The Tutor: A Novel Read online

  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 . . .”

  He grimaced. “Furniture? To write words in rhyme is an art, madam; to rend them, beat them into submission, is a sin.”

  Katharine crossed her arms, a nurse scolding a child. “He’s done no violence. His words are beauty. His feeling pure. What right have you to mock him?”

  “‘In truth, oh Love, with what a boyish kind . . .’” he recited. “‘Yet of that best thou leav’st the best behind.’” He grinned. “Is he musing on his fair Stella’s behind? I should hope, after he compared her features to nature’s furniture, he has at least the grace to praise her buttocks.”

  She could have sworn, with a movement as quick as a cut to a quill, he peeked at her backside. This fellow’s rudeness had no bounds.

  “I’ll not listen to you dismantle one of the world’s most gifted poets,” she lectured, “who if he had not died so young—”

  “Aye, the mantle of such greatness hangs heavy upon his poor soul. What he hath writ, my dear, stands separate from pity. Another poet down. A playwright dies every week, it seems, yet one Sir Poet takes lead in his leg and the whole world stands still. I cannot weep because I cannot follow where this poet leads. A maze of language, with trees scarce cut to fit, stops me at every turn.”

  “‘Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show . . .’” She recited the first sonnet in the cycle. “His path is easy. You cannot follow it?”

  “You are more nimble than I. Perhaps you’ve not read far enough to get lost in his woods. I read all. The songs, too. A woman, it seems, by your fair example, is not the weaker sex with Sidney.” He waved his hand in mock surrender. “Yet a man must have stamina, perseverance and strength to couch with him.”

  “And you are not such a man?”

  “With him? I have tried and I have failed.”

  “You are jousting with a dead man because you cannot come close to his wit, nor his rhyme, nor his meter, and that angers you. I don’t pity Sidney. I pity you!”

  He smiled, keeping her eyes in check with his, and declaimed, “‘But with your rhubarb words you must contend,’” and then in a melodramatic voice, “‘To grieve me worse, in saying that desire / Doth plunge my well-form’d soul even in the mire / Of sinful thoughts, which do in ruin end’? Many a sugar’d sentence doth your fair Sidney pen. The sweetness, I suppose, counteracts the rhubarb, or perhaps counterattacks it. ’Tis not his ‘sinful thoughts’ that ‘do in ruin end,’ but ’tis his insufferable rhymes.” He took the roll of Sidney’s sonnets from his belt and handed them to Katharine. “I have no more use for these.”

  “The envy you wear upon your sleeve does not become you,” she said. “Find a glass and gaze at the image there.”

  “‘Oh no, her heart is such a citadel, / So f
ortified with wit, stored with disdain, / That to win it, is all the skill and pain . . .’ Dear lady, to write that is all the pain and no skill.”

  He seemed to have read all one hundred and eight sonnets and memorized a good portion of them, though he’d only had them for less than three days. She’d heard of people who read something once and held pictures of every single word in their mind, so they could recall not only lines but whole poems without ever having to study them again. Perhaps he was one of those.

  He chuckled. “Sidney vexes me. A few stanzas inspire envy, yes, but sonnet after sonnet of eyes beaming and gleaming. Oh, and the dreary repetition of ‘Stella’s rays’ and the dull ‘two stars in Stella’s face.’” He paused and looked into Katharine’s eyes. “Could he not think of a better image for beautiful eyes? Something to do with heaven, perhaps? His pen too often marks with ‘dribbed shot,’ to steal a phrase from the master himself. ‘Desire, mire, sake, slake, same, shame’ . . . come, now, even I could do better than that. Love and virtue, love and virtue . . . up and down, a seesaw, again and again, how tedious.”

  “Then do it.” She glared at him.

  “What?”

  “Have you ever tried to write a sonnet? Have you one hundred and eight tucked under your bed? Or perhaps they are the stuffing of which your bed is made!”

  “I certainly have written . . .” He put his blade in his belt. He stared at her, his eyes steady. “I—”

  “Oh, I mustn’t forget,” she continued. “You are the self-anointed poet of mankind. Do you actually put those quills to paper, or do you just spend your hours carving up feathers and poets alike, poets who have created whole books, whole worlds?” All of a sudden she felt faint and leaned against the tree. “The smoke . . .” she began but did not finish.

  He moved to her, but she put her hands up to stop him from coming closer.

  “’Tis nothing,” she said, straightening herself and walking to a stone bench. She was mortified that she and this glove-maker’s son were in plain sight, for the windows of the household above were prime seats for viewing. She wished she’d never ventured down from the library.

  “Where did you come by your learning?” he said when she was seated. He remained on foot.

  It was the first time she’d heard the tutor utter a word that did not sound choreographed, and she was as much taken aback by what he said, that he had asked about her, as by his tone, which had lost its edge and was gentle.

  “Sir Edward,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. If her uncle were at the hall, she would have leaned on his warmth to shield her from the man who stood before her.

  Shakespeare nodded. “Sir Edward was a scholar. The walls lined with books, which I have started to plunder. I thought a father, or a brother, or a husband had sat you down with a hornbook.”

  “Sir Edward is a scholar. He is still with us, though for a time abroad.”

  One black crow landed in the garden, and then another and another. It wasn’t the rooks, for they hadn’t returned, but carrion crows, their beaks black and stout. Shakespeare waved his arms at the cackling tribe and shooed them away.

  “And no one sat me down with anything,” Katharine said.

  “How came you to live at Lufanwal?” he asked, sitting on the bench next to her.

  “I was brought as a child, when my parents and my brother and sister perished. I married and moved five leagues from here. My husband died and I returned. ’Tis not a complicated history.”

  “A child robbed of parents is always complicated—a hollow in the heart that endures. The plague?” he asked.

  “A fire,” she replied, her tone sharp, scorning his softness.

  She looked away and felt a touch on the scar on the back of her neck. The movement was so swift, so light, such a feather of unfathomable liberty, that in an instant she convinced herself she’d imagined it, that indeed it was the breeze that had skimmed her skin, not his finger. Yet in a flash the contact wreaked havoc on her flesh, moving down into the depths of her body. She was relieved to hear voices—though at this moment Ursula’s high-pitched giggle was unwanted music. Katharine rose from the bench.

  Ursula swept across the brown grasses, gathering dry leaves in the hem of her full red skirt as she walked. She was with her brother-in-law Harold and the master mason who had saved her little dog. Harold began to introduce Katharine, gesturing with his right arm, the hand of his shorter arm hidden in the fold of his doublet.

  “Katharine met Mr. Smythson when he rescued Guinny from Richard’s horrid hawk,” interrupted Ursula.

  Mr. Smythson bowed his head but not his body. He ran his fingers through his hair in an effort to keep his dark curls out of his face. His mop was as unruly as the hair on the sculpture of Laocoön Ned had sketched and sent from Italy.

  Harold presented the tutor last. “Walter Shakespeare, our new schoolmaster up from Stratford.”

  “William Shakespeare,” Ursula corrected.

  Shakespeare bowed deeply.

  “We are considering some changes to the hall,” continued Harold, his cropped light red hair and neatly trimmed beard making a sharp contrast to the rough-hewn appearance of Mr. Smythson, whose leather jerkin was stained and who wore no proper doublet underneath.

  “Richard and I are to have our own set of chambers,” said Ursula. “With Sir Edward away, we think it’s time to make additions. We are to have our own wing. We’ve been crowded in the back for too long.”

  Katharine wondered if the departure of Sir Edward had given birth to Ursula’s interest in the shape of the house. The black crows in the garden masked nothing of their greedy nature when they attacked the berry trees and busied themselves in thieving. Was Ursula perhaps a bird of a similar feather?

  “I met a Smythson in London,” said Shakespeare. “He creates scenery for theaters. He is a magician.”

  “My brother,” said Mr. Smythson, nodding.

  “Ah,” said William. “A family of magicians.”

  Katharine could not gauge whether Shakespeare’s comment was a compliment or an insult.

  “I’m no magician,” said Mr. Smythson. “Merely an artificer. A stonemason by trade. Not skilled at sleight, never have been.”

  “Your houses are splendid,” Ursula said with a sigh. “This marvelous man is largely responsible for Sir John Thynne’s beautiful home at Longleat. And he did the renovation of Sir Matthew Arundell’s castle in Wiltshire. Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire is one of his masterpieces, and recently he’s been quite taken up with the Earl of Shrewsbury—”

  Harold cut Ursula off. “We are flattered that the talented Mr. Smythson has taken time away from his many projects and duties to look over our humble cottage here,” he said.

  Mr. Smythson nodded and squinted his brown eyes at Harold in what seemed a smile but might have been a grimace. Perhaps, Katharine thought, it was hard for the builder to be in this circle of strangers; maybe stones were easier for him than people. Shakespeare whispered something to Ursula. He was as nimble with his attention as he was with his words.

  “Pray pardon, I must leave,” Katharine said. Her voice was higher than usual, and sounded artificial even to herself.

  Katharine tipped her head but did not bid a proper farewell. In truth, the tutor-poet addled her, and she needed to escape. She left by way of the orchard and the chapel and continued walking. As she passed the barns, she saw the milkmaid Mercy. When Mercy curtsied low, Katharine noticed something dangling between her ample breasts.

  “Ho, there, lass, what have you round your neck?” she asked, pointing to the small discs.

  “I . . . I . . .” the girl stuttered.

  “What?”

  “I found ’em on the floor ’neath the birds, my lady, yonder,” she said, nodding in the direction of the mews.

  Katharine couldn’t help but notice how Mercy had grown from a girl to
a young woman. She had curves now, her broad hips filling her skirt.

  “Give them to me,” said Katharine.

  Mercy hurriedly pulled off the cord with the wax discs. “I didna mean no harm, my lady. They were in the hay.”

  “Do you know what these are?”

  “No’m.”

  “They are what priests wear. They have been blessed by the Pope. What were you doing there?” She did not question her further. She could imagine what Mercy might be doing in the hay in the hawk house. No doubt some lad had taken her in there for a doddle.

  “Get along, now,” Katharine said to the girl, who curtsied low again before she fled.

  Father Daulton had said the priests from Rome rarely carried Agnus Deis anymore, for they broke any disguise the instant they were discovered. The wax discs impressed with the Paschal Lamb had been outlawed by the Parliament close to twenty years before as “popish trumperies,” and the punishment for wearing them was death.

  Katharine had heard tales of the miracles worked by Agnus Deis. Once, during Lent, an elderly lady was at death’s door. An Agnus Dei was hung around her neck, and that instant she recovered her voice and memory, and the following day she was perfectly cured—to the great confusion of her heirs, who, having prematurely taken away her possessions, were forced to bring them back.

  Whose Agnus Deis were these, and why were they on the floor of the hawk house? They had to belong to a priest. Were they Father Daulton’s? Perhaps one of the birds had found them and brought them in its beak. Or Richard had taken the wax discs from Father Daulton’s neck when he found him dead? If so, why leave them in the hawk house? Katharine would have taken the blessed medallions directly to Sir Edward, but his chair was still empty. On her way up the stairs, she met Mary going down.

  “I met one of the milkmaids outside, and she was wearing these around her neck.” Katharine held the Agnus Deis up to Mary. “She found them in the hay.”