The Tutor (10 page)

rsula was dancing. There was no music.

The other women sewed in front of the fire, while Ursula pranced across the wooden planks, her little dog nipping at her heels. What song was Ursula listening to in her head while she dipped, turned and curtsied? A flush on her cheeks made Katharine wonder if she might be with child again, but her girth was no thicker.

“I must perfect this,” Ursula said.

Katharine waited for someone to give Ursula what she wanted
: What dance is this you’re worrying over, Ursula?
But no one looked up.

“’Tis new, from the Continent, called the courante,” said Ursula, answering the unasked question.

Ursula had never completed a tapestry or even one small piece of embroidery—no threaded stories of her handiwork seated a chair or covered a bed or hung on a wall. Sad piles of her half-finished cloths sat dejected and dusty in baskets throughout the house.

“Monsieur LeBlanc, my new dancing master, taught me. I will dance with the duke, and he will surely know the steps. Oh, I do hope Ned
returns in time to welcome the duke and his men. Ned is so skilled at dancing,” Ursula said.

“We do not know when Ned will arrive,” said Matilda, biting a red thread with her teeth. “But surely we will provide a warm welcome for our guests.”

Ursula stopped dancing. “
My
guests.
Mine.
Richard and I invited them. The duke is my cousin. The new cook and I have gone over the menus. Monsieur Delaney is from the duke’s province, and Monsieur Delaney is an expert in the dishes of that country. I have been fitted for my new gown: the lace is from Belgium, the silk from France, the velvet from Italy. I will look like a queen.”

“Queen of what?” Katharine asked, sticking a needle into the spiraled horn of a unicorn and drawing gold silk through the linen. She was stitching a linen coverlet for a bed.

The question gave Ursula pause and she was silent for a moment. “The queen,” she replied flatly. “Our queen. Her Majesty.”

“What alchemy is this, dear Ursula?” Mary said, her head still bent over her stitching. “Your tailor must be a sorcerer, verily, if he is able to transform you into our queen right before our eyes. Better pay your dressmaking wizard well, for all of England will be knocking at his door.”

Isabel giggled, Katharine smiled, and Joan suppressed a grin.

“Cease!” said Ursula, her tone shrill. No one looked up. She sighed loudly and then stalked out of the room.

“What next? The Virgin Mary?” Katharine said.

There was laughter.

“Ursula is a child,” Matilda said.

Ursula was past thirty. Katharine recalled their conversation on the grass that day. She’d seemed no child then. And now she appeared to possess a newly found hunger. She could stomp her feet one minute, yet she also seemed quite capable of dropping poison into Matilda’s wine the next.

Katharine stood to give her legs a stretch and went to the window. Mr. Smythson was below with several workmen. Two men were rolling something that looked like a large skein with a ribbon round it. They staked one end of the ribbon to the ground and continued walking. Mr. Smythson called out numbers while a man next to him hurriedly wrote them down. The mason cut a striking figure with his height and his long black coat. Katharine assumed they were measuring the dimensions of the new addition. At one point Mr. Smythson looked up at the window, held an instrument to his eye and peered through it. Then he removed the instrument but continued to gaze at the window where Katharine stood. She did not know if he had seen her and was intentionally looking up, or whether he was blind to her and merely intent on gauging the height of the house. She had just raised her hand to wave, when he turned away to talk to one of his men.

—

The children were
gathering leaves and jumping feetfirst into the piles. Henry brought a three-legged stool for Katharine to sit on, and she held her umbrella to shield the sun. Henry no longer ran with the younger children, and his voice had deepened. He stretched his long legs on the linen spread on the grass and read not a leather-bound book but pages sewn together with thread.

“Whose pages?” Katharine asked, glad Henry was near and that his head was buried in words.

He held up the slim volume, a cheap penny pamphlet, the type sold on the streets in London. “Robert Greene,” he said.

“Don’t know him,” she said. “A new curriculum from Master Shakespeare?”

Henry grinned. She remembered when he was born and the first time she was allowed to hold him. He had a shock of black hair at birth that fell out before he was a month old. And then the blond hair grew in, and
even at this age it was soft and bright. Katharine had to stop herself from reaching down and running her fingers through it as she used to when he was a child.

