The Tutor (42 page)

“Your verse,” she said.

“My verse?” He cocked his head to one side and raised an eyebrow.

“Your verse,” she began again. She did not know how to say it. She had already said she was in love with him, and she had given her body to him, or rather taken his, in love, but this feeling was something more, or in addition, perhaps, to love. His words were now a bounty, a harvest, a surfeit of richness and majesty.

He was but inches from her. He did not kiss her. His lips never touched hers. He pulled her to him and reached down her bodice and grabbed her breast—there was no softness to his touch. He raked his nails across her skin; the sting shocked her. Then he pushed her onto the bed, his action so abrupt, so brusque, so unexpected that she let out a cry. Within seconds he was on top of her and had yanked up her skirts and her petticoats. He was not smiling. He pinned one of her arms to the bed. The motion of him above her and the way he pinched her wrist made her fear
a bone would break. This was perhaps retaliation for this morning. Will worked at it and worked at it. Each thrust burned; each thrust felt like a brand. She wanted it to end. But he rode on without heed to her discomfort, without heed to her. At the height of his incursion, he shouted, “I will win!” through gritted teeth, and then rolled off.

Mayhap the “I will win” applied to her, though she doubted it, for he seemed not to notice her. It was some strange battle he was fighting in his head. In this vainglorious instant, of some undetermined triumph, she could have been anyone or anything.

A man of abundant words, he said nothing after he rolled away. He left her on his cot. He did not look at her. He strode out the door and left her.

She picked herself up, pulled down her skirts, passed the table strewn with brimming pages, and when she walked outside, he was nowhere in sight.

—

Though the chair
Katharine sat on was covered in gold velvet, she felt uncomfortable and sore. “I’ll meet you outside,” she said to the girls.

The last time Katharine had been in the hat shop, all had seemed so simple with Will then, so hopeful. Today, while Isabel was fitted for a pearl headpiece, Katharine was barely aware of the two girls chatting about the betrothal and the banquet. In the many scenes Katharine had concocted in her head of bedding Will, none matched what actually happened. He could have taken her at any moment in the preceding weeks. He knew that. Why had he waited, forced her to it? Perhaps the jousting with language finally failed them and the cot had become their tilt field.

After both encounters, Will had said nothing. The first time he seemed indifferent, the second time angry. Katharine recalled his sonnet, which conveyed the fury of the speaker after the physical union.
Maybe, she thought, Will embodied the shame he gave Adonis. She had been digging to find the real Will, and now perhaps she had.

Katharine stood in front of the shop. The month of March just starting, the air still felt raw. A tall young man caught her eye. She watched him for a moment, then decided to cross the street to greet him. John Smythson bowed.

“You’ve been shopping, I see,” she said.

He held up his package. “Aye.” He grinned. “A gift for my father.”

“Lovely. What did you buy him?”

John opened the leather carton and pulled out a glass case with a large blue butterfly pinned inside.

“How extraordinary,” Katharine said.

She looked from the opalescent wings to John’s beaming face.

“He fancies things like this,” said John. “Odd things. They fill his rooms.”

“What sort of things?”

“Oh, shards of pottery from the Greeks and the Romans—a handle, the neck of a jug, part of a bowl. And old glass. Shells. Oh, my, the shells he picks up at our cottage on the shore. He arranges them and won’t let the maid touch them. He dusts them off himself. He found a few feathers last week, wild turkey, I think, maybe pheasant, where they were molting. He was so pleased and showed me how each feather had a different design but were all from one bird.”

“Will he make them into quills, then?”

“No. He’ll stick them in a vase like flowers. Then he’ll pull them out when he’s designing a mantelpiece or some such, to follow the lines and the dots. He says ’tis uncanny how full of patterns nature is. I guess he’s right.” John carefully put the blue butterfly back in its leather box.

“Your father will love your gift, I’m sure,” she said. For some reason her throat tightened.

