The Tutor: A Novel Read online

  Katharine couldn’t help but be impressed by Ursula’s warbling oratory; at least she seemed honest. Perhaps she was not the anointed family fool after all.

  “To the De Malois offffffsssssspring, may they ffffflourish and proudly carry their mighty father’s mantle upon their shoulders.” Ursula downed her drink, then vomited all over the table.

  Richard winced. His passion was falconry; they often trained the hawks by sealing their eyes with a needle and thread, a temporary blinding. As the servants rushed to Ursula’s side, Katharine wondered if at this moment Richard would have preferred to have his eyes sewn shut.

  Laughter turned to whooping. Several Frenchmen stood, bowed, cheered and clapped, as though Ursula had just recited a beautiful piece of poetry. For a moment she looked startled, but she waved a servant away, calling instead for more wine.

  The feast was finishing, and it was Matilda who gave the sign to the musicians in the balcony to start the song. Katharine caught Matilda’s eye. With Edward gone, there seemed to be a warmth growing between them.

  While the women withdrew to the gallery adjacent to the balcony to listen to the music through the grillwork, Katharine planned her escape from their chatter. Ursula would not be joining the women. Her heavings had been cleared, and now her head was on the table, her eyes shut, her cheek resting upon a piece of yellow cheese.

  When Katharine had last looked at Will, he was in conversation with a Frenchman. She was almost out the door when she heard his voice.

  “And how fares my lady?” he said.

  She turned. “You are looking very . . . full of color,” she said.

  Will bowed.

  “A peacock would pale next to you,” she added.

  “Pray, madam, do not mock me.” He stared at her. “Your eyes are the color of your gown, two blue windows.”

  “Yes, my eyes, my gown, seem a subject of fools’ flattery tonight.”

  “We are but subjects to them,” he said, bowing again.

  “Subjects to fools or to my eyes? It is the eyes of fools that weave false flattery. Must I be subjected to such foolishness? ‘Two blue windows’? Come, now. You can do better than that.” Katharine smiled.

  There was something brazen about how he looked into her eyes, something prying and challenging and delightful. They had never been together at supper and certainly not at a banquet as glittering as this one. The music had begun, and the air was filled with the pleasant sounds of a violin, flute, lute and viol.

  “What thought you of my last sonnet?”

  “It spoke of torment. I could feel the wound in the heart. A lover crossed by his lover and his friend,” Katharine said.

  “If a man sees his mistress with another man, even his best friend, he assumes his mistress has forsaken him.”

  “All men assume this?”

  “All men.”

  “You are an education,” she said.

  “I have started the new poem we spoke of in the orchard. Might you read it?” He leaned his broad frame close to Katharine, his voice low. “It is untried. The ink not yet dried,” he said. “I pray you like it.” He took her hand and kissed it.

  It was the first time she’d felt his lips on her skin. His lips were warm.

  Katharine took the pages he held out to her. She wished she weren’t leaving the great hall when he came to her, for if she turned now and went back in, it would seem she was doing so to be with him.

  “I thank you in advance,” he said, bowing.

  She nodded, not knowing exactly what to do. “Adieu,” she said finally.

  Will bowed again and left her at the door, returning to the hall, where music and laughter filled the air. The guests were drunk and loud, and the gentle notes could not do serious battle with the harsh sounds of revelry.

  She climbed the steps to the old turret, then put Will’s folded paper on the table next to her bed and stood at the window, staring into the last glow of light. There was something deliciously expectant about this time of night, in the gloaming, before darkness finally descended—a waiting. She sighed, unfastening the gold chain girdle at her waist that held a tiny Bible and then unpinning the lace coif that covered her hair. Molly came in and helped her out of her blue satin stomacher and blue and black brocade gown.

  “You’ve come up early, my lady,” said Molly as she unlaced Katharine’s bodice. Molly had a face full of freckles, and orange ringlets that refused to stay captive beneath her cap.

  “I am tired, Molly, bone-tired.”