Two girls from the kitchens brought baskets filled with bread, cheese, quince, nuts, cider, ale and a few stunted apples and pears from the orchard. When the food appeared, the children leapt from the leaves and dove for the offerings. They ate and then played again in the leaves. Henry helped himself to food and ale and fell asleep, Greene’s pages slipping from his fingers.

Katharine loved these children. She relished how they grew and changed, how they became by turns angry, sad, happy, thrilled and curious. When she read to them, they often talked and played among themselves; other times they were quiet and settled down, their heads dropping back on pillows or their little bodies curling up like puppies on rugs. Today, fed and worn from their frolics, the children wandered back to the hall as the slate-colored clouds above them moved in from the west.

Henry woke and stood.

“You are a tall Lancastrian elm,” Katharine said, still perched on her stool.

Henry smiled, then brushed the leaves from his hose and picked up the baskets. She watched him make his way back to the hall—he was not in any hurry, his head filled with his reading. She was on the verge of rolling the linen, when a voice called.

The tutor was coming toward her in a flame-colored doublet and white ruff. Full doublet, slashed, gray silk peeking through. Narrow waist, flaring hips, broad shoulders. Dove-gray hose. She waited. He looked quite handsome in his fiery hue, surely not the attire of a glover’s son. She doubted such a rich doublet was in accordance with the queen’s Sumptuary Laws. He held a sheaf of paper and knelt, a knight before a queen, and placed seven sheets in a row, a card dealer now.

“Seven sonnets,” he said, still kneeling.

She wanted him to rise; his countenance was off—the supplicant had replaced the challenger.

“Seven sonnets,” he repeated, his head down, his eyes still lowered.

“Seven sonnets,” she said finally, in an effort to come to his aid.

“That I beg you . . .”

She nodded.

“Beseech you . . .”

She nodded again.

“To read.”

“Of course,” she said quickly, worried that he would keel over or start to weep. How strange he seemed, how fragile, how humble. “I will read them,” she said. Was he feigning or in sooth frightened?

“You forced my hand,” he said.

So he was a gambler. She knelt across from him, picked up the first sheet and read it, and then the second and then the third, until she had read all seven. She was shocked. She hadn’t expected this. She and Shakespeare faced each other; if they hadn’t been in the orchard, she would have thought they were in a chapel, kneeling in prayer.

“It has vexed me,” he said, “what you might think. Do my little songs . . . have merit?”

“I am no judge.”

“Thou art mine.”

“Your sonnets are very good indeed.”

“But not perfect,” he said. “I am an apprentice yet. I have studied the form . . .”

“Perhaps in these two,” she said, pointing, “o’erstudied it.”

“When Petrarch’s octave is followed by his sestet, therein—”

Katharine put up her hand. “Master Shakespeare, I beg you keep your equations to yourself. I tire quickly of mathematics.”

He pointed at the sheets laid on the linen. “What think you of the subject?” he asked.

She was silent.

“Love,” he said.

“’Tis the subject of sonnets,” she replied.

“Some say the path to poetry is to write it first as prose,” he said.

“How did you start these?”

“With rhyme and meter. I let my quill race across the page.”

“No need to follow the rules of others,” she said. “Your engine is your own.”

“Your master Sidney has pushed the iambic pentameter ajar. And when he steps into the hexameter . . . he . . .”

“I know not the details of the form, but I can see how his sonnets vary.”

“And my sonnets?”

“The beat is unexpected in those.” She pointed.

“Petrarch’s kin.”

“The two that follow Sidney’s form are even, perhaps too even.”

“Sidney was your anointed . . .”

“The evenness did not occur to me when I read his verse. I was overcome by . . . his sentiment,” she said.

“Yes, he is sentimental. And I agree with you, he is monotonous as well.”

She gazed at him but said nothing.

“Teach me,” he said.

She was, with these two words, distracted by his lips. Again she noticed their shape.

