The Tutor (14 page)

Lord and Lady Strange were attending the revels today. They flanked Matilda and the Duc de Malois at the head of the table. Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who was in direct line to the crown of England, would inherit his father’s title when the time came and become the Fifth Earl of Derby. The lord and lady had three young daughters, and the family was in London at court part of every year. The queen, who was not known for finding warmth in her heart for the mistresses or wives of her favored, was known to like Alice as much as she liked Ferdinando—and that was no small feat.

Alice, Lady Strange, was a year younger than Katharine, and her beauty was much remarked upon in Lancashire and throughout the whole of England. Ferdinando was also beautiful, and both were patrons of poets and playwrights. Lord Strange supported what had been a troupe of acrobats and tumblers but had since turned into a company of players, as was the fashion now. Several times a year, Sir Edward’s family was invited to the Stanley seats at Ormskirk or Merseyside, and several times a year, the family invited the Stanley clan to Lufanwal Hall.

Katharine hadn’t seen Will since the banquet two days before. She’d sent Molly with the marked-up pages of his poetry. As the family and guests settled into their chairs and benches, Katharine scanned the crowd all the way to the maids’ and servants’ tables for the tutor, but he wasn’t there.

The drinking had started early, and the air was thick with merriment. Ursula did not vomit on the table this time, but she sat in the duke’s lap at the end of the meal. The duke’s large hand held his cousin Ursula’s tiny waist, yet his eyes were locked on Sophie. Katharine realized how much she relied on Sir Edward, that even at grand feasts and entertainments he always included her, sitting her next to him or walking her to each new guest. For the first time in ages, Katharine did not know her
place. She thought she had outgrown these worries, but with Edward gone, and the festivities long, she felt a gloom descending.

She stood and smiled at the elderly Frenchman to her left and the young Nicholas Barlow to her right. She was not sure either of them noticed; the old man was dozing, and the young man was speaking French to one of the duke’s men across the table. The mulled wine had made Katharine’s limbs weak. She made her way to the library to read
The
Faerie Queene
,
which
Will had returned to her. Still dressed in her golden gown, Katharine picked up her skirts and sat back in her favorite chair. She could hear the cheers and the clapping from the tilt field. The sun was dropping behind the trees, long shadows stretching across the lawn. The branches for the bonfire were almost as high as the library window.

Katharine turned the pages to “Chastity,” the legend of the female knight Britomart, which she’d been reading before she lent the book to Will. She loved that Spenser put such a strong and valiant woman in disguise. When Katharine reached the stanzas where Britomart and the Redcrosse Knight enter Malecasta’s Castle Ioyeous, she found writing on the pages of Sir Edward’s new book. Words like
lust
and
unrequited
adorned the margins now, and
Kit’s Adonis rose-cheeked
and
desire
and
death
. Katharine saw that Spenser’s canto possibly influenced Will’s new direction, for in a chamber in Malecasta’s castle hangs a tapestry with the tale of Venus and Adonis woven into it. Spenser’s Venus entices and woos the stunning Adonis, each line brimming with sensual desires. And as in Ovid’s story, Adonis pays no heed to Venus’s warning, and it is with the boar that he finally fulfills his fate, “for who can shun the chaunce that dest’ny doth ordaine?”

After the sun dropped to the west, the sky gleamed opal, and the crackling of the kindling and the first slender spirals of smoke announced the bonfire had been lit. The fire would be bright tonight, the flames high. Katharine closed her eyes and let her head fall back on the chair. She thought of Will and how his bright eyes seemed to shift shades of green.

—

The bells were ringing
. On her way down to dinner, Katharine stopped and ran her fingers over the rectangular lid of the virginals in the gallery. She still carried the key next to the small Bible on her girdle chain but had not used it in years. Wiping the dust from the fine wood, she unlocked the case. Sir Edward had given her this set as a wedding present; they were newly crafted and brought over on a boat from Flanders. The master instrument-maker Hans Ruckers had adorned his beautiful box with ivory, mother-of-pearl and marble inlay, and the soundboard was painted with flowers, fruits, birds and caterpillars. The scene painted on the inside of the lid was of a hunt with two manor houses in the distance and a crowd of dogs, and men on horses and on foot in the foreground. The box had been closed for so many years that the colors still gleamed; indeed, the painted sky looked as if it were lit from behind and glowed with a rose-gold hue.

