The Tutor (43 page)

“You have done this,” she said. “You are like our queen with her courtiers—you need people to fall in love with you. You had to harness my heart and make me love you in order to write your poem. I know that now.”

“I’ve done nothing of the sort.”

“You have! You dangled words that kept me fastened to you!”

“I have not.”

“You will say what it takes.” Her voice was rising. “My love hasn’t just nourished you, you’ve fed upon it! You’re a child who drinks his mother’s milk to thrive, and you’re a beast who devours the flesh and bones of its prey to survive!”

“Stop this mewling, Kate!” he ordered.

“Did you make merry at the Stanleys’ Twelfth Night?” she asked.

“Aye, verily,” he said coldly.

“Did you make merry with Ned?”

“Who is Ned?”

“Ned, my cousin. Ned, the lastborn son of Sir Edward?”

“Oh, that Ned.”

“‘Oh, that Ned’?” she screeched. “Along with advance and retreat, you have added retaliation to your tactics!” she fairly spat at him. “Perhaps you should be a general—certainly the queen could use a man who commands his troops with such fearless strategies!”

“What is it you seek, Kate? ’Tis no surprise you have taken no second husband,” he said.

She could not see his face completely, but she could fill in the flesh of his sneer.

“Or rather one has not taken you,” he continued. “’Tis no surprise at all, for your behavior would thwart even the strongest of men. I am surely not fit for such a task. ’Tis a wonder they were able to marry you off to that old man who was your first, but ’tis no surprise he died so soon. Methinks perhaps you best lay off the mead, if that is what urges you to such tawdry business. You have caused me much offense, Kate. You have wounded me down to my very bones.”

Will’s malevolence fanned her fury. “What is this?” she bellowed, the words issuing from deep within. “I know not what we have. Friendship? Love? A poem? I am not your mother, wench, wife, whore, nor your Venus! What was that fit the other night on your cot? Not love, verily, nor lust, but more akin to the siege of Troy! ‘I will win!’” she mocked. “I am no Helen, surely. What do we have here? What! What! What!” She was shouting, but she did not care. She was at this instant begot from her beloved Greeks, from Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles. She was Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone. She continued, the bile rising. “Why did you say such false things to me? Why? Why did you say you missed me? Longed for me? Why did you kiss me? Pull the pins from my hair? Why did you give me gifts? I should have listened to the gossip: ‘A bad lad, that one. A lewd lad. A wanton lad. A swain whose own wife sacked him, for he was caught in the sward too many a time with too many a lass.’ I was deaf to such rumors. You are a man profligate with words, yet parsimonious with love, a man who flings words at people to
conquer them. Desire, secrets, a special bond, forty years, London. Love. Fie on you!”

By the end of her speech she was shrieking. She still saw Will’s face through the door, but behind him, on the bed, she saw something move in the candlelight, a body, skin.

She turned. It was as if the house of her childhood were burning all over again. She put her hands to her ears to block the screams as she fled. She remembered the terrible smell, a blazing timber crashing. She made it down the stairs before the wood gave way. She was running through the garden with her smock in flames, then rolling down the hill. And now she was running also. When she was partway down the path, she tripped and fell with such a fierce force that her hands could not stop her and her head hit the stone.

All was quiet. She did not move. Her bones felt at rest finally. Her cheek was stuck to the icy path. Her knees were raw and throbbing. She had not died in the fire, by some miracle, but she might die in the cold on this sable night. She would go deep, to sleep and then at some point, a tick only God knew, she would take her last exhale. Her flesh would go stiff; her body would freeze. She was calm. She accepted that she had loved Will. She could not change that history, just as she could not change the fate of her family.

She heard footsteps, a scampering, light and weightless, like a small animal, or an angel. Then she felt warm breath on her neck, and she smelled a sour scent. Perhaps this was it, then, death—though she was surprised at death’s heat.

“My lady,” a soft voice cooed in her ear. “My lady.”

Katharine opened her eyes but did not move her head.

“You’ve had a nasty tumble.” The small face moved in close to Katharine’s. Katharine said nothing but tried to focus on the little upturned nose and the large blue eyes. “You’ve cut yeself. There’s blood. Canst thou move, my lady? ’Tis Mercy here, ’tis Mercy. I will fetch someone.”

“Gramercy, Mercy, but no need.”

Katharine remained still, bathing in Mercy’s blessed breath.

“I was come from the scullery in the big house, when I saw you running. You’ve banged yeself above the eye,” said Mercy.

“I will get up, Mercy, though this hard stone feels like a feather bed, and if you were not here I suppose I would fall asleep upon it.”

“’Tis too cold fer ye to do that,” said Mercy. “Uncle drank a jug of sack and then lay down on the snow one winter night and died. ’Tis too cold. ’Tis not e’en Shrovetide yet. Your blood will ice. I’ll bring you to me mum—she can fix your head and give you some hot milk with honey.”

Katharine did not answer, but started to raise herself on her hands. Mercy helped her up, and they slowly walked toward the cow barns.

“How fares your winter?” Katharine said, after they’d walked a ways in silence. “You were sick when I saw you out in the snow. Have you your health back?”

“I was puking my guts out in the snow, but turns out I wasn’t sick, my lady.”

“No?”

“Turns out I was with child.”

“Oh, Mercy.”

“I done lost the babe, came too early, came too fast, and we buried the little thing out yonder. I feel better now.”

“I am so sorry, Mercy. Methinks you have plenty of years ahead of you, plenty of time to have plenty of babes. You told me last that you were nigh fifteen.”

“Just, my lady. Me, the babe—’twasn’t meant to be. The lout who made me so did promise to be with me, take me to London e’en, then slammed the door on me face when I told him I was with child. He said he had too many brats already.”