“I do not presume to teach,” she said, “but I can relate to you what I read and how it makes me feel.” She studied each sonnet anew. “These are the weakest.” She held two sheets in her hand.

He frowned. “Why?”

“They follow convention, lack emotion. The words plod across the page.”

“Plod across the page? My words may be donkeys, but yours are daggers.” He placed his hand on his heart and toppled from his knees to the ground as if stabbed.

She smiled. “If you cannot shield yourself, then we should end.”

Shakespeare sat up, cross-legged, took one of the papers from her hand. “I was guided by the Greeks in form. Yet I invoke the Roman deities,” he said, “Cupid and the goddess Diana.”

“I know the story. Love put his torch in care of Diana’s nymphs while he slept. Perhaps ’tis those ties to antiquity that make your words weary.”

Lines formed above Shakespeare’s brows, and his eyes married hurt with humor. Katharine watched his mouth curve from a pout to a grin. Then he laughed: the sound was glorious and warm.

“‘Seething bath’ and ‘sovereign cure’ are well chosen,” she said.

“You flatter me,” he said.

Katharine turned to the second of the two poems and said, “This sonnet lacks grace. Perhaps use
brand
instead of
wand
, and then change
frond
to
hand
. A plant has a frond, but does a maiden? Even in poetry that seems most stretched.” She continued, “The bitter end does resonate. A nod to the Song of Solomon, yes? ‘Love is as strong as death: jealousy as cruel as the grave . . .’” She glanced at him. “So love is a disease that hath no cure?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

She did not wait for his response but sat back on her skirts. “Both poems fret and fume about distemper and disease. There is much ‘cure’ business. I see Petrarch in the complaint. Yet the shrill fury of the speaker is
after
the physical union, not before—unusual. If Sidney has pushed the form ajar, perhaps ’tis time for you to split it wide.” She paused. “Think you that women are the givers of disease, not the receivers? We steal ribs and health and lead men to debt and to death. How vile we are.”

“Some more vile than others,” he said with a chuckle. He was on his knees again. He snatched another page from the linen and held it to her. “The verdict?”

“This has much mirth.”

“Ah. You are my advocate.”

“How well you love yourself, your name.
Will
makes its entrance in your poem—once, twice, thrice, four times, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen times in fourteen lines, but—”

“This sonnet may be too common for your chaste ears.”

“I am no nun. But with all the planting you have done with your
will
, I am still not sure what is the
thrust
of this sonnet. Are we to care about this man, this Will? With these puns you dance well, your feet are swift.”

“A jig at the end of a play,” he said forlornly.

“Aye, a touch of the jig-maker. Use those same feet to tread deeper.”

Katharine started to stand. He rose to help her. She tightened at his touch, which was delicate. Perhaps reading his verse was not a good idea.

“This wearies you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Which is the best?” he asked.

“The third sheet in,” she said.

“Why?”

“The first line, ‘They that have the power to hurt,’ hails from the heart, not the head,” she said.

“It has history,” he said, his eyes filling with tears.

His tears surprised her. He had dropped his shield. For the first time, she felt no need to parry.

“I feel that history when I read it,” she said.

He nodded. “’Tis good, then?”

“Aye.”

He smiled now, the tears of a moment ago gone. “Since meeting you, dear lady, I have put quill to page every day. I write and write and write. I have been in London, at the playhouses, writing verse but never
finishing it. I count poets and playwrights among my friends—Kit Marlowe, Thomas Watson, Robert Greene.”

“I know not these men. Your wife . . . is she among the living?” Katharine asked. He had mentioned his wife the day he said a woman
other
than his wife had told him what felt akin to a sneeze, but he had not uttered the word
wife
since. Perhaps, Katharine thought, his wife was dead.

“Aye, I have been in Stratford, too. My wife, Anne, is very much among the living. She is eight years older than I. Or perhaps I am eight years younger.”

“What is your age?” Katharine asked.

“Six and twenty.” He was quiet for a moment, then added, “I’d rather my wife not be currency between us.”

What did he mean? There was no “between” between them. “I was not bartering with my question,” she said, “I was curious.”

“And I have three children,” he offered.