The Tutor (23 page)

“Venus may have a strong appetite, but we must still love her.”

“I like a lady with a strong appetite . . .”

“Instead of bugs, maybe Venus can be like a bird.”

“A buzzard?”

“No.” Katharine burst out laughing.

“I like a lady with a strong laugh. Oh, Kate, I should just take you here and now.”

“I beg your pardon?” she said. Perhaps she’d heard him wrong. She took a deep breath.

“Why not a buzzard?” he asked.

“A buzzard would paint the same horrid picture as bugs. Why not an eagle?”

He walked to the fire, then to the side of the table where she sat, and sat next to her on the bench again. She was acutely aware of how close their bodies were, but not an arm, nor an elbow, touched.

“A hungry eagle . . .” he said.

“Much better,” she said.

“You are right, though I loathe to part with my munching maggots.”

“Why does Adonis stay with Venus yet turn his head?” she asked. “What keeps him by her side if he thinks her kisses, as you wrote, murderous? Instead of welcoming a woman robust in her attentions, fearless in her actions, Adonis thinks Venus immodest, her behavior amiss. He could easily push the fair goddess away. He is not tethered to her. He is free to go. Why does he not leave?”

“Conflict.”

“Between the two?”

“Within him.”

“The pair’s connection is complex,” she offered.

“I like complex connections,” he said. His face was not a hand’s length from hers.

Minutes before, their dialogue had felt like a lure; now it was a trap. She pointed to the next page. “’Tis very good.”

“I get a ‘very good’ today. What happened to ‘’tis brilliant’?”

“Bear-baiting, bull-baiting, flattery-baiting, cockfighting. The sporting world of men does make me cringe. I’ve suggested changes,” she said.

He took the paper from her hands. “Your words are better in most cases, perhaps in all,” he said.

He began to read aloud. She stared down at the lines on the paper as
he spoke, words he had wrought and she had rendered. As he read, her words became his words, and his words became her inward voice.

“‘Look how a bird lies tangled in a net . . .’”

Will sat so near that she could feel his breath on her skin.

“‘So fasten’d in her arms Adonis lies . . .’”

For a second Katharine turned her head to watch him, but then she looked back down at the page. By the time he reached the words “she cannot choose but love” she felt her whole being well up. She stared at the verse, but under the table she dug the fingernails of her left hand into the palm of her right hand.

“‘Till he take truce with her contending tears,’” he read, “‘which long have rain’d, making her cheeks all wet . . .’”

She breathed evenly and kept stabbing with her nails, not caring if she drew blood, because anything was better than tears at this moment.

He finished with: “‘And one sweet kiss shall pay this comptless debt.’”

Katharine did not look at him. While in her chamber, she had read the stanzas, indeed she had reordered lines and pruned words, but she had not been overtaken by them then as she was now.

“You have used the word
shame
four times in fourteen stanzas. It repeats and repeats. Can you not think of another word?” Her face was hot, her voice trembled. She grabbed her cloak and hurried to the door. He sprang off the bench and followed her. She turned to him, her eyes wide.

“Fare thee well?” he said, a question.

She did not answer him, nor did she put her cloak on, but pushed out into the early evening, and raced down the path to the hall, eyes brimming. Once in her chamber, she flung herself on her bed, the rain of tears making her cheeks all wet.

Soon there was a knocking at the door. “Mistress, I have a note for you,” called Molly.

Katharine wiped her face with her shawl, but she could not stanch her tears. She let Molly in.

“He wants to know your state. He insists on knowing. A hound on a hunt, he is.” Molly handed her the letter.

“Did he ask you that?”

“No, he done wrote it.”

“I won’t be down for supper, Molly,” Katharine said, then realized what Molly had said. “You read his words!”

“I guess I have. Beg mercy.”

“All your hard work and you are reading now. Pray don’t tell him anything.”

“Yes, my lady. I’ll keep me mouth mum. He is no friend.”

“Why do you say that? He is a friend.”

“A friend wouldna make you weep and such. Can I bring you some broth?”

“No broth, thank you. I need to be alone is all.”

Molly left, but scarce a half hour had passed when she was again knocking at the door.

“Molly, I need to rest. Please do not worry,” she called.

“Katharine.” The voice on the other side of the wood was not Molly’s. “Katharine.”

She wiped her eyes one more time and then opened the door. Matilda, whose eyes looked as red and watered as Katharine’s, walked in. She was dressed in her smock and a worn black velvet dressing gown. Her hair was down and uncovered. Katharine could count on one hand how many times over the years Matilda had come to her chamber.

“You have heard,” Matilda said. Her voice was edged with anger.

“Heard what?” said Katharine.

“You have been weeping.” It sounded like an attack.

“Yes. But I have heard nothing.”

“Edward, my Edward, my dear Edward, is dead.”

16

atharine slept briefly that night, a sleep that seemed more a single breath, a gasp really, than true slumber. Outside her window, in the gray light of dawn, the first snow had fallen, and the hills and fields were now hidden under white. Where were the noises of the day? Had Edward’s death quieted even the birds? Silence, sad and still, rang through his house and his land.
For death has come up into our windows
,
was writ in the Bible, in Jeremiah. And indeed it had.

Her grief was twofold. She had lost sight of where she and Will ended and where Venus and Adonis began. She felt as if she were living within Venus and that, in a way she could not quite—or rather did not want—to grasp, Will was encouraging this metamorphosis,
I should just take you here and now.
At the dawn of such a dreadful day, she was shocked to find herself thinking of Will when she should have been praying for dear Edward, but she was having difficulty distinguishing between her loss of Edward and her longing for Will. How odd. How horrid. She was a ship, foundering; she had to find a way to buoy herself. With such sharp and unforeseen shifts in the current of the family, now was no time to drown.

Katharine sat by her small window. With the sun behind the snow clouds, much of the land and the sky looked almost blue. What was out there, beyond the beyond? Endless white? Infinite loss? Eternal grace? Edward was one of God’s flock: he had been pious, he had been faithful, he had believed in life everlasting. If, at the evening of life, one was judged on one’s love, then Edward was now resting in peace. The Bible, in Hebrews, said:
And as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment.
Katharine would pray for Edward, she would pray for his soul, but she had no fears for his final destiny—he was heaven-bound.

A prior had posted a letter with the sad news an hour after Sir Edward’s passing. As Sir Edward was failing, with a fever that could not be quenched and his breathing loud and labored, he had asked for a cot at the nearby monastery, saying if he could not be at home surrounded by his loved ones, he would die surrounded by those who had dedicated their lives to God and His love. In the days preceding his death, Sir Edward had thrashed about and cried out, but on the final evening, the prior wrote, his body was calm, and with several brethren kneeling next to his cot he had prayed for many hours, his words slow, even and true—until his voice was spent. He had been alert but unable to speak when the priest anointed him with the sign of the cross upon his brow, gave him the Eucharist and performed the last rites. His eyes had been open and soft and full of peace. During the night’s watch, the priest at his bedside understood that Sir Edward had departed out of the miseries of this life into the joys of paradise. For his repose, the sacrifice of salvation was to be offered, and at a signal from the bell, the brethren entered his room, prostrated themselves in prayer and began to say masses and to offer earnest petitions in commemoration of the blessed Edward.

“Whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s,” Edward had oft quoted from the Bible. He had been the Lord’s in life, and now he was the Lord’s in death.

Katharine had expected Edward to return to Lufanwal within a year,
that the tension with the queen would settle, that other battles would replace her Roman paranoia. In the months since Edward’s leaving, Katharine had thought him away but not gone, for Ned had been away much longer than Edward. She had not received one letter from Edward, but she supposed his duty in writing was to Matilda and their children. Katharine had not written to him, thinking it proper to wait for a letter from him and then to reply.

In Edward’s library was a German book called
Totentanz
, Dance of Death. When Katharine was a child she pored over the macabre woodcuts. The whole of society from the Pope down to the common laborer was represented in this work; grave subjects led captive by grotesque and mocking Death. Sir Edward, ever steadfast in his faith, had been preparing for death his whole life. From the prior’s account, it seemed that in Edward’s final hours he was not among the reluctant followers of the jig-maker Le Mort. Noble Edward, kind Edward, was at the end accepting and in harmony with God.

With Advent scarce begun, there would be no need to force a fast this season, for sorrow and lamentation would kill off all appetite. Katharine planned to spend the morning praying in the secret chapel. Surely no priest from a neighboring estate would venture forth; the last time one did, he was slaughtered and his head stuck on a pike.

Molly was at the door early, with kind words of sympathy and also with a note from Will. He again asked how Katharine fared, but now the news of Sir Edward’s death was upon his page. Katharine could feel Will’s urgency, yet she advised Molly to make no response. For her heart was overflowing with chaos.

Katharine sent Molly off with a note to Isabel, asking if she would meet her in the hidden chapel to pray. Then she sat down to write a letter to Will. She usually wrote letters easily, but today she wrote, crossed out, rewrote, then tore up the paper. She started with a description of how she was taking on the inmost life of Venus; then she changed the
beginning to how her grief over Sir Edward’s death, combined with the peculiar nature in which she felt she inhabited Venus, or Venus inhabited her, made continuing with Will impossible. If there was any bewitching going on at Lufanwal, she wrote, it was his poem that was casting spells, not the poor hags who’d spent the night. She tried to write without emotion, without passion, from the outside of her heart, not from within. She tried to sound like a man.

You are an exceptionally talented and clever writer, a diamond of brilliant cut, and you must write, you must write forever, for eternity. You are beyond nimble in word and thought, and now is the time for the poets of our land to be as brave and daring as Drake, Raleigh, Hawkins and Gilbert sailing the waters of the globe. Our poets have embarked on a wondrous expedition—to fare forth in our own language that which has heretofore been the terrain of other cultures. Our dearly departed Sir Edward once told me that the library at one of our great universities holds thousands of books but only thirty of them are in English! You have a grand future of exploring worlds and charting tales in our native tongue.

Minutes before the end of our last time together I came undone, and I am still trying to comprehend it. To be more precise, I felt I had turned into one of those porcelain figures traded from the East, and that I might, given the lightest tap, shatter into a thousand pieces. I wept for hours and this weeping came upon me before I heard the sad news of our dear Edward’s passing. As you go deep into your writing of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ I seem to be diving deep into another tale, the tale of us. Must I, I ask myself, take on the feelings that live within the walls of your story? Do you know the Latin word vulnerabilis, from vulnerare, “to wound,” and vulnus, “wound”? As you become more vulnerabilis in your writing, more open, more able to penetrate your characters, I seem to become more vulnerabilis in my attachment to you . . .