s little dog running across the rolling land. The children were no longer with Guinny. The flat-headed spaniel was the size of a hare. The goshawk marked its prey and stooped, closing its wings and diving, its talons ready to hack.

  “Guinny!” Katharine yelled. “The hawk!”

  Ursula was on her feet and running. Katharine jumped up, threw down her book and followed. The hawk paid no heed to the women, but having missed its mark rose into the air and then hurtled down again at Guinny, who now realized she had gone from pet to prey and was in a panic, darting this way and that. By the time Katharine was two hundred paces from the little dog, she could hear not only the hawk screeching and the beating of its wings, but also the bells attached to the bird’s feet, which meant the hawk was not wild but most likely from Richard’s mews.

  When the hunted dog charged for the nearby brambles, the bird soared into the air again, then fell with talons ready, cutting the pup off. A tall workman in an apron strode toward the dog, and in one graceful movement scooped her into his arms. The goshawk swept up into the air, shrieking in anger.

  Ursula and Katharine were out of breath by the time they reached the man, who had slipped the frightened dog under his apron. Guinny’s little brown and white face peered out at them, panting.

  “Gramercy, Mr. Smythson,” Ursula said tearfully, then introduced Katharine. “Mr. Robert Smythson is a master mason who’s come to look at the house.”

  The man bowed and Katharine nodded.

  “I had a dog killed by a hawk, a wild hawk, though,” he said, patting Guinny’s furry head.

  “I would like to know why one of Richard’s hawks is out, hoodless and unattended!” demanded Ursula.

  Guinny’s savior had a strong nose and a head full of brown curls thick-twined as ivy tods. He was outside the fashion of the times, had no beard, not even a mustache, and his skin was dark from the sun. He handed Guinny over to Ursula, who started cooing, petting and kissing her dog’s face. Katharine thanked the mason and bade them farewell. Then she started walking toward the hall but turned and glanced back. Mr. Smythson was still patiently listening to Ursula, who was going on about Richard and his hawks. Katharine wondered if she should try to rescue the poor mason just as he had rescued poor Guinny—for there was no stopping Ursula once she’d launched into a rant. One of his men arrived, and as they were bowing and taking their leave, Mr. Smythson looked up at Katharine. Katharine, not quite sure what to do, smiled and then hastened to the house.

  6

  he clamor of insects, metered and rhythmic, rose up from the dry brush. Katharine was standing at an open window in the library, thinking of how the trip across the sea could not have been easy for her uncle at his age. By now the queen would know Sir Edward was gone, and she would, Katharine hoped, fix her focus elsewhere.

  And here was Henry, breathless, grinning, fresh from his flight up three score steps, asking for help with his Greek.

  “Plutarch?” she asked, turning to him.

  “Yes. ‘Julius Caesar,’” he responded.

  Henry went to the leaded window on the other side of the room and pushed it open. He leaned out over the courtyard. “Martin,” he bellowed to the boy below, “get ye off your sleeping arse and get to work.” He hid behind the casement, then stuck his head out again. “Get ye off your—”

  A stone came whizzing through the open window and Henry ducked. Katharine stepped back and the stone hit a chair.

  “Henry, such a vulgar tongue. What would your mother say?”

  As another stone shot through the window, Henry picked up a green leather-bound book and used it as a shield. Katharine swept past him and, standing with her hands on her hips, shouted, “Enough!” down at Martin, the steward’s son, who was gazing up with his hand over his eyes to block the sunlight. He hung his head when he saw her and scurried in through the scullery door. She pulled the window shut.

  Henry put the dark green book back on the marble table. Then he picked it up again and opened it. “Il Decamerone,” he said, poking through the pages. “Italian?”

  “Sì. You were talking of Plutarch?”

  “We read a translation of ‘Caesar’ last year, so I don’t see why we need bother . . .”

  “Perhaps your new schoolmaster wants to see if you can learn from the original text. Henry, try your best. And then you are welcome to ask me. But do not reach for me first.”

  “How did you come by Greek, coz?” Henry asked, dropping into a chair and swinging his legs over the wooden arms in one athletic motion. He was good on a horse and skilled with a lance, and she thought, if not for the changing times, with chivalry on the wane, he would have become an excellent knight, perhaps even made the Order of the Garter.

  “Your grandfather Sir Edward taught me. It started as a game when I was your brother Thomas’s age, and then it turned out I had a head for it.”

  “And Latin.”