  “And a bit sad that Sir Edward is not here to enjoy the revels?” asked Molly.

  “I suppose that’s why I left.”

  “Feels off the center of things without him presiding at the table.”

  “’Tis very true, Molly. The other day I heard horses and was convinced he’d returned. When I rushed to the window, it was Richard and some of his men. That was all.”

  By the time Katharine’s black petticoat had fallen to the floor and the farthingale was undone, she had decided against reading Will’s words. She would snuff her candle and go to sleep. When Molly let down her hair, Katharine told her she could go.

  As Katharine ran the brush through her hair, she watched herself in the oval looking glass perched on the table. Many women her age dyed their hair blond like Saxon girls. Though she had strands of gray, she preferred her own chestnut color. If she could change her appearance, she would wish away the lines on her forehead and around her eyes and even the laugh lines from the dimples on her cheeks. She would wish for smooth where there were now furrows. When she was young, she’d wanted to erase the burn marks on her back and her neck. Even in the summer heat she used to wear high-necked, long-sleeved stomachers, but now she accepted those scars as who she was, as much a part of her as her eyes, her hair and her heart.

  In her white cambric smock, she pulled up the linens and blankets in her bed and listened to the revelers below. They would all gather in a few hours for a light meal, if they were not too drunk. Katharine wouldn’t go back down. The candle flame was unsteady. She would read Will’s work in the morning, when the natural light would lift the quill marks off the page. She heard laughter and song. Then she leaned toward the candle with the snuffer but stopped. Snatching the paper off the table, she unfolded the pages and squinted into the candlelight.

  In the orchard, two days before, Will had presented her with something new. They were not sonnets, but the beginnings of longer pieces—poems with stories. She had read each one, then spread them on the ground before her, and, like a mystic with tarot cards, pointed at a page and said, “This one.” She liked the tension between Venus and Adonis. It drew her in.

  And now he’d worked on that poem and written much. Three pages. Nine stanzas. She read and reread the verse, then she climbed down from her bed and went to her table; pushing aside combs, ivory hairpins, necklaces and clay pots filled with skin potions, she dipped a quill in ink and started to write on Will’s pages, circling words, querying meaning and placement and feeling. Her lines stretched out at strange angles from his neat and careful handwriting, connecting her words to his. By the time she finished, the pages looked like maps, his words countries whose boundaries and allegiances had been called into question.

  She opened the heavy door and listened. The musicians had stopped playing, but the house was not quiet. Footsteps, singing, the sound of iron pots in the scullery, a horse whinnying. The night was far from over. She grabbed her cloak. The way Will described his recent nights of writing it was unlikely he was carousing below. Candle in one hand, Will’s pages in another, she pulled the hood over her head and started out her door. Molly and several other chambermaids slept in a windowless room not far from Katharine’s in the old Norman side of the house, partway down the circular stone steps. Katharine peeked in: Molly’s cot was empty. Who was the freckle-cheeked, redheaded lass lying with tonight? On
e of the foreigners?

  Katharine had to pass Ursula’s rooms. Shrill squeals of delight stabbed the air. Had the parrot roused? Katharine knew it wasn’t Ursula’s husband in there. She hoped Richard—that dreary, dull-worded soul—was with someone: perhaps that was whose bed her maid was spreading her thighs in tonight. Katharine traveled down another back staircase, through the kitchens and the scullery. Praying she would pass unnoticed by those whose red hands still worked, she snuck outside. She had never done anything like this before. The moon was full: no wonder the great house stirred like an animal unable to sleep.

  She would go to Will’s lodgings, give him his marked-up verse and tell him: There is vigor in thy words. His launch into the Venus and Adonis tale wasn’t perfect, yet his nimble mind seemed to stretch and to flex with each line. Will was working in a field where Ovid had plowed and Spenser had planted. Katharine had always loved Venus’s passion, her undeterred fixation on the beautiful mortal Adonis. Katharine imagined Will on a stool, bent over a table, the candle burning until the sun crept up. There is vigor in thy words . . . she’d say, after she’d knocked on the door and he’d let her in.

