The Tutor (34 page)

Henry and his brother, Thomas, stood outside in the cold as their mother was carted away. Katharine went to the brothers and put her arms around them. Henry had appeared so grown-up the day he told her of his plans to go abroad to study, but today he looked a child again. “You two come in,” she said, leading them toward the door. “The air is as raw as our hearts.”

Ned and his two fellow priests emerged from hiding after the sheriff left. Harold’s body would be bathed, kept cold and buried on Saint Stephen’s Day, the day after Christmas. There was an old country saying that as long as the Yule log burned, evil spirits were kept at bay. The servants finally cut the log that afternoon, dragged it to the great hall and lit the fire, and while Katharine warmed her hands in front of the flames that evening, she wondered what protection the log could possibly afford the family now, for hadn’t the evil spirits already stormed the gates?

—

Sir Edward,
Ursula and Harold dead. Richard and Mary gone. In a time of pestilence many family members felled in such a short time would
be commonplace, but the plague on this house was not from disease or battles or flames. The days of Christmas plodded on, with shock turning to sorrow and then back to shock again. No merrymaking this year. No mirth. Grief was now woven into the fabric of their lives. One had to eat. One had to sleep. Loss became routine. Ned and his fellow priests consoled the children and the adults, and brought them back to the sacraments and to prayer. What was left of the family and a few trusted servants squeezed into the windowless chapel on Christmas Day; Ned held three solemn masses, starting with Matins.

The three seminarians had orders from Father Henry Garnet, the Jesuit priest who ran the English mission; they planned to split up after Christmastide, journey east and south, with Henry acting as one of their squires until he made passage to Calais. Saint Stephen’s Day came and went without the customary wren hunt or feast but with Harold’s burial. On the following day, Saint John the Evangelist’s Day, the three young men, disguised as dandies, ventured out for the first time to nearby Catholic estates to give mass and the sacraments. Ned was gallant in his fine Italian apparel and exceedingly well horsed. To the passerby, he would seem none other than who he was: the adored son of a noble Lancastrian family, finally come home from his sojourn on the Continent.

Whenever Katharine was alone, she shut her eyes and escaped into scenarios with Will—the same way she used to escape into her books. She tried to recall every feature of his face, the warmth of his voice, his tender touch.

A packet came from him.

He was writing, he said, even during the daily festivities of Yuletide. He was writing, he said, because Venus and Adonis kept him up at night and woke him in the morning. He was writing, he said, because he craved to set his humble verse in front of her:
How fares my dear Kate? I beseech you, tell me how thou art?
His patience was too thin, he said, and
thus he was moved to ship to her what he had of recent inked:
The youth must dance and sing and the aged sit by the fire, but I am neither and do neither, for I sit at a plank with quill in hand and scratch my music upon the page
. His family did not know how to take him, for never before had he been so lacking in mirth and merriment and yet so completely contented.

Once Anne said I found no comfort in my own skin, and I have in the past proven that I wanted to jump right out of it, but the act of putting down word after word does, as if by magic, calm my sinews and my soul. No more need for mead nor maids. By sundown I am a tired farmer who has with ink on paper plowed many furrows and sown many seeds. By God’s troth, I might even call myself serene. Whilst the rest of the house does eat and drink and make good cheer, I sit sequestered in the second floor, a weird hermit, and write. ’Tis in my blood and in my bones and verily I may not sleep until this poem is finished. What will this harvest bring? I miss you, dear Kate, sweet Kate, with all my heart. I will, at the end of these festivities, spur my steed on and in great haste be on my way to your door.

He knew nothing of the recent tragedies. He’d finished the section with Adonis’s horse. The palfrey and the mare ran off into the wood, leaving Adonis unsaddled and furious. When Venus reappeared, Katharine dipped her quill into the inkhorn:
Why not have both Venus and Adonis brimming with contradictions?
she wrote.
Adonis might peek at Venus from under a hat—coy like a woman—so that Venus cannot help but notice him. Make her skin with hues of white, then red, magnify her conflict.

She plowed into the verse he’d sent line after line, marking when a beat was off or a word astray. This stitching of his words focused her, funneled all her concentration, and it gave her hope.

—

On New Year’s Day
, despite the sorrows of the holiday season, Isabel and Joan came to Katharine’s chamber and presented her with the beautiful green plumed hat she had so loved that day in town.

“You should not have done this, you silly girls,” said Katharine as she pulled the stunning hat out of its box. “And I thought no one was exchanging New Year’s gifts this year.”

“Dear Kate, we do not care,” said Isabel.

“We bought the hat scarce a week after you visited the shop,” added Joan.

“And you have kept it a secret all these weeks. I am sure I do not deserve such kindness. My hands are empty of gifts, but my heart is full of love,” said Katharine. She pulled the girls to her and kissed them both.

When the girls left, Katharine resumed her work on Will’s verse, for she wanted to be fully through it by the time he returned to Lufanwal.

Venus was no closer in her conquest.

Katharine copied lines of Ovid’s tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus on Will’s pages as a guide, