The Tutor (28 page)

Katharine entered the library at this point and shut the door behind her, for Matilda was on a rant, and she agreed with Grace that talk when loud and without counsel could seep into walls and floorboards.

“I was passing and thought it best to pull the door fast,” said Katharine. It was the first time she had seen Matilda since their unfortunate encounter on the stairwell after the news of Sir Edward’s death.

Grace greeted Katharine with warmth.

“Mother wants dear Father’s bones to lie here,” said Isabel.

Katharine nodded. “And they will in time. Yet his good soul will rest in heaven and for that we can thank the Lord.”

“Mother, it will bide us a year to build his monument,” said Grace. “And when his bones return we shall have a mass for his saintly relics.”

“His monument is long ago built and resides in the lot of the man who carved the stone. Methinks my Edward designed it when he was ne’er past twenty,” said Matilda.

“Our Ned is returning,” said Grace. “We can rejoice in God granting us this gift.”

“Godspeed dear Ned,” said Katharine.

“Why did I allow Edward to leave without me?” moaned Matilda. “Why was I not at his side when he breathed his last breath?”

At that moment they heard horses and men shouting. The women stopped speaking and listened, for there was no amity in the tones rising from the courtyard. Quib’s voice was adamant. “The master, Sir Edward, is dead,” hollered the steward. “Get ye hence and leave his poor family in peace.”

“What skirmish is this? The insult of another raid when I have so freshly lost a husband.” Matilda’s face was hard. “Do they not remember, they murdered our priest and the priest who came to give our murdered priest mass? Do they now seek blood from a stone? Let us open our doors to them. For once we have nothing to hide. The stain of their actions will be all theirs.” She rose, pulled her dark widow’s veil over her face, and with the bearing of a queen walked from the library; her daughters and Katharine followed her like ladies-in-waiting.

As Matilda descended the staircase, she ordered one of the gathering servants to open the great oak door. “Have you no shame?” she bellowed at the group of some twenty men. “This house is mourning our dearly departed master.” The steward hobbled toward her, blood dripping from his forehead.

The leader of the men pushed past Matilda and ordered the men to “search every corner, try every floorboard, drown every fire and peer up every chimney as if it were a maid’s skirt.” The men fanned out across the house while the family and their servants were herded into the great hall.

“We have no priest here!” shouted Matilda.

“Who said ’tis a priest we’re looking for?” said the leader, who identified himself as Hull, the new high sheriff.

Hull was unusually tall, with a large ruff and small head. He looked exactly like the priest who had given mass for Father Daulton and was murdered on his way back to the Molyneux estate. He had the same long fingers and long arms, the same pale skin with a hint of blue underneath, the same frail body yet large frame. Instead of a black chasuble, he was wearing a black doublet and a black cloak. The two, the murdered priest and the justice, were twins. Identical. How odd, Katharine thought, for twins to be on the opposite ends of the spectrum: one the hunter and the other his prey.

The last time Lufanwal was raided, the pursuivants took two days to search every nook and cranny, slighting furniture and any object, be it lantern or painting or looking glass, that stood in their way. The women and children were locked away in their chambers, the men rounded up in the courtyard, the Catholic servants segregated in different parts of the building and the non-Catholic servants made to stand watch. They did not find young Father Daulton, who was crouching in the ingenious hide in the wall above the well. The three hides at Lufanwal had concealed priests since the start of Elizabeth’s reign—one high up in the well house outside the kitchens, another within the unused fireplace in the North Hall, and the third behind the tapestry and wainscot in the library.

Perhaps the ravaging would have happened again, if Richard had not walked into the fray, just returned from a morning hunt, his hawking gauntlet still fast upon his right hand.

“Hull, what goes here?” Richard called, recognizing the high sheriff, possibly from his duties as a justice.

But as soon as Hull saw Richard, he started shouting commands, and several men surrounded Richard, pinning his arms behind him and binding him with ropes. Then Hull pulled out a parchment and read the official order, calling for Richard’s arrest for the treasonous charge of conspiring against the queen, describing a plot against her life that supposedly Richard along with the Duc de Malois had conceived.

Shock spread across Richard’s face. “I am no traitor! I made no plot against the queen! Unhand me! There has been a grave mistake. I served as justice at the assize. I am no traitor! I serve our queen as do you!”

“We have evidence!” Hull shouted, and commanded his men to continue the search, for if they brought in a bloody seminarian as well, he said, “That would be sugar on the custard!”

A maid must have alerted Ursula to the plight of her husband, for just as they were dragging him out of the great hall, she ran up to the door from the corridor and tried to grab Richard. She looked like a ghost, her blond hair flying in all directions, her body thin. The men swatted her away, but she kept at them, clawing with her fingernails.

“You brutes! He is no traitor! He does not have that much steel in him!”

Katharine was stunned by the inaction of the rest of the household. All stood by and watched the scene with Ursula unfold. Hull had gotten hold of Ursula by the time Katharine was at her side. He had one arm around Ursula’s neck and the other locking her arm behind her.

“Sir, she is not well. Prithee, let her go. I will take her,” said Katharine.

“She looks like one of the hags brought round here last month!” Hull laughed.

Ursula uttered a strange howl, the type of sound a hurt dog might make. Then she sank her teeth into Hull’s hand.

