The Tutor (27 page)

our eyes, dear Kate, are far away,” said Joan. “But not from grief.” Joan was a keen watcher of moods, having grown up with a mother whose humors changed by the hour.

A fresh square of linen lay on Katharine’s lap, but the cloth remained without the first stitch: she was staring at a bare branch outside the window. Ever since meeting with Will the day before, she was ashamed she felt so light, so airy, when the whole great house was deep in mourning for the beloved head of the household.

“There are rumors, dear Kate,” Isabel added.

“Rumors?” Katharine turned her gaze to the girls.

“You must know,” continued Isabel. “You meet a fair fellow almost daily, whose tales precede him. Tongues wag in this warren. Walls have eyes, as do windows.”

“Tales?” Katharine repeated.
The tale of us.
She wanted to remember forever how welcome it felt when he held her in his arms. If this was how it felt when they were fully clothed, well—she sighed—how wonderful skin on skin would feel.

“He’s a lewd lad, they say,” said Isabel.

“‘The fictions of idle tongues,’” Katharine quoted Ovid. “Master Shakespeare is married! Her name is Anne.”

“He’s a lewd lad that one, all the same,” countered Isabel.

“The blush of damask is upon your cheeks,” said Joan.

“You can be sure our tongues are still,” said Isabel. “But come, give us a little sugar, for our day is most bitter.”

“I know not what to say, nor how to say it,” said Katharine.

“Kate, you always know what to say and how to say it,” said Isabel. “He hath struck you dumb. What do you do with him in that chilly old chapel?”

“’Tis now a schoolhouse,” corrected Katharine.

“What do you teach the tutor, then?” said Isabel. “Or what does he teach you?”

“What love scenes do you play, for they say he’s been in London, a player at the new playhouses,” said Joan.

“The players upon those stages are all men, so his love scenes would have to be with boys,” said Katharine. She wished she felt like laughing, but the topic of Will seemed to offer neither comedy nor satire.

“You
are
bereft of speech,” said Isabel. “Come, dear Kate, we are only trying to make mirth on this dismal day, to speak of something other than our loss. I have been hoping you would use the wondrous wit God hath bestowed upon you to cheer our tearful countenance.”

“I am in love,” Katharine said, wondering how the words sprang from her lips before she could trap them. Where was her dignity?

“Oh, Kate,” the two girls chimed in unison. They left their perches and, like bright-eyed sparrows, gathered round her.

“’Tis serious,” chirped Isabel.

“’Tis wondrous,” sang Joan.

“He is a player, Kate,” said Isabel. “A poet perchance. A tutor when necessary. ’Tis not the right match. He is married. He has, they say,
children, several. His father is a glover. He is years your junior. And this ‘Will,’ as you call him, is too . . . too glossy, for he is used to wooing spectators with his words and wit. He wooed my dear father before he left. This man you say you love has never been to university and my father hired him! Never, in the history of this house, has such an unqualified, unschooled man taught the children. He is no match for you, dear Kate. I would not trust my weight in what this Master Shakespeare says. Has he spoken of his love?”

“You sound as though you are my sister, Isabel, my elder sister, and in truth you are not yet twenty,” replied Katharine. “I hold no interest in matches.”

“You have never held any interest in matches, Kate! They used to flock around you and you hardly noted them. You dismissed them!”

“I did nothing of the sort.”

“’Tis what Father said.”

Katharine recalled the years after her husband died, when she was a young widow with no children and no dowry. “Perhaps I did dismiss them,” she said. “None of them had true intelligence. Some had wealth. Some had age. Some had property. But none had brilliance.”

“So this Will, this Shakespeare, has that?”