  “I had a head for that also. With the Latin, I taught myself Italian. You could, too, and then in time you could read this instead of using it as a shield
.” She picked up the copy of Boccaccio’s green-leathered book and tapped him lightly on the head with it.

  “My mother doesn’t have a clue about the ancients.” Henry was sitting but couldn’t keep still. He picked up a crystal globe the size of an orange from Seville and tossed it from his left hand to his right. The translucent orb belonged to Katharine. Sir Edward had given it to her when she turned sixteen. It had the aspect of a sorcerer’s shewstone used for peering into the future.

  “Your mother, Mary, knows many things of which I know nothing. It all balances,” Katharine said, her eyes following the crystal ball as Henry threw it in the air. “Henry, put that down,” she said finally. “It might shatter.”

  Henry placed the crystal back in its leather box.

  “In truth, cousin, who needs Greek?”

  “You do, and Latin, too.”

  “Well, he doesn’t.”

  “Who?”

  “Master Shakespeare.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he confessed to us that he doesn’t really know Greek . . . but for a bit. And Latin he says he learned but not well, for in his school it was rare that a boy went on to anything that needed it, except maybe the Church, but even that has all changed now. And, he says, everything is being translated.”

  “Henry, our language is built on Latin and Greek. And French and Saxon and . . . but so many of our words come from Latin and Greek and you need, must, study them. And much history is still in Latin. Only parts of the Bible are in English—our fellow Englishmen are working hard in France translating the rest. So you still need to know Latin to know the Bible, for a few more years at least. And you need to know the Bible.” Katharine was walking back and forth in front of Henry, her little leather heels trilling across the wooden floor.

  “Why?” said Henry.

  She turned and faced him. “Don’t ask that, Henry. I pray you were speaking in jest.” She paused at the map of England, stretched out and pinned under glass like one of Thomas Moffett’s butterflies. Then, placing her hands on the rosewood frame, she straightened her back as if she herself were a schoolmaster at a lectern or a priest preaching the gospel from a pulpit. “Is this Shakespeare unsound? ’Tis not his place to fill your head with such foolish thoughts.”

  “He isn’t a good tutor,” Henry whispered. “He doesn’t seem . . .”

  “What?”

  “Learned. He makes us laugh, though. He also confessed to us that he never attended university and—”

  “He likes to confess.”

  “They could have found someone who had gone, maybe not to Oxford or to Cambridge on account of our faith, but to university abroad like Ned.”

  “Or at least someone who kept quiet about his lack of the academe,” said Katharine.

  “Exactly,” said Henry, then added, “He does sing rather well.”

  “Go.” She pointed to the door. “‘Caesar’ awaits.”

  Henry got up from the chair, walked past her and pulled a brown leather book down from the shelf as he was leaving.

  “Henry . . .”

  “What?” His back was to her.

  “Sir Thomas North’s translation.” She held out her hand.

  “Aw . . .” Henry turned around. He was smiling. Katharine saw he was taller than she was now. And his hair, though it still gleamed, was no longer white-blond but more the golden color of harvest rye. Henry put the book in her hand.

  “Is that what you came up here for?” She replaced it on the shelf.

  “I came to find you,” said Henry with mock sincerity.

  “Of course. Go.”

  When Henry left, Katharine drew a high-backed chair close to the window to get the full slant of sunlight. Long hours of candlelight often hurt her eyes. She had been waiting for this moment all day, and now, tucked in a corner, hidden almost entirely by a screen of staghorn filigree and mother-of-pearl inlay, she sat in the cool shadows above the garden with the unbound pages of “Astrophil and Stella” by Sir Philip Sidney on her lap.

  Sidney had come to a banquet at Lufanwal while staying with Lord and Lady Strange. Katharine was married then and lived an hour’s ride away. Less than a fortnight earlier she had suffered the loss of an unborn child, but she had forced herself to get out of bed and go to the hall that evening—not because she knew anything about Sidney, but because she had stared at the ceiling for too many days. At the time of his visit, Sidney was five and twenty, five years older than Katharine. He had left Christ Church, Oxford, without taking his degree and traveled the Continent. Young men like Sidney, like Ned, journeyed to foreign cities, while young women stayed at home.

