The Tutor (20 page)

“More a common stone,” he replied.

Katharine waited, but Will offered no more.

“How is it,” she pressed on, “that you did not finish a sonnet or a poem before you came to Lufanwal?”

“As you saw, I had a dozen starts, but I . . . I . . .” He paused. “I have never confided this to anyone, not even to my wife, Anne, but I was afraid if I seriously embarked on writing I would leave my family,” he blurted.

“Oh,” she said. “Yet now you have.”

“I suppose I have,” he said slowly, his countenance grave. “But I have found you.”

She reddened, for she had no real family left on this earth and his words filled her heart.

“Let us meet in the schoolroom in the future,” he said, “after the children have gone. The privacy will benefit our work. I feel anyone could wander in here at any moment. And let us meet more often. Will that serve you?”

“Yes,” Katharine said faintly. In truth, she knew tongues would wag.

“Excellent,” he said. The way he stared at her, she half expected him to lean over and kiss her. Instead, he shifted his gaze, placed his pages on the lid of the virginals and started to read what she had written.

“I agree, though Adonis is a huntsman, Venus is the hunter here, the huntress, the predator. Wonderful idea,” he said, “I, too, have been pill’d.”

I, too, have been pill’d
. What did he mean by that? Who was his pillager? His wife who was eight years his elder?

Will looked up at her; his eyes, their usual brightness, lingered. “Beautiful. Brilliant,” he said.

Was he referring to the words scribbled on the margin, or to the woman sitting an inch from him?

“You say here that I have not yet got fully at Venus’s passion,” he continued. “I have aimed at it, certainly.”

“Yes, aimed, but the arrow has missed its mark.”

“How then do I pierce the heart?”

Katharine pulled off the glittering gloves, snatched the pages from his hand and leaned into the light.

“Kate, methinks you are the huntress. I best be glad my fingers are still intact.”

She glanced up. He was smiling at her.

“The sun is shining again,” he said. “Our cloud has surely passed.”

She wondered at his need to narrate.

“Two lovers after a quarrel,” he said playfully.

“Lovers?” She narrowed her eyes at him, then returned to the page and tried to focus on the words there.
“Inopem me copia fecit,”
she said.

“
Inopem
 . . . abundance . . .” He jumped from his seat and began to translate.

“Abundance makes me want, makes me poor,” she said. “From your friend Ovid’s ‘Narcissus.’ A tree laden with fruit breaks her own boughs.”

“’Tis good,” he said.

“Desire creates hunger, which it cannot satiate,” she continued.

“Venus . . .”

“Venus to Adonis. She tells him that her kisses will not satisfy him but rather make him famished for more.” She handed his pages back to him. His gold earring caught her eye again, and she turned away.

“You are always beautiful, Kate,” he said. He was leaning against the virginals looking at her. “But today you are more beautiful than usual, your cheeks bone-white.”

“Perhaps my illness has made me thus,” she said, referring to Molly’s earlier lie. “I have not dusted my skin with any powder, I assure you. I have earned my pallor quite naturally.”

“My sweet Kate, methinks you are not much accustomed to compliments,” he said. “What next?”

“What next?” she repeated.

“What next does our Venus say to the lovely-limbed boy?”

“Enough of her chatter, I suppose,” Katharine said. She felt if she were another woman, Ursula perhaps, she would seize this moment, rise from her seat, place her hands on his shoulders, lean in and kiss him. But she did not move.

“So, if she does not speak more to him, what does she do?” he asked. His voice was tender, his words slow, as if he were talking to a child, but not a child, for there was something else in them, too, a wanton tone.

She still could not move.

“What does she do?” he repeated quietly.

“She snatches his hand,” she said.

“Like you just snatched the page from my hand?”

“She seizes his hand,” she said.

“His palm,” he said.

“’Tis moist.”

“A sweating palm, there is desire there, then, on his part, too. He is no innocent,” he said.

She waited. He gazed at her.

“Kate, you and I are from the same skin,” he said.

“We are?” she asked.

“We like being alone. I to write and you to read,” he continued. “They are solitary acts. My wife loathes being alone.”

Katharine stood and went to the fire. “But your wife is alone,” she said, turning to face him, “for you are not with her.”

“While I am not at home she keeps herself crowded at all times. While I am at home she crowds me. My wife does bridle me.”

“Has it always been thus?”

“I was a lad when we wed, and after I did once or twice or thrice or maybe more find myself in a dark wood or grassy mead, reeking of mead, with other maids. In truth, the mead and the maids became my sport for a time.”

“How long have you lived away from your children?”

“For much of five years.”

“You return oft?”

“Once or twice a year, a’ times thrice.”

“Is that enough?”

“Nay. ’Tis my sacrifice.”

“And theirs, too.”

“Yes.”

“How came you to leave?”

“My wife was carrying a child when we wed. After Susannah was born, I was . . . how can I relate it? . . . I was in a cave. I didn’t wish to live in Stratford. I didn’t wish to follow my father into his trades or businesses, within the law or outside of it, nor copy his many gained and lost titles in our town. Brew-taster, alderman, bailiff, debtor? I had no appetite for such roles. I had not gone on to one of our great universities as my mother had intended. I wondered all the while how I did get myself into this cave, for in truth I was to marry another wench when Anne did tell me she was with child. My other lass, when she learned of the Hathaway maid from Shottery, did toss every book and every piece of clothing I owned out the window onto the busy street. The folk in Stratford still laugh over a pint at the day my britches flew through the air.