“I think he will,” said John. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it when I saw it. Someone brought butterflies back on a ship from somewhere and put them under glass. There’s a whole lot of them at that stall over there,” he said, pointing. “I should get on with my business. Father sent me here with a list of items and I’ve gotten distracted.”

“That’s what happens on market day,” said Katharine. “How is Mr. Smythson?” She didn’t want John to go. He was as affable as his father, and she wanted to bask in his warmth for a minute longer.

“Oh, he’s fine. He’s up to his ears in work. We are.”

They were silent for a moment, then she said, “Well, you best be off, then. Please send him my regards.” She wondered if the father had shared his intentions about her with his son.

“I will,” John said, bowing. “Farewell.”

“Fare thee well, John,” she said, and watched him until he disappeared into a maze of stalls.

—

The great hall
was alive with candles. Dishes savory and steaming framed the tables. Matilda had invited other known Catholics from local estates, for the Barlows were as tied to the old religion as the De L’Isles. Katharine recognized some faces and not others. She snatched a goblet of wine and drank it without breathing. She welcomed the distraction of Matilda’s small banquet for Isabel and Nicholas Barlow. She’d had Molly pile her hair high on her head. She’d dressed in her golden gown—too large now—and a blue velvet doublet borrowed from Isabel.

Isabel came to her. She was wearing a rose silk gown with a bodice of silver weave. A headpiece of gray pearls crowned her head.

“How beautiful you are, my dear,” Katharine said. “Your cheeks hold the same blush as your dress.”

“Here he is,” said Isabel.

Katharine remembered Nicholas Barlow’s intelligent eyes from when
they had been introduced on Saint Crispin’s Day and then at the Stanleys’ revels, but she had been in such a state she hardly recalled more about him. The young man walking toward them now was no taller than Isabel, but the fit of his garments showed a good shape in leg and waist.

“I have heard much of you from your fair cousin,” young Barlow said, bowing and taking Katharine’s hand. “I am never one to bother with details, and have a terrible memory, cannot recall the names of any of my horses except for the one I’m riding at the moment, which is . . . I can’t remember, but I have retained some important information pertaining to the agreement our esteemed parents have drawn up. There is a provision therein that specifically states Isabel have unlimited access to you,” he said, smiling.

“How fortunate,” Katharine said with a laugh, “that I am considered a part of dear Isabel’s dowry.”

“At the very least there is mirth in him, and that is good,” whispered Katharine to Isabel. “My gut says there is goodness in him.”

“You are most welcome whenever and always at Bridgeton Manor, Miss De L’Isle.”

“A thousand thanks, good sir. Prithee, call me Katharine, for we are to be cousins now.”

“And call me Nicholas,” he said, bowing deeply. “Dear Isabel,” he continued, “Lord Barlow and I have walked the grounds of Bridgeton Manor, and he is quite keen on making changes. No one has lived there for a long time, and Father is thrilled we are to have it. We had that man Smythson up to look at what he could do. He seems to have a hand in every house north of London and south of Edinburgh.”

“We know him. He’s been here!” Isabel exclaimed, looking at Katharine.

“He had but an hour to spend before he was off to his wedding, but in that short time he came up with impressive ideas.”

“His wedding?” asked Isabel, her eyes wide.

Katharine’s blood ran cold. “Mr. Smythson is to be married?” she asked.

Young Barlow nodded. “In London.”

Katharine raised her eyes from Isabel to see Will entering the great room. He was standing talking to folk she did not recognize. There he was: his black doublet snugly fit, white collar pointed and starched, beard shaped and trim. Who had invited him? She had not seen him since their last encounter, nor had he sent her any words.

She waited for him to come to her; she would make the perfunctory introduction to Isabel’s betrothed. She waited for Will, but he never came. In fact, Will acted as though she weren’t even there. She charged out of the great hall and ran up to her chamber.

If Will had wanted a different type of bond with her, Katharine thought, pacing the floor, if he wanted love, he would have aimed his dart and landed his mark—the way he was aiming at everything else he wanted: sonnets, a long poem, a patron, a part with Lord Strange’s Men, a coat of arms, the largest house in Stratford.