  Sir Philip Sidney had regaled the dinner guests, not with his poetry, but with his views on the purpose of poetry. He drank enough wine to launch a loud attack on a book just published called Schoole of Abuse by one Stephen Gosson, who thought all poets immoral and faulted them for creating unnatural desires. Gosson had, according to Sidney, in “the spirit of malice” dedicated his book to Sir Philip. “Who is this knave,” Sidney fumed, “who claims to be a scholar but is nothing more than a squire—no, a page, better a fool—in the employ of unsound ideas? Schoole of Abuse . . . he should go back to school!” There was laughter. “I would not, I daresay, want to be a maid or page in his household, or a cow in his barn or a poor sheep in his meadow, for a man who rails against unnatural desires is most often the keeper of such fare . . .”

  Katharine remembered thinking how the handsome young nobleman with dark brown curls was at one end of the spectrum and her aging husband at the other: except for a few long gray strands, her husband had lost most of his hair. He was kind, but with his days of hunting and hawking behind him he had very little to occupy him. He did not read. He loved his three sons, who were older than Katharine, and who, like their father, were avid sportsmen. He spent most of his afternoons in their company.

  She had come to Lufanwal that night still grieving for her lost child and praying she would not weep before the first meats were placed on the table, but by the time dinner had ended and she was returning home, her cloak wrapped around her shoulders and the rugs in the cart swathing her feet, she had resolved to read as much as she could. Reading was something besides stitching she could do: she would make it her vocation.

  Sir Edward was so taken with Sidney, he had encouraged his charming guest to write a book that defended poetry, and now Katharine wondered if he ever had. She’d never encountered Sidney again, but she’d followed the stories of him. He’d been a darling at Elizabeth’s court for a while—the fate of all handsome smart nobles—and lingering there, he had become an unabashed anti-papist; so many poets were, all playing into the queen’s silky hands—a prioress with her coterie of favorites. How could any young man at court refuse such adoration from a queen? Until, of course, her blood thinned to him, and she found something upon which to unleash her fury—that he was betrothed to a woman of whom she didn’t approve; or perhaps the young lord or earl was too passionate about her Protestant Church or not passionate enough; or maybe he’d cooled on Her Majesty’s endless battles with Ireland and the money and lives spent there—reports continually came from Ireland that yet another soldier or settler’s throat had been cut; or he voiced a political point which she thought either futile or dangerous, or he had too much hubris or he had too little. It seemed all too often the queen’s displeasure with these young men was a whim. Whatever the reason, one by one she tossed each one of them out—sometimes wooing them back again, other times chopping off their heads.

  Sidney was two and thirty when, in a battle in the Netherlands, a musket ball in his thigh took his life. All of England mourned. He was given a funeral fit for a king. As far as Katharine knew, now four years since the gravediggers lowered him to rest, no printer had yet issued a volume of Sidney’s words. His sister Mary Sidney Hubert, the Countess of Pembroke, tirelessly copied his poetry i
n beautiful curling black script—the busywork of a woman’s hands, like needlework or lace-making—and passed it around to family and friends. A cousin had sent a copy of his sonnet cycle to Katharine.

  Katharine had read sonnets in Italian: Dante and Petrarch. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Wyatt had both tried their hands at the form in English, but the sonnet—with its prescribed syllables, meters and lines—was still relatively new to England. She held the paper up to the light and read Sidney’s first sonnet once, twice, three times. Here was a whole story in fourteen lines! Sidney’s language was graceful, marked with emotion, yet muscular and utterly masculine; he was able to get at the truth of the moment. “Great with child to speak . . . Biting my truant pen . . .” His images were thrilling, and at the same time simple and direct. “Beating myself for spite . . .” The tension grew between the meter and the speech, and then the last line rode the crest of a wave and trumped the rest of the poem. “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”

  She read it again. His words affected her bodily. They seemed to leap from the paper directly into her veins. This intense, and only the first of many poems in Sidney’s cycle—she was not sure she could live through the rest of it. She tried to calm herself, tried to breathe evenly. She sat very still. It was silly, but that was the way she was, the way she always had been. Words did this to her.

  Someone entered the library. She peeked through the tiny holes between the carved ivy leaves in the screen.

  She saw the broad shoulders first. As he examined the volumes, he did not round his back but kept it surprisingly even, bending from the waist. He wore no doublet, no jerkin, but a simple white tunic, the sleeves blooming round his wrists. He pulled out books, glanced through them, put them back on the shelves. She did not move but watched him. He was searching for something. The air was warm, but she shivered, and just as the straight-backed visitor pulled out a dark red volume with gilt tooling, she sneezed.