The Tutor: A Novel Page 5

  He spun around, book in hand. “God bless you.”

  Katharine was silent.

  “A favorable sign from the gods, say the Greeks,” he continued.

  She sneezed again.

  “God bless you. Twice blessed by the gods. And twice blessed by me . . .” He walked up to the screen and leaned in close—a priest awaiting her confession? She felt his breath, and from his skin was a hint of herbs, of lavender or rosemary. How unusual for a man not to smell like a horse.

  “You think it a blessing? More would have it that my sneeze augurs death,” she said.

  “Then twice blessed by me . . . to protect you from such an end.”

  He walked around the screen and stood in front of Katharine. Again she was struck by his insolence. He was no lord, yet his carriage spoke otherwise. He had practiced, perhaps, for years in front of a looking glass. She heard from Ursula he had come to Lancashire from mucking about in theaters in London and that his father was a glover in Warwickshire: no noble lineage this—making skins for the hands from other skins.

  He stood as if waiting for something. She stared at him, not knowing what to say next.

  “Twice blessed by me,” he repeated.

  “So, a giver of blessings. Art thou God?” She rose from her seat. She wanted to walk out of the room, but this man, this Shakespeare, stood in her way.

  “A plain gramercy would do.”

  “I’ll thank God,” she said.

  “A lady I once knew, not my wife,” he continued, “told me a sneeze is akin to what a woman feels when she is . . .” He paused, leaned in close to her and lowered his voice. “When she is in the throes of Eros.”

  Katharine slapped him. He did not step back but put his hand on his cheek, his eyes steady on her. When she saw a grin appear on his face, she raised her hand to hit him on the other cheek, but he caught her wrist and held it. Yanking her wrist from his grasp, she calculated her exit. In the throes of Eros, indeed! She had heretofore only been in the grasping arms of a juddering old man.

  “How fares my lady?” Shakespeare asked, his voice now supple.

  She glared at him. Any other swain of his station would have, after such a cuffing, bowed so low his nose touched the ground, begged a thousand pardons, and scurried out the door.

  “I’ll with the Greeks align,” he said, no longer closing in on her but with a timbre now light and open and sunny, “that good will come, not death. Odysseus’s son, when his father returned home dressed as a beggar . . .”

  “Sneezed?”

  “Yes. And Penelope laughed, was hopeful again.”

  Katharine wondered if the quick manner in which he jumped from one subject to another—Mercury’s swift flight from place to place—was a sign that he was mad. Had anyone at the hall checked his previous employ? “So you read Greek?” she asked.

  He bowed. “I am a schoolmaster. And a poet.” He bowed again.

  “And you read Latin.”

  “Of course.”

  “How learned you are.”

  “More than many, less than some.”

  “And what Greek are you teaching your pupils now? Aristotle?”

  “No. The man in the marble chair.”

  “His seat culled from the quarries of Paros,” she said, “Mestrius Plutarchus.”

  “You know of him?”

  “A master of history and a priest at the temple of Apollo in Delphi.”

  “You know of him,” he said. “For I cannot assume you’ve read Plutarch—he’s far too rigorous a regimen for your fair sex. There are no knights, no maidens, no love songs. Though, fairly, there is much from him that women can learn, for he is not as much a chronicler of history—though war, death, valor, all walk upon his stage—as he is an examiner of character, a physic to mankind, in search of the pieces of the puzzle of men.”

  “The puzzle of men. You are a poet.”

  “A poet of mankind.”

  “Ah. A poet of mankind. What a princely title. And do you fancy that men puzzle women?”

  “Women puzzle men in that we know not what you are or how you work.”

  “But in the last grain of sand, you spoke of the puzzle of men. I am puzzled. Are you now changing it to the puzzle of women? Do you include women in this riddle? As the puzzled or the puzzlers?”

  “I—”

  “Or is it that we women have our hands full of womanly things, of babies and stitching? And thus our minds are too weak to worry about how to put all the pieces of the great manly puzzle back together again. How lucky Master Plutarch was, with his powerful puzzling head, to have time to sit upon his marble chair. No babies crying to suckle at his breast, no children to wash or to put to bed or to cool their feverish brows.” Katharine sat down again and straightened Sidney’s pages on her lap; then turned them over so the ink was hidden from his sight.

  “I would not—” he began.

  “I suppose to complete the puzzle of man is an impossible task. Since the Garden, when poor Adam lost a rib, brought an end to any manly order. Was Eve up at night wide-eyed with worry that by gaining a rib—or is your history that she stole it?—she forever rendered the puzzle of men incomplete?” A newly sharpened blade would have been duller than her tone.

  He backed away, leaned against the windowsill, the open air behind him. “I dare not presume that a woman—”

  “My good sir, you have already presumed too much. But I’ve forgotten, you are the self-anointed poet of mankind and are used to such presumptions.” Katharine jumped up and pushed past him, Sidney’s sonnets now rolled in her hand like a club. “Which life are your young men studying?” she asked.

  “‘Julius Caesar,’” he answered.

  He was following her across the room. She was heading for the door.

  “And they can read it?” she asked.

  “They are at different levels. And they translate,” he said to her back.

  “From the Greek to English.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when they make mistakes, you correct them?” She finally turned to look at him.

  “I read Greek,” he said.

  The dark red leather book with shafts of wheat engraved in gold at its edges was now behind his back. He obviously did not read Greek well, for he had pulled a translation of Plutarch from the shelf.

  “I’d venture to say you speak Greek,” she said, spitting out the words.

  “I speak Greek and—” He stopped mid-sentence when she waved her hand to cut him off.

  She meant he spoke nonsense, but he had taken her literally. She rolled her eyes toward the heavens. “And you also read our fair language . . .”

  “English? Yes, fairly. Our Saxons may have been fair of hair, but their tongue was dark and brutish. When William conquered our lands, he brought a fairer, lighter lilt.”

  “So when your students exchange Greek for English, do they use other texts to aid them or are they on their own?”

  “The beauty of Plutarch is that he writes of character, of qualities, of the person first, the event second. Lessons we can all learn from . . .”

  “So you said. But you have not answered my question. Are your students allowed to use another text to help them in their translation?”

  “No.”

  “So you must be truly a master, then, to sit with their ink scratches barely dry and read their creations.”

  “Their translations. I am a schoolmaster.”

  “Yes, a master, but of what I cannot tell.” Katharine stopped at the door and, facing him, pointed to the book he was holding with both hands behind his back. “That is Amyot’s Plutarch in French—you, I assume, want Sir Thomas North’s Englished version,” she said, pulling the brown leather binding from the shelf and handing the book to him.

  Without waiting for a reply, she charged through t
he door. She felt like laughing but was afraid the sound would come out of her mouth in gales. At the end of the next room, when she was out of his sight, she picked up her skirts and ran.

  7

  ad they fallen to the floor? She pushed her skirts and bone farthingale to the side, got down on her hands and knees and looked under her bed. They were not there. Nor were they on the table, in the oak cupboard or under her pillows. She hoped to dear God that her maid Molly hadn’t thought they were rubbish and thrown them in the fire.

  Sir Edward’s library was on the second floor, with two doors at opposite ends of the long room, one opening to a staircase and the other to a withdrawing chamber and several guest quarters. There was no central corridor in this part of the house, so Katharine retraced her steps with candle in hand, through one guest chamber and then another. The rooms boasted broad beds with fringed canopies trunked by oak pillars of carved thistles, ivy and doves. She passed windows framed in teal, emerald, gold and damask. The chambers of the grandest suite were elegant enough for a king, and indeed Henry VI had slept there.

  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?