The Tutor (41 page)

—

He sat erect,
a statue. It was the next morning. They were again in his lodging—by now the whole house was assuredly full of foul and vulgar rumor. She sat on the stool across from him. Without changing from her smock before she left her chamber, she’d pulled on her worn velvet dressing gown, then her cloak and hood, and now in his lodging she kept her cloak wrapped tightly around her. Her hair was not up but braided by her own hand in a queue down her back like a servant girl’s.

He slapped the pages on her lap. “Read,” he commanded. “’Tis Adonis first.” His profile was sharp, his jaw set and his look of such blackness that it nearly threw Katharine from her seat. She had never seen him thus.

She took the paper and leaned into the light and read. Adonis’s lines stung her eyes: “‘Remove your siege from my unyielding heart, / To love’s alarms it will not ope the gate.’” While Venus’s lament broke her heart: “‘What, canst thou talk?’ quoth she, ‘hast thou a tongue? / O would thou hadst not, or I had no hearing!’”

“Is this the muck of players, Kate, of changing fine flaunts for a role?” Will nearly shouted as he recited:

“Say that the sense of feeling were bereft me,

And that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch,

And nothing but the very smell were left me,

Yet would my love to thee be still as much;

For from the stillitory of thy face excelling

Comes breath perfum’d, that breedeth love by smelling—”

“I—” she interrupted, but he continued:

“But oh what banquet were thou to the taste,

Being nurse and feeder of the other four!

Would they not wish the feast might ever last,

And bid suspicion double-lock the door,

Lest jealousy, that sour unwelcome guest,

Should by his stealing in disturb the feast?”

“I must hail from a shallow place, then!” He fairly spat the words at her. “And not from a well far deeper.”

There was silence. She had never seen him so full of rancor, yet she felt oddly satisfied that she was able to move him thus—at least that, she thought, at least if not love, then anger.

“The words you wrote were heartless, beneath you,” he said.

“Everything about this is beneath me,” she said.

As quickly as he flashed his fury, he quelled it: with haste the merchant usurped the poet. “Let us forget this moment,” he negotiated. “Let us not speak of these things. Let us continue on as we have.”

This could have been the end—her final resolve. Katharine sat in his small room, surrounded by his black quills, his order, his paper stacked neatly like hay after the harvest. This could have been the end, but she nodded and leaned again into the light to read the rest of the stanzas he had thrust at her.

“There seems an even field where mountains and ravines should be,” she offered. “There is little action here between Venus and Adonis. We’ve heard enough of idle chatter. Cannot Venus fall in a faint?”

“What makes her swoon?” he asked. He was sitting on his cot. His doublet and shirt were open. The skin of his chest that showed was smooth and without hair. “What makes her faint?” he demanded, there was nothing gentle in his tone.

“His look,” Katharine said, shifting her eyes to his face.

“How so?”

“His look is so full of anger, so racked with fury, so verging on hate, that when she sees that, before he even speaks, she is struck down.”

“And when she falls, Adonis comes to her,” he said.

“Yes, he might. The silly boy believes she’s dead,” Katharine said, wishing she could feign a swoon.

“He claps her pale cheek,” Will added.

“Till clapping makes it red,” she continued. “For on the grass she lies as if she were slain.”

Will darted to his table, dipped his quill, wrote, then spoke: “Till his breath breathest life in her again.”

“To mend the hurt that his unkindess marred,” Katharine offered. “He kisses her, and she does not rise, so he kisses her again. She opens her eyes.”

Will was staring at Katharine. “Her two blue windows,” he said.

He lingered in his look at her. She countered him, her eyes on his, unwavering. Perhaps all that had gone on was just stone upon stone—what they were building—and she would, after all, make a life with him and go to London as he had promised.

He dipped his quill and bent his head. “The night of sorrow now is turn’d to day,” he said. “His kiss has roused her.” He tapped the point of his quill on the paper, making a trail of little black dots. “And as the bright sun glorifies the sky, / So is her face illumin’d with her eye. / Whose beams upon his hairless face are fix’d . . .” He scratched the words across the page. “She opens her eyes, beholds him leaning over her,” Will said. “Her eyes are caught in his eyes, and his in hers. She feels his hot breath upon her face.”

“Her dream made real,” said Katharine. The untied ribbons of his shirt caught her eye.

He stood.

She stood.

She kept thinking, This is it, now he will run his hands down my face and kiss me tenderly; after all this time of waiting, now comes the eternity of his mouth on mine. Or he will, in a passion, tear the clothes from my body and crush me with his kisses. But there was no such blessing, and no such kissing. He did not move from his spot. He did not come to her, so she went to him. Her cloak still on, she took the quill from his fingers, then put her hands, not on his shoulders, but on his waist. She felt her way under his shirt to his skin and pulled him to her, but he did not yield. She put her mouth on his. The Will who had kissed her after pulling the pins from her hair was gone. This Will was not insistent with his tongue, nor was he the hunter, indeed he didn’t seem keen on her advances, and turned his face away, but she pressed on.