“He is the most brilliant man. He has pieced together a good education in an independent way. He has taught himself much . . .” Katharine paused and then tried a new tack. “There are certain human beings who are born with minds so quick and so curious they create kingdoms in whatever sphere they tread. The ancients, the philosophers, the poets we now read—”

“He does not seem on the road to kingdom come, I daresay,” Isabel interrupted. “’Tis said the playhouses in London are worse than the bear-baiting pits! Where are his riches, Kate? Where is his gold? Where is his property? Where are his books, his plays, his poetry? He is six and twenty, Kate. He has a wife, for whom, from what the tongues say, he
cares little; he has children he has abandoned. And you believe, my dear Kate, that he loves you? He may love himself, but you? You? Who in truth deserves so much. Does he love you, Kate? Hath he said so?”

Isabel was no serpent, but her words had such strength that Katharine, old enough to be her mother, was close to tears. Perhaps it was Isabel’s father’s death that moved the girl to such force.

Isabel did not stop. “Perchance the brilliance you see is
on
him, not
in
him,” she continued. “Perchance, like a shilling, it is his shininess that attracts. He does know how to put on the polish. He was most buffed up after his performance on Saint Crispin’s Day. You had left the dance floor when he applied himself to Lord and Lady Strange. To watch your Will court them, well, one would think he believed Ferdinando and Alice were alchemists who could change his silver to gold! I love you, Kate. And so does Joan, and we do not want to see you pained. Perhaps you are still blind to men who love you or could love you. You are not out of wooing range yet. The queen still woos.”

“The queen,” said Katharine, “is the queen! She truly has the kingdom from which to woo. Do I? I think not! You two girls will marry with wagons of gold—that is why our dear Edward fled! To save all these riches, these beautiful hills, forests of timber, bountiful fields, mineral mines, for all of you! But I have few true connections and no true claim. When we hear dear Edward’s will, I will be but a pebble at the most, a grain of sand at the least, while the rest of you will be boulders!”

Katharine had stood during her speech and was horrified to find she had shouted the last lines. She had never wanted to blurt such things to these sweet young women. Why had she routinely dismissed her opportunities? She had fed on words and ideas and enjoyed her bookish company with Edward, and, with no children and no gold of her own, she was minutes away, seconds perhaps, from the poor scorned hags dragged through the cold currents or from those poor wretches dragged into cages and burned at the stake.

And, now, for the crown: she had fallen in love with someone whose goal was to hawk verses the way his father had hawked gloves.

“I am so sorry,” Katharine said.

Isabel and Joan stared at her, their eyes soft with concern. Katharine had never seen such a display of pity directed toward her. She had brought this illness upon herself.

“Forget what I have said, I beg of you. I am overcome with grief for Edward’s passing, and have lost counsel with myself. Forgive me, my dears.” She placed a hand on each of their cheeks and held them for a moment, then snatched her bare linen and hurried out the door.

Katharine was out of breath by the time she reached her chamber. Young Isabel, dear, gentle, loving Isabel, Katharine reasoned, did not know the true nature of her friendship with Will. She and Will were forging a special bond without the customary boundaries or rules.

Molly handed a sheaf of folded papers tied with a blue silk cord to Katharine. “Suppose everyone does want you to read their verse now, mistress,” Molly said.

It was not Will’s paper, nor his handwriting.

“Mr. Smythson brought it for you.”

“Mr. Smythson was here? Did he ask to see me?”

“No, on account of the house being in mourning for Sir Edward, but he bade me hand these to you and said he hoped you enjoyed them and he wished you well.”

“Marry, Molly, does everyone think they’re a poet?”

“Suppose they do,” Molly said, brushing Katharine’s hair.

“Are you a poet, Molly? Do you have a stack of rhymes ready for me to read?”

“I cannot write ev’n two score words yet. Methinks I might learn a few more before I ’tempt a thing like that!”

Katharine laughed and placed the packet of papers, unopened, on her table. “And Ursula? What news?”

“The doctor leeched her and gave her a draught and said she must rest, for she’d worked her nerves to a boil.”

“That she had.”

—

The following afternoon,
the library door burst open just as Katharine was to enter. Richard was the first out the door, followed by Mary and Harold, arm in arm. Katharine could not recall them ever touching; their linked arms were a strange sight. The last time she had seen Harold was in the hidden chapel when he was dragging the pleading Ursula, whose frail arms were hugging his legs. Mary did not have a full smirk on her face, but her self-satisfied armor was cause for alarm. Katharine had noticed a newfound power in her gait and wondered what had energized her thus.

Sir Hugh, Grace’s husband, next exited the library.

“How fares my dear Katharine?” said Hugh, trying to bow.

“I’ve been better, my dear Hugh,” she said. “We all have.”

Katharine looked past Hugh into the library, where Matilda sat flanked by her daughters, Grace and Isabel. Ursula was absent. Ned was the courier for Edward’s last wishes, so the family group could not have been listening to the will—and Katharine assumed she would be invited to that gathering—but Matilda, sitting in Edward’s old chair by the fire, was visibly distressed. Her two daughters were trying to soothe her by patting her back, petting her arm and cooing at her.

“His bones should be here, in this earth, in his earth,” Matilda cried.

“But Mother dear, the body must stay in the ground for a long while yet,” said Grace. “Then they will come.”

“We must wait at least a year, Mama, until the bones can be moved,” added Isabel.

“Will there ever be an end to this bloodshed and chaos?” Matilda wailed. “The monasteries around us are slighted and in ruins. The bones
of men cut down in their prime are scattered across the country. To serve what? The evil whims of Her Majesty and her greedy ministers?”

“Mother, soften your voice,” cautioned Grace.

“I have been mute too long. Eight years ago I saw my husband dragged from his home as if a criminal and imprisoned for a year. I have seen our turf appropriated and divided among them. They are rife with avarice. They are as conquerors with battle spoils and do with our manors, our halls and our farms what Elizabeth’s father did with the friaries and abbeys. My own dowry, Lefford Hall with its thousand acres, was thus stolen from me two years past, when it was supposed to go to Isabel for her dowry. The Lord Chamberlain has increased his domain tenfold by robbing good and noble Catholics of their lands. Why this blight? Why this constant punishment? Why are we the ones who are made to suffer? If Edward had been in his house, if I had been able to care for him, to wife my husband, then he would not have perished. He forbade me to go with him, felt his banishment was but a short breath, but I should have gone after him, to be with him. It was my duty. Forsooth, I have lost all.”

Katharine had not heard Matilda’s voice so full of vigor since Edward had departed. Perhaps in her grief, in her loss, she had found strength.

“’Tis true, dear Mother, that much has been taken and much has been lost in fines to the Crown for our beliefs, but we have not lost each other,” soothed Grace. “Think of many of our best families in Lancashire, their fathers jailed and tortured for much longer than a year, their sons gone off to the Continent, only to return newly ordained in our faith, their fate in God’s hands.”

“In truth, too many are hunted down and executed like murderers,” added Isabel.

“Worse than murderers,” said Matilda. “For the minute they step again upon the soil of their birth, the minute their ships let them down upon the sand, they are, in Elizabeth’s eyes, traitors. And we have borne
sad witness to her gruesome executions. Oh, poor Cuthbert Mayne, poor Edmund Campion, poor Robert Southwell. So many, many lads, their skin still soft, so true and so bright and so brave that risk not their souls but their blood . . .”

“We have lost no sons,” said Grace.

“We have lost a father, who was a son once,” said Matilda.

“Father died joyful, I am sure of it,” said Isabel. “Joyful in being able to retain, till the very end, a conscience void of offense.”

“Father died an upright, loyal English gentleman who at the end had liberty to worship God according to the dictates his conscience granted him. He was ready at all times to serve his country faithfully and honestly,” added Grace.

“The crack in this land rends all honesty asunder, for now to be a Catholic means a man is no longer a natural Englishman,” said Matilda. “The air I breathe reeks and suffocates and poisons.”