“I was two years into my wedded
bliss
, when my Anne, nearing thirty, was with child again, and I took to carousing with my friends or anyone in the alehouse who would join me. I spent much time out, would bed a wench now and again. Was a lout and oft stayed away from the crowded house on Henley Street till the cocks crowed. I’d given up. One day, ’twas after noon, I awoke to find my wife standing in the doorway. Her girth was great with twins, though we didn’t know that yet, and she was gazing at me. ’Tis an image I will never forget. The lantern in her eyes was out. She’d given up also. My head ached. My lids stung. It came to
me whilst I lay there, the throb of mead pulsing in my head; I must leave. For that life, my dear Kate, would have been the grave for me.

“As a boy I was taken with schooling,” he continued. “Enamored with history, Latin, marched like a good soldier through much of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, but it was the poetry of Golding’s translation to which I lost my heart. I would steal myself away from the noisy house on Henley Street and lose myself in its pages. As with Pygmalion’s ivory image, once touched by Ovid I was forever changed.”

“Would take a passing hard heart not to soften under such a stroke,” Katharine agreed.

“I was pulled from schooling by my father’s plight and found myself at fourteen currying and cutting kid for fine gloves. Then at fifteen up hither in Lancashire at the De Hoghtons’ for a time. Then I found myself back in Stratford, tied to the town like a man on a scaffold, and I awoke one morn with three children and no Ovid . . . No Ovid! I could not live a life bereft of Ovid. I screwed my courage and left.”

“Hence to London?” asked Kate.

“To Durham first for a spell with a company of touring players. Then to London, where I had as many jobs in two years as my father had in ten. But the playhouses drew me and ’tis where I seemed to cling.”

“Make you London now your home?”

“My home for present is here. With you.”

Kate smiled.

He looked at the gloves he had given to her on the inlaid wood of the virginals. “Do you fancy these gloves?” he asked.

“They are beautiful.”

“And you will keep them?”

“Aye.”

“Good. They are my first gift to you.”

“Gramercy,” she said.

He came to where she stood. He seemed taller than usual, as though he towered over her, or maybe at this moment she felt unusually small. She looked up at him and he brought his face down to hers, but his lips did not touch her cheeks. He turned his head so that her lips softly grazed his cheek.

“Carry on with your day, Kate,” he said gently. “I will sit here by the fire and write. Fare thee well.”

She wanted to stay, but his head was already bent over his pages, and she didn’t want to disturb him. She left him there, a statue in the flickering firelight. As she walked down to supper, she worried that she should have acted differently—held him or turned her head to kiss him—that she had missed an opportunity by waiting for him.

14

will not have them here!” Matilda hollered.

Katharine was lost in thoughts of her recent encounter with Will, when Matilda’s voice thrust her from her thrilling reverie. The words were loud and shrill and silenced the usual clamor at the long table.

“I will not have them foul our home, make rank and gross our ancestors’ land. I will not have them lodge here!”

Matilda’s scolding sounded heavy and strained from a well deep with anguish. She had displaced the code of the great house by shouting about these matters at dinner and by shouting at her stepson. Sir Edward would not have acted thus, and that she was a woman worked doubly against her. Katharine was in awe at the strength of her fury.

Richard stammered a reply. “It . . . it . . . it . . .”

“How dare you put this house in danger! We have children living here, Richard, and some of them are yours.”

A servant tripped and an ewer went crashing to the ground; the ale sloshed across the floor.

“It will be so,” Richard finally said, and then stood and walked
toward the door. The servant had not finished wiping up the ale, and Richard did not notice the floor was still slick. He skidded and slipped and fell on his backside.

Katharine saw the servants smile behind their hands. They would never have done that when Sir Edward was at the head of the table. But it was not just the servants’ snickering that caught Katharine by surprise, it was the scene that followed: no one, not one of the servants, nor anyone sitting, not even Richard’s wife, Ursula, went to help him. Katharine did not hold much affection for Richard. He rarely said hello when he saw her, but after years she had accepted his coldness, thinking perchance the loss of his mother when his brother Harold was born had unhinged his humors and corrupted his nature. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him smile, and to think he had married the young giddy-headed Ursula before she in truth even knew what marriage meant.

Katharine watched Ursula glare at her sour-faced husband as he, with ruff aslant, got on his knees and then pushed himself off the floor, almost losing his balance and falling over again. When Richard finally managed to stand, Ursula glanced at Harold, who was staring at her. Katharine wasn’t sure if it was the way the corners of Ursula’s mouth twitched, or the way she cocked her head or put her finger to her lower lip, still looking at Harold while he gazed at her, but it was after the sequence of these little movements that Katharine, with Richard limping now from his tumble and rubbing his hip, wondered if something was afoot between Harold and Ursula.

She recalled the day in the garden when Ursula and Harold arrived with Mr. Smythson. Maybe Ursula’s flirtatious manner with Will had been a game to make Harold jealous. What would this entanglement do to pious Mary? Had Mary sensed this unnatural bond between her husband and her sister-in-law? But Mary had her own secrets. The week before, on a chair in the gallery, Katharine had found a Protestant prayer book wrapped in Mary’s shawl.