And what of the Smythson news? He, it now seemed, dissembled as easily as Will. A mere trifle of time after he’d told Katharine he was in love with her, he’d gone off and wed. He had moved on. A nunnery was heaven compared to this prison.

As the days passed, Katharine began to doubt God. Her life thus far had been built on faith, but she could not find that faith now. Even deep down there was nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be God, she thought, please forgive me. She had such a deep longing for God, but she could not find Him. She had no faith left, no love, no zeal. She sought refuge in the ancients, made Molly bring her books from Edward’s library. She reread Ovid’s
Epistulae Heroidum
as if it were the gospel, immersing herself in all the mistreated, neglected and abandoned heroines from Greek and Roman mythology: Penelope, Phyllis, Briseis, Phaedra,
Oenone, Hypsipyle, Dido, Hermione, Deianira, Ariadne, Canace, Medea, Laodamia and Hypermestra.

—

“You should give
him up for Lent, mistress,” Molly said. She set bread, cheese and ale on the table and with a click of her tongue she handed Katharine several sheets of folded paper.

Katharine opened the papers and read: “‘The boar,’ quoth she: whereat a sudden pale . . .” Katharine felt as if Will had struck her. The boar—it was only a matter of stanzas until Adonis would leave to hunt the boar with his friends.

Venus, with her arms around Adonis’s neck, “He on her belly falls, she on her back.”

Now is she in the very lists of love,

Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.

All is imaginary she doth prove;

He will not manage her, although he mount her:

Katharine drank the ale in one gulp as she read on. “The warm effects which she in him finds missing / She seeks to kindle with continual kissing.” He seemed to have plucked his words from the night she’d shared his cot.

But all in vain; good queen, it will not be.

She hath assay’d as much as may be prov’d:

Her pleading hath deserv’d a greater fee:

She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d . . .

She jumped to her feet and threw the pages into the blaze. He’d done it again! He had mined her ore! Her jaw was set. Her eyes wide.
“She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d!”
she shouted. How could he do this? What had she done but love him and help with his verse?

She stormed out of her chamber.
“She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d,”
she chanted as she swept down stairs and through doorways.
But all in vain,
he wrote.
But all in vain
 . . . Katharine wanted to kiss him and to crush him all at the same time. These past months, now seeming a whole life, could not, must not, would not be in vain, for if they were, what was there?

She pulled the hood over her head and flew through the house and out the door. She was a witch, for it was not her natural limbs that propelled her thus, but a sick wrath that boiled in her veins. She marched to Will’s door, envisioning him, quill in hand, poised mid-thought, mid-rhyme perchance. At first she did not knock. She tried to pull the door open, but it was latched from the inside.

Later, she tried to recall if he had begun to open the door before she banged her fist on it, or if her banging had roused him and made him open it. She played the scene over and over again in her head. The door opening, but only a sliver.

“Who goes there?” he asked.

“’Tis Kate.”

She waited, expecting him to open the door farther, expecting him to let her in.

“How now,” he said.

How now.

How now
was all he said, but he did not invite her in, nor did he open his door wider. He stood there behind the door.
How now.

Her vessel cracked.

“You told me: ‘I may be married but that will not prevent us from joining together!” Katharine hissed.

“I said that?”

“You do not recall?”

“No.”

He could spew stanzas of Chaucer or lines of Ovid as if his mind held a mirror, but he could not summon up what he had said to her a few months past. The words had seemed fine gifts to her then, like pearls or gems or strands of golden chain. She had mulled and mused over those words, drawn them into her heart. Now he did not remember them. Now those same words seemed knots on a shroud or spikes in a coffin.

“When I said I could not continue, when I said my heart had become attached. You said we had forty years, a future together, London! Why? What was I to think? When a man says such to a woman.”

“I must’ve been afraid you would leave me.”

“I see,” she said. She was not sure whether she should feel flattered or shattered by the words he now tossed at her.