  With the night folding round her, she felt cold. She wore only her woolen cloak over her smock. When a gust of wind snuffed her candle out, she paid no heed; the glow from the moon was so strong and white it lit up everything it touched: stone and bark, flowers and grasses. The shadows on the ground outlined even the tiniest branches with magical precision and made a carpet under her feet.

  While she gazed at the moon, a movement on the highest roof of the house caught her eye. She saw one dark figure, then another. They were passing a tankard back and forth. Were they squires from the Duc de Malois’s party? Or were they Richard’s or Harold’s men? They were drunk, alternately swaying and clinging to each other. One man was narrow in limb, while the other was taller, broader. The small one held the tankard for the larger man, and then, when he pulled the pewter away, he leaned in close and kissed him.

  Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps it wasn’t a kiss. Perhaps she’d woven one moment out of quite another. The man who had held the tankard to the other man’s lips, the man whom she thought had then kissed the other man, climbed up on the old parapet and stood barely balancing, then he sat on the edge, his legs dangling over the side. The other man followed him. And there they both sat, high up on the ledge, the tankard still traveling back and forth until the last drop was drunk, and the vessel was hurled out into the night. The clanging sound of metal hitting stone echoed below.

  They now had their arms around each other, and they started to kiss. The kiss was long and endless, and Katharine couldn’t pull her eyes from them. One shift, one error, one twitch, would fling them both to the unyielding earth below. But they didn’t stop. She couldn’t move. She was afraid if she went forward to Will’s room or retreated to her bed they would lose their fragile balance and tumble to their deaths. She didn’t want to shout at them to come down, to be careful, not to test fate, for she worried the sound of her voice might throw off their risky embrace and cause them to slip. It was as if her watching ensured their safety, their survival. While she stood beneath them, a chill seeped under her cloak, and she started to tremble.

  The one who seemed to lead, who was wiry, and even while drunk seemed nimble, got to his feet on the narrow bridge of stone and jumped back to the roof. Katharine sighed, waiting for the other to follow. But he didn’t. And much to her dismay, the leader returned with yet another tankard, climbed back up and dangled his feet over the side as before, and they started the drinking again, the back-and-forth, the dance.

  And then, as if they were thoroughly enjoying their reckless behavior, their taunting and tempting, they threw the second tankard to the cobblestones below and started kissing again. She could see in the moonlight that the one who had followed and not led now held the other’s head in his hands and was kissing him on the eyes, the cheeks and the neck; then he moved his lips to the other man’s lips, and though she couldn’t actually see this she knew that his tongue had gone in deep. The spry one’s arms were now around the other’s waist. Was this some chivalric code of honor? Were they testing their loyalty to each other? If one made the wrong move, both would fall. Did the tension of their stance add to their need, their excitement? Or were they boys and not men yet, pushing each other to an extreme, a jousting of sorts, a competition, a game, daring, thoughtless, silly?

  The kissing went on and on. She could not stand there under the milky moon any longer. She finally pulled herself away, her eyes tracking them as she withdrew. While she returned to the house, she was sure any minute she would hear the terrible sound of bodies hitting stone.

  Upstairs in her bed, swaddled in wool and with skins layered on her feet, she realized she’d not glanced at Will’s quarters, not even checked for light in the window, a candle flame at the desk. She still had his pages. But the poetry on them was different from what she’d witnessed on the parapet. Will had backed down, shied away from the risk and the drunken balancing. While there was indeed vigor in much of what he had writ, he was still too conscious of what he was trying to do. It was as if he held a looking glass to his face and admired his own reflection instead of losing himself and forgetting about his features altogether. The pressure in his passages fell off. She now saw this was not the stuff of shepherds and maidens. From the start, Venus had to wax wild and raw instead of controlled and contained.

  Katharine would press Will to make what he penned feel as real as the passion and the danger she saw tonight.

  She would find him in the morning.