There was another pair of virginals in the balcony in the great hall where the musical instruments were kept, but they were not nearly as fine as these. As a child, Katharine had spent hours learning the notes and playing the bone keys; those moments had soothed her soul, helped heal her heart perhaps more than prayer.

A servant rounded the corner, bobbed his head in her direction, touched his fire stick to the torch on the wall and scurried away.

The swell of noise—voices, dogs barking, laughter and the notes of a lute—rose from the garden and the great hall, but when Katharine placed her hands on the keys, she felt an ancient tranquillity within. Her fingers used to roam the keys, nimble tumblers at a fair, the jacks plucking the strings, but at this moment she did not dare strike a key; she stood in the dim gallery with her fingers resting on the keys, and then without warning her eyes filled with tears.

Katharine slowly and carefully put the lid down. She had lost two
children: one months before birth but the other she’d carried full term, and two days after birth the little girl had died. Katharine remembered the weight of the wood as she shut the tiny coffin. Was that the last time she had played music? She had brought the virginals with her when she returned to the hall after her husband died, but she had never played again; she had left the pair in the gallery, figuring someone would surely play them, but no one ever had. Over the years, she had taken to averting her eyes from the instrument when she passed.

She heard voices.

“I crave your pardon, my lady.” It was Mr. Smythson, the master mason.

Wiping her eyes, she tried to gather her senses. Mr. Smythson reintroduced himself and then turned and introduced the tall young man next to him.

“My son, John,” he said.

John bowed. Mr. Smythson and his son were images of each other—not mirror images but reflections. John was almost as tall as his father, yet his features were finer and his hair was clipped and neat. He was a smooth-faced youth no older than Joan or Isabel.

“Are you here for the revels, Mr. Smythson?” Katharine asked.

“Revels? Oh, no, madam, we are here to map the additions to the house.”

“On such a holiday as this?”

“We take few holidays,” Mr. Smythson said.

“You’ll not stay for a meal, at least?”

“No, many thanks, most gracious lady, but no. We’ll be on our way.”

Mr. Smythson did not move, and Katharine waited. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something else, but no words issued forth. Finally, his son came to his aid.

“Good even, my lady,” John said, and bowed.

Mr. Smythson hastily said good-bye and bowed, and they took their
leave. How fortunate Mr. Smythson was, Katharine thought, to have such a well-mannered and attentive son to work with him.

—

The orange flames
of the bonfire leapt and charged at the black sky. Saint Crispin’s Day was in full glory. Katharine was tired of hatching conversations with the French and tired of the overabundant tables of steaming meats, cheeses, bread, ale, sack and wine, and if Will had not been set to perform, she would have fled to her chamber before the dancing began. As a child she had seen moralities performed at the fine house of their neighbors the Heskeths. She remembered the players with beards freshly trimmed, wearing their master’s livery. Last year she had seen a wonderful performance by Lord Strange’s own company of players. But Sir Edward had never had the inclination to employ permanent players at Lufanwal. Will’s double role, of schoolmaster and player, was new. She wished her uncle were standing next to her in the great hall so he could also watch tonight’s interlude.

The servants snuffed the torches, one by one, along the walls. One torch at the end of the great hall remained lit. Will entered through the door from the west parlor. The servants stood in allegiance, sentries, their long snuffers held at their sides like spears.

“I come before you this eventide not as Saint Crispin,” he said.

Indeed, Will looked not the role of a shoemaker—no leather smock tied round his neck. Instead he wore a simple tunic and breeches with a mantle of mail plucked from the family’s cabinets.

“But as Henry the Fifth,” he continued, “on this very day in 1415, when our heroic king found victory in the fields of Agincourt.”

While Master Shakespeare rattled on about how the brave King Henry and his men overpowered the French so many years ago, Katharine felt the room shift—but not settle. Richard scowled, Harold’s jaw
hardened and Matilda stared straight ahead. Instead of celebrating the martyred Saint Crispin’s defense of Christianity, instead of commemorating the duke’s valiant battle against the anti-Catholic Huguenots at Ivry, Will had seized this moment to memorialize France’s dreadful loss to the English.

He likes to gamble, Katharine thought.

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend.” Will began his performance. “The brightest heaven of invention . . .”

A dog started barking and Harold reached down and smacked it with the back of his hand. The poor hound staggered from the blow into silence.

Will directed their imagination to the battle at Agincourt. With fine words, he painted the muddy field, the French with fresh horses and full bellies, the beleaguered English foot soldiers, the French outnumbering the English.

Where were Will’s fellow players? Why was he performing alone? The family was now a hive of nerves, afraid their London player-poet would offend. And indeed Katharine wondered at the current complexion of their French friends. Most of the duke’s men did not understand English, but they understood the word
Agincourt
, and perhaps they could interpret the intensity of Will’s performance. Were they imagining the knights and noblemen, their relatives, bloodied and slain on the fields that day?

Will paused. The family and their guests waited, expecting perhaps another actor or two would join him. But he remained alone when he commenced his speech. “If we are mark’d to die . . .” His voice took on a kingly timbre—commanding, earnest, humble and brave. The eyes and voice that beckoned to Katharine alone in the library or under the apple tree now gathered up everyone in the great hall, harvested them. Even the smallest serving boy stopped his business and looked.

Will was not a minute into his rallying call, when he started to walk around the hall and speak to one person after another, even the women, as though they were dressed and armed for battle. To Matilda, he proffered, “If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.”

Stopping before Richard, he continued, “That he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart.” Will seemed to grow taller when he faced Lord Strange and said, “He that shall live this day, and see old age, will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors. Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, and say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’”

Those listening to Will’s speech began as his subjects but were soon his soldiers, too. When Will came to Katharine with the words, “This story shall the good man teach his son,” he lingered in front of her for a moment, and she held her breath. Then he moved on to Harold: “But we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” He passed by Ursula, who fanned herself. “And gentlemen in England now-a-bed . . .” He walked a few more paces, finally stopping in front of the duke, who had laughed with him at the banquet. Will’s voice rang through the hall: “Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”

The duke stood and shouted something, and like an arrow, fear launched through the air. Katharine worried that the duke’s party, many of whom had fought by his side and seen their brothers slain at Ivry last year, would rise up and start a brawl.

The duke swung his arm at Will. A few of the ladies gasped. But at the instant of impact, instead of assault the duke clasped Will on the shoulders, not with violence but with affection, as though they were brothers; he was, evidently, taken with Will’s words, not angered by them. He said something about honor in French, and then all his men chimed in and lifted their tankards, while Will bowed low before the duke. The duke’s men surrounded Will as if he were one of theirs. The
duke, his arm still around the poet-player, called for a servant to bring Will wine and shouted,
“Salut!”
before drinking his own down in one gulp.

Katharine had never witnessed anything like this before. The family now gathered round Will, thanking him. Katharine was not familiar with the play and wondered from what talented playwright he had borrowed his speech. Will had been daring, both in the role he chose and that he performed alone, for all eyes had been on him only, no other players to distract or to defuse. The whereabouts of the traveling troupe still remained a mystery.

Katharine, who was not in awe of many, had always been in awe of Lord and Lady Strange. Ferdinando was considered a genius; Katharine had been a bit in love with him and used to dream that Ferdinando fell in love with her, despite her meager dowry, and asked her to marry him. But Ferdinando had made a sensible and smart choice in Alice, who, though contained, if not aloof, was genuine and certainly seemed like she had a good heart, and it was clear that Ferdinando and Alice were very much in love.