“To London, Mercy.” The word
London
pricked Katharine’s heart.

“To London, we were to make a life there, he said, and I would wear my hair up high with pearls in it and meet grand folk.”

Though Katharine was walking slowly on account of her bruised knees, all of a sudden she had trouble catching her breath.

“Should we stop and rest, my lady?” asked Mercy.

“Were you with this lad a long time, Mercy?”

“No, ’twas a few months but felt like years. He started at me the minute he got here before the harvest. Oh, the words he did employ. He said I was special to him and said so soon I knew him in a way no one, not e’en his wife, did, like we had a special bond, like we was meant to be together. The gifts he give me—never seen such fine things—and we were together soon after. He was my first one.”

“Did he give you gloves, Mercy?”

“Aye, he did. The likes I’d never seen before, with beads and skin that felt like silk upon me hands. He loved me hands. Methinks they are ugly, so red and chapped on account of the milking. He said they weren’t the hands of a lady and he loved me for that. He would trace me stubby, rough hands with his fingers, as if me hands were somethin’ fine. He had the lightest touch, then, sent shivers down me. That’s how I fell for him—’twas the way he touched my hands, as light as a feather he was. Now I know better. He’s a trickster, he is, a trickster and braggart and a bawd, who apes his betters in dress and manners but is no true gentleman. His heart is filled with lechery.”

“He isn’t fit to tutor, is he, Mercy?”

“Nay. How did ye know it was he?”

Katharine stopped. “I’m feeling as if to faint, Mercy,” she said.

“Must be the cows. I don’t e’en smell ’em anymore ’cause I was born amongst them. Hither. We lodge in the back of the barns, me mum and me sisters and me. Come. We’ll attend to
thee.”

27

n the ides of March, Molly came to Katharine’s chamber and, though Molly was busying herself with the fire, Katharine could tell something was wrong. Katharine had not seen Will since the night of her fall on the icy path.

“Prithee, Molly, your face is an open book. Tell me your worries.”

“’Tis
him
,” said Molly.

“What of him?” said Katharine.

“’Tis confusing.”

“What is, Molly?”

“He pulled me aside the other day . . .”

“Yes?” Katharine thought perhaps he had finally inquired after her.

“And he said he was furthering his poem and asked me to read it.”

“Asked
you
to read it? How does he know you read, Molly?”

“I told him once or twice I thought him good with the words and the rhymes, and he asked me how I knew, and I said you had taught me to read and a’ times when he was passing his verse to you I would take a peek at it now and again.”

“I see.”

“And he said I wasn’t to tell you that he had asked me or that I was reading it—’twas to be our secret. His voice changed when he said that, and he leaned into me in a way that is, well, was almost . . .”

“Uncouth.”

“Yes, that. And said he wanted to know what I thought of what he had written, and he started saying how clever I was, how he could tell by how I spoke that I had a good mind and that I was in luck because my face was good, too, and not every wench had the two combined. I blushed from head to toe when he said those things and methought how this might bring you pain.”

“Did he give you his poem?” Katharine asked. She imagined his table, the quills, the sheets of paper overflowing with words. Where was Venus now? she wondered. Had Adonis gone off to hunt the boar? Was he dead? Katharine kept her jaw set, in an effort not to weep.

“He did give it me. Do you want me to bring it to you?”

“No, Molly. No. And Molly?”

“Yes.”

“Please never mention him to me again. Would you do that for me?”

“Yes’m. I crave your pardon.”

“And Molly, you do have a good head and a fair face and you also have a good heart.”

“Gramercy,” Molly said, and curtsied low.

What amazed Katharine about Molly’s tale was that Will would seek to murder her anew. Did he do such things out of cruelty, or was he thinking only of himself and his needs rather than of retaliation? Katharine had thought he needed her for his words, but she now realized what he’d needed her for was her worship, and when that stopped, he no longer had any use for her.

Not only was the Ides of March the day Caesar met his fate, but it was the ancient Roman holiday honoring the goddess Anna Perenna as well. Ovid had written of the goddess and of her sister Dido, the lovesick
queen of Carthage, who fell in love with shipwrecked Aeneas and then killed herself when he deserted her. She’d taken Aeneas’s sword atop her funeral pyre and plunged it into her flesh. Katharine reckoned she didn’t need Aeneas’s sword, for if she’d survived the death of her family when she was ten, then she could at one and thirty survive Will Shakespeare.

As a player, Will could mimic accents and manners, and as a poet, he could imitate the terrain of the heart without ever truly visiting it. That, Katharine supposed, was his genius—or part of it—that he could project himself into a great variety of people and situations, allowing in his words on a page or his actions upon the stage a humanity that he, in truth, failed to possess. She’d always trusted words, and now she no longer found shelter in them, indeed she felt betrayed by them, for Will had shown her that words were not truths: they could be used as bait; dressed up and trotted out; spun like the gossamer threads of a spider’s web.

A month later, in April, with the sun lingering in the sky and the summer birds returning, Lord and Lady Strange were due to attend a banquet at Lufanwal in honor of Richard’s release from prison. Were it not for Isabel’s pestering, Katharine would have stayed up in her self-made convent. She had begun to wonder if perhaps she had erred, for as the days became longer, and with Ned still in the north, she found she missed Mr. Smythson. She’d seen a tall man in a black coat one day in town, and she’d run up to him, almost tripped, only to discover the man wasn’t Mr. Smythson at all. Katharine imagined his wife as all sorts of people, some of whom she approved of and others of whom she did not. She found some comfort in thinking that maybe he’d married the poetess Aemilia Bassano, whose bold verse still echoed in Katharine’s head. Such a cunning and bright woman would make a good wife for him.