The Tutor (21 page)

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The following day
Katharine sat in front of the fire in the schoolroom. The wood had burned to embers, and there was a chill in the room. She had a wool cloak, lined with rabbit fur, wrapped round her. She was waiting for Will. He had sent a revision, and he had added new lines. She had read them and taken a quill to them.

“I crave a thousand pardons,” Will said as he burst in. He bowed. He wore no cloak or cape or ruff. His doublet was of earthen shades dotted with specks of color, his collar of linen and ribbed with fine lace. His beard looked freshly trimmed. He went to the fireplace, added logs to the fire, then stirred the coals with a poker. “I could not leave my writing of our lusty goddess and her tender boy. Are you cold?”

“I have been warmer,” she said.

“Has my verse not warmed you?”

She smiled. “You have written well.”

“’Tis all?”

“’Tis much improved,” she added.

“Much improved?” He paced in front of her.

“’Tis very good,” she said.

“You are still cold.”

“’Tis wonderful.”

“You are, methinks, warming.”

“’Tis on its way to brilliance.”

“On a path, but not brilliant yet?”

“’Twill be brilliant when ’tis finished,” she said.

Will sat on a bench across from her. “I am a schoolboy yet, I suppose, and you are my . . .” He did not finish his thought but smiled at her.

“I am your . . . what?” she said.

“You are my Kate.” He reached across the table and grabbed her hands. There was silence. “Why are you not wearing the gloves I gave
you? Your hands are frozen.” He pulled her hands toward him and blew on them, then blew on them again, as if waiting for a flame.

“They are far too pretty to wear just any day,” she said.

“Then I must get you a less pretty pair to wear just any day. I may not have a full purse, but I am rich in gloves, that I can assure you! I can still hear my father: ‘Will, take these to Master Such-and-Such and those to Mistress Whose-It-What’s-It and that pair over there, the ones with the glittery stones, to Lady What’s-Her-Name.’”

Katharine laughed. “You talk of your father, you mimic him well, but I never hear of your mother.”

Will sighed deeply. “No player could play my mother—not Edward Alleyn, nor Richard Burbage, not even Will Kempe, could build that role. Though the very idea makes me laugh. My father is neither a saint nor a scholar, but he reached high in our humble town. He gambled in his way, and lost more than he won. My mother is clever but not learned. My brain is from her. She comes from people who had more than my father’s folk, a fact she has never let any of us forget. She schooled me in the art of pretension. I please my mother always, but I never please her enough.”

“A harsh road.”

“The maternal stocks. My mother lost two children before I was born, and two months after I was born, a bout of pestilence broke out and many in our town perished. I did not die, and because of that feat my mother always thought I was special. She reared me like a prince. She could not read nor write, but while I was in grammar school she sat beside me every night while I toiled with my studies.”

“A good mother.”

“Depends . . .”

“On what?”

“She was miserly of me. It was difficult for her to let me out of her sight. Aye, she bridled me.”

“You were the anointed one.”

“When I grew, my mother scorned that I might want a woman. One time, I was upstairs, in our cottage, with a maid who lived next door. I was new to my manhood and doing nothing with this maid. In truth, the lass had a fever and no one was at her home, so I offered my bed. My mother thought otherwise. Her rage, I can still hear those words, and feel her hard fists upon my back. I have always been able to tell when she is displeased, by a look in her eye or a tone in her voice, by the slant of her shoulder . . .”

“Or the feel of those fists pounding upon your back.” Katharine felt anointed now; with Will’s talk of his mother he had let his drawbridge down.

“Methinks that was the first time I discovered I could make myself weep,” he said.

“How so?”

“A shower of commanded tears. In sooth, my mother’s fists were no harsher than a light rain, but after her attack, I made my eyes fill, and then she felt horrid.” Will stood, went to the fire and kicked the logs to start the flame again. When he returned, his eyes were brimming with tears. Then he laughed. “Others need onions wrapped in napkins for such a shift, or they must poke their fingers in their eyes.”

“A good weapon to wield upon a stage,” she offered.

“A good weapon to wield in life,” he said with a chuckle.

She recalled the times Will seemed close to weeping—they had to be genuine, for why would he stand before her today and demonstrate his sleight of tears if he had practiced his false art upon her?

“Methinks the words ‘time-beguiling sport’ are perfect to describe kisses,” Katharine said, referring to Will’s new verse.

“Kissing is time-beguiling, as are other things,” he said. “‘Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty.’ Did you like that line?”

She gazed at his lips.

“Kate, how I love seeing you,” he said. “The thought of our meeting wakes me in the morning and pulls me through my day. I want, if it pleases you, to meet as much as possible. I could not write this without you. You know that, Kate.”

“I do.”

“You must never leave me, Kate,” he added.

“Where would I go?” she asked. Will would be the one to leave, for he had his life in London and his family in Stratford. He would leave her: she knew that well enough.

“Some suitor, I imagine, will snatch you away,” he continued.

“Time for that is past.”

“You do not know your powers, my dear. That stonemason felt your draw.”

“Mr. Smythson? You misread the moment.” She did not want to linger here. “Let us talk of your Venus, who has just plucked her prince from his horse.”

“Her desire hath made her strong, hath made her nimble.”