She took her hands from his waist and moved his ruby-colored mouth back to hers. Lips on lips. She was not soft; she was not gentle. She had imagined myriad stories of this moment, but what was actually happening matched none of them. She was driven to this harshness because anger had seeped in, appalling and uninvited, but there it was nonetheless. She would’ve given herself to him so many times in the last weeks, but now she had to take him. And that was how it played. She held his wrists to the wall, and she kissed and kissed him, as if her thirst could not be quenched. He had said a few weeks back, “I, too, have been pill’d,” and now she was his pillager. She felt his smooth chest with her hands. She kept her mouth on his.

He finally gave in, and they moved to his cot. But after all these months of his maneuvering her with his eyes, now he would not look her in the eye. She undid his breeches and, without taking off her cloak, she pulled up her smock and pinned his hands above his head as she climbed on him. He stirred hard against her. At least, she thought as she moved on top of him and felt him inside of her, at least he is not resisting, yet after all that had occurred, after all the teasing, the tenderness,
the flattery, the focus, after all the words, he did bed her but he did not welcome her.

She wanted him to hold her after it was done. She wanted him to kiss her, but he rose and so she did the same. He pulled a doublet on and buttoned it, sat down at his table and picked up his quill. She tried to convince herself that everything was fine, that what had happened was progress, that she’d written a cruel letter out of desperation and he’d gotten angry, but this was now a part of their history and finally they had given themselves to each other, and his lack of attention during their act of love was due to leftover fury from the letter she’d written or maybe because she’d been too aggressive with him. But didn’t he want her to be Venus, the huntress? Katharine bent over Will at the table and carefully kissed him on the mouth. She would mend the final hurt of her unkindness—replace any drops of vinegar with honey.

“Write well,” she said from the door.

He nodded but did not look at
her.

26

hat night, Molly arrived with more pages from Will. He had continued from the moment when Venus awakened to find herself freshly kissed by Adonis. “‘O where am I?’ quoth she, ‘in earth or heaven . . .’” Then Venus beseeched and demanded that Adonis keep kissing her. When Adonis replied, his tone was softer now, his tongue not laced with scorn. He addressed Venus as “fair queen,” and begged her to measure his “strangeness” with his youth. “‘Before I know myself, seek not to know me,’” he said.

Before I know myself, seek not to know me.
Was this a message from Will? Katharine wondered. Was Will, though six and twenty, feeling yet half grown and hence not ready for her? Perhaps she had utterly misjudged him, thought him promiscuous when he was principled, deemed him philandering when he was pure. Katharine moved from her bed to the table, and in her haste to dip her quill into the inkhorn, she knocked over a mug of ale Molly had brought her. She was relieved the ale did not drench Will’s page. Without waiting to find a cloth, she snatched her beloved silk shawl from the back of her chair and mopped the table with
it. Then she circled his lines of verse and wrote:
Think of an image here of youth, of unripe years. A green plum sticks to its branch and when plucked early ’tis sour, while a ripe plum falls and is sweet with juice.
She barely recognized her own handwriting. There was something wild about the shape of her letters. She hoped he could read her writing, for she barely could.

Will had made Adonis, as dusk descended, a man of negotiations. “‘Now let me say good night, and so say you; / If you will say so, you shall have a kiss.’” After Venus accepted the terms of Adonis’s contract, like Ovid’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, “Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace; / Incorporate then they seem, face grows to face.” Will’s next lines seemed a winged horse: with words like “breathless,” “sweet coral mouth,” and “Their lips together glued, fall to earth . . .”
There was in his pace a panting of word and rhyme, meter and foot. A stanza with “And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth. / Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey . . .” ended when Venus indeed became a vulture. He’d used the image that weeks ago Katharine had thwarted; he then described that ravaging:

And having felt the sweetness of the spoil,

With blindfold fury she begins to forage;

Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil,

And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,

Planting oblivion, beating reason back,

Forgetting shame’s pure blush and honor’s wrack.

Though Will had turned Venus into a monster these last stanzas, Katharine could not read his words fast enough. “Hot, faint and weary with her hard embracing” charged on to “He now obeys, and now no more resisteth, / While she takes all she can, not all she listeth.” Next Will shot his arrow directly at Ovid’s Pygmalion: “What wax so frozen
but dissolves with temp’ring, / And yields at last to very light impression?” While she continued reading, she held the paper with one hand and pulled every pin out of her hair with the other. Then ran her fingers through her thick locks. His poem, these words coursing across the page, seemed to her a living, breathing thing that filled her head and penetrated her heart. “Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast,” Will wrote, “Yet love breaks through, and pricks them all at last.”

Then, “For pity now she can no more detain him . . .”

She had to go to him.

Will’s chamber was bitter, the fire almost dead, and the sun long gone when he let Katharine in. She found it hard to believe that it was just that morning when she had been with him on his cot. He wore a green suede jerkin over a white blouse, hardly enough cover for the dank air. She wore a cloak over her skirts and bodice: her hair was a wild waterfall of tresses. She placed his pages on the table and remained standing. He looked at her in silence.