  In the darkness of her room, through her window, the same full moon cast its web on her. She felt caught, as she tossed and turned and worried about sleep.

  10

  n Saint Crispin’s Day, Katharine heard the men below dragging dead trees to the great lawn. There would be feasting, sport, bonfires and dancing. Will was to perform with a company of traveling players, tragedians he knew from London. According to legend, Saint Crispin was a Roman cordwainer, and in many villages the shoemakers still celebrated the holiday by choosing a king and, after crowning their patron saint, parading down the streets with music, torches and banners. Katharine wondered what sort of play the family and their guests would see tonight.

  The lovely aroma of spiced wine and butter-crusted meat pies crept under the doors of the house. It was to be an earthy affair, with pigs, goats and deer roasted on spits. Tables were brought outside, while the children ran from the forest and threw branches, twigs and brush onto the growing woodpile. After the damage from the drought and an early frost, the weather had righted itself and warmed the fields enough for the wheat to be sown, so the day was in part to celebrate the October planting, and most of the servants were well into the cider and the ale—the kitchen maids having put pitchers out soon after the sun came up.

  Grace and Isabel caught up with Katharine at the door and they walked out into the flood of sunshine together. There was not a cloud in the sky.

  Lady Planchet, Matilda’s eldest daughter, Grace, had arrived from Yorkshire in the night with her family. She had a twinkle in her eye like her father and was tall like her mother, indeed taller than her husband Sir Hugh Planchet, whose short stature was made up for by his noble lineage—his ancestor was Ilbert de Lacy of the famous Pontefract Castle, where Richard II perished. Grace was thirty years old and had given birth to five children, but only three remained, and those three were all under the age of seven and very spirited.

  “My dear Kate, you look radiant,” said Grace as she kissed Katharine. “I have faded and gotten fat and you have not!”

  “You have not faded!” said Katharine. “And you are always radiant!”

  “But I have gotten fat!” countered Grace.

  “Kate, you’ve done something different,” Isabel said. She stopped and examined Katharine. “Your hair.”

  “The same
,” said Katharine.

  “Did you powder your face? Paint your cheeks?” pushed Isabel.

  “No. My cheeks are still stained from the summer sun. ‘More white and red than doves and roses are.’”

  “‘Doves and roses’?” asked Grace.

  “’Tis verse,” said Katharine. It was a line from Will’s new poem describing Adonis.

  “A new gown!” Isabel exclaimed.

  “My first in years. Your brother sent the fabric from Italy to your mother, and she never used it. Your mother was very generous, and I am most grateful.”

  “The embroidery . . . in gold,” said Isabel.

  “Ned does not buy on the cheap,” Katharine said. The gown had a saffron bodice, burnished gold silk peeking through the slashes, and marigold trim.

  “It matches the luster of your hair,” said Isabel. “Look how the sun lights you up.”

  “‘Her garments all were wrought of beaten gold . . . and all her steed with tinsell trappings shone,’” Katharine recited from The Faerie Queene the description of the lady pursued by a brute in the forest. “I seem to have mislaid my milk-white palfrey, alas,” she added.

  “What tongues are you speaking in?” said Grace.

  “Edmund Spenser,” said Katharine.

  “I’ve heard of this Spenser,” said Isabel.

  “You should read him.”

  “Aye, after I read the twenty books you and Father assigned me this year.” Isabel put her hand to Katharine’s cheek. “There is a glow to you this afternoon, Cousin Kate. You positively shimmer and look no older than I.”

  Katharine laughed. “And you, my dear Isabel, positively shine and are much wiser than I.”

  “And what will you wear tonight? For the dancing? If you are teasing us with the new frock now?”

  “Tonight? This again, I suppose. For I already wore my blue. And my green is old and out of fashion.”

  Sir Hugh joined the ladies and tried to bow, making a spirited attempt to put his right leg forward, though his gout made him wince. He still managed to bend at the hips, but he could only sweep one arm open, as the other was pressing on his ivory-handled cane.