“In Ovid, they are reclining in the shade. She tells him a story and intersperses her tale with kisses,” Katharine said.

“She’s red and hot as coals glowing in a fire . . .”

“Write that.”

“And he’s red but not from desire, from . . . shame.”

“Why shame?”

“Her lust shames him.”

“Does not make sense. He is not so young.”

“You have not been a boy.”

“No. But I have been a girl.”

“Did you not feel shame at the thought of lust?”

She didn’t answer.

“And now? Do you feel shame?”

“No,” she said quickly. She felt her face redden.

“She pushes the youth backward,” he said. “She has tethered his steed, studded the bridle on a ragged bough. She throws him down and lies beside him. She strokes his cheek. He starts to talk in protest but soon she stops his lips with kisses . . .”

Katharine dared not speak. She was afraid her voice would prove unstable.

“Does it please you thus far?” he asked.

She nodded and bit her bottom lip.

“Good,” he said, gathering his pages.

She imagined taking off her cloak and spreading it on the cold stone hearth in front of the fire. She pictured pulling Will down and stopping his lips with kisses. Will was standing and coming round to where she sat and helping her up, but she wasn’t plucking him from his horse like Venus or pushing him onto the ground, nor was she drawing him down to her furry cloak before the fire; she was walking with him to the door, and he was pulling the hood of her cloak up over her hair, leaning down and kissing the top of her head. Then they walked out the door: he to his lodging at the other side of the courtyard and she to her chamber up the narrow stairs in the back of the hall.

—

Matilda lost her battle
. As a justice of the peace, Richard had been pressed into taking the witches for the night. The custody of the wretched women would be passed from one justice to the next throughout their journey to the Lancaster Assize. As the night of the witches’ coming drew close, the servants hauled out barrels of turnips, parsnips and onions, and bottles of mead and sack from the cellars, and the blacksmith fit bars of iron across the openings—the pigs in the sty had more air and more light. Bouquets of herbs and berries were hung throughout the house to ward off the possibility of evil spells: vervain, dill and rowan.

Despite these efforts, an awful wind swept through Lufanwal in the
hours before the witches’ arrival. Though the sky was clear, it was as if the three cages, flanked by uniformed men and dragged through the countryside on their way to the court, were the start of a tempest. The feeling was foul and thick and troubled; behind closed doors, in front of fires, at the dinner table and on the frost-covered stones in the courtyard, the tension grew.

Katharine watched from her window as the strange caravan slowly made its way up the road. It was a cloud of discord and discontent winding up the hill. Rough men sat atop the thorny jails, whipping and shouting at the thick-shanked horses. Snorts of steam shot through the icy air. Sir Edward would never have allowed such an invasion. Katharine sensed from the start it was an ill-advised notion, and now, as she leaned over the sill into the raw afternoon, she was sure no good would come from it. These women, if they were indeed witches, were practiced in black sorcery, a path no one should have to walk in or to follow. And now they’d come to stay the night.

Matilda had ordered the women chained outside. And at first they were, their wrists and ankles manacled to the iron stakes in the courtyard usually used for horses. The women and the children of the hall were told to stay in their rooms, for fear even a glance from one of these hags would cause enchantment.

Katharine did as she was bade and withdrew from her window before the poor women were led from their cages—not because she believed in the superstition that looking at them could cause harm, but because she could no longer bear to see how they were treated with such brutality. She pulled her canvas curtains across to muffle their cries. The witches, in their tethered state, were more beast than human, and the three of them screeched and hollered into the wind. Their fit did not end, and their distemper rose louder and louder, so that finally Richard and Harold, against Matilda’s wishes, had the wretches brought into the dungeons that had been prepared for them in the basements below, hoping
the thick stone slabs of the foundation would silence their frightful mewling. But strangely, even before they were moved indoors, they stopped their racket. It seemed the poor women had recovered out of their fits but were now struck dumb; none of them spoke or even issued a whimper by the time they were dragged through the cellar
doors.

15

ne had eyes made of glass,” said Ursula.

“Glass, in truth?” asked Joan.

“Light blue glass, the color of those Venetian beads round your neck. And her glass eyes glowed with a weird and unnatural light,” said Ursula, who was sitting on her bed brushing her spaniel’s long, drooping ears. She had tied a gold ribbon on a tuft of brown and white hair on the top of Guinny’s flat little head.

Katharine put her hand on Joan’s shoulder. “Joan, dear, they may have looked to Ursula like eyes of glass, but I can assure you they were not. Perhaps the hag had poor eyesight, perhaps she was blind. That can cause the eye to discolor.”

Katharine, Isabel and Joan had gathered in Ursula’s chamber for a morning of needlework, but scarcely a stitch had been sewn. Instead, Ursula had transformed the time into the sewing of tales, for she, it seemed, had not obeyed the orders of the house, but had left her chamber to witness the witches. Having managed to hide behind a door in the courtyard, she had spied them while they twisted and screeched from their chains on the horse posts, and then as they were dragged into the
cellars through the doors in the ground usually used for crates of food and drink.

“The other had a face so pocked that it was hard to see where her eyes began and the pocks ended,” continued Ursula. “One had no teeth. She reduces food to dust with a spell and breathes it in,” said Ursula.