“Fie, you vile snake!” he screamed, and tossed her at Katharine, who picked Ursula up in her arms and started to carry her away, for she was afraid that Hull might attack them or, worse, might haul them off to jail.

“Foul wench, if thou art a witch and hath poisoned me, thou wilt be tied to a stake and burned!” he shouted. Ursula had bitten Hull so hard that his hand was bleeding. “Take the traitor out and hoist him up on a horse!”

“Nooooooooooo!” Ursula wailed.

Hull started to lunge at Ursula, when he was called by one of his men. They had brought Will in. He was not bound and they were not holding
him, but he was flanked by three men. His doublet had been ripped open—no doubt they’d searched for the sacred Agnus Deis around his neck.

“We found a man who says he’s a tutor but methinks he’s a priest,” shouted one of the men, whose cheeks were so ruddy, his eyes so bloodshot and his walk so wobbly that it would take a blind man not to notice he had been soaking up sack in the hours before the raid.

“Where hid the fiend?” barked Hull.

“Wasn’t hid exact, he was in a room near the stone wall o’er there in the back. He was writing something. Says he’s a player, like the boys who come to town last summer. If he’s a player—’tis a priest playing a schoolmaster!”

“Did you find a Latin Bible or papal bull among his pages?” asked Hull. Possession of a papal bull was also punishable by death.

“Not exact,” said the man. “He didna have no bull in his chamber. Nor any other animals neither.”

“Papal bull, fool! ’Tis a document with a seal from the Pope,” scoffed Hull.

“Still wouldna know if I saw one, ’cause I don’t read words. Here, we seized these papers right outta his hand—the ink no’ ev’n dry.” He pushed the pages at Hull. “And he’s quiet like a priest. And has a certain priestly dignity. I can smell a priest, I can. And look at his hands, pale as the moon . . . with long fingers, like priest hands, and his room was full of paper with words written in every which direction, priestly words, methinks, prayers for secret masses—”

“Enough, Pearson! Enough. Bring me a candle, and the rest of ye keep your pace. ’Tis yet another treasonous brother we come here for.”

Mary had entered the great hall, clasping what Katharine assumed was a Protestant prayer book. Mary had changed in the past year, emerged hard and distinct, like a statue from a block of marble. “My lord is not here,” she said.

“And where might he be, my lady?” said Hull.

“I have no idea. He left on horse this morning and did not say where he was off to,” Mary said, and promptly held
The Book of Common Prayer
aloft so Hull could see the cover. She opened the book and started to read.

Ursula had gone still in Katharine’s arms. Her eyes were open, but she had quit the moment. Katharine held her, yet she could feel in Ursula’s body that she was elsewhere; there was no weight to her, as if magic had made her feather, not flesh and bone.

Will stood in front of Hull and waited. Katharine noticed where Will’s doublet was torn his skin was smooth—not the bristly lawn of her long-dead husband. He held his tongue, did not even utter a syllable, while a servant brought a candle and Hull looked at his pages. As Will stared soberly at Hull, the rest of his features, too, betrayed nothing.

Hull started to read out loud: “Sometime she shakes her head, and then his hand, now gazeth she on him, now on the ground. Sometime her arms infold him like a band: she would, he will not in her arms be bound. And when from thence he struggles to be gone, she locks her lily fingers one in one. ‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer: feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale; graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie . . .’”

Katharine thought Hull would stop reading—for Will was at his most lecherous yet. Perchance the high sheriff did not understand Will’s direction. Whatever Hull thought, he continued to read aloud: “‘Within this limit is relief enough, sweet bottom grass and high delightful plain, round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough, to shelter thee from tempest and from rain: then be my deer, since I am such a park, no dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark . . .’”

The man standing next to Pearson had been biting a grin, and with this last stanza he could contain himself no longer and started to giggle.
Pearson, too, the sack he’d drunk making him weak, began snorting and guffawing.

“This is no papist mass!” screamed Hull as he flung the pages into the air.

Pearson and his fellow pursuivant quickly dropped their smiles and pressed their lips.

“This . . . this . . . these . . . these . . .” Hull stuttered, “are but carnal rhymes with harlot words . . . unfit for ladies or for gentlemen! You, sirrah,” he said, pointing his bitten and bloodied hand at Will, “lack any sort of decency . . . are lewd-quilled and should not be the teacher of children! This lout is no priest, Pearson! He is a poet!” Hull spat out, then marched out the door to the courtyard, where Richard was now rigged atop a horse.

From his ungainly perch, Richard could be heard shouting, “I am no traitor!”

“Tie a rag about his mouth,” ordered Hull, and he stalked off to find the men he had sent to the barns.

Hull and his marauding men looked for priest holes in all the wrong places, for the hides and the secret chapel were so expertly hidden in the main house that the men—as in the last raid—passed right over them. They had sniffed and tapped and rattled and thumped, but in the end they galloped off, with only poor Richard as their prize.

19

fter the sound of the hooves receded, the servants and the family cleaned up what had been shattered or destroyed. The charges against Richard, the family believed, were utterly false, and they needed to find a way to prove this and to secure his release from jail before he was carried off to London, for once he was there any true contact would cease and the chance for any legal maneuvering would diminish. Mary had known her husband was off to Lancaster but had not wanted to tell the high sheriff. Harold was still not back the next day. The family worried the men had snared him along the road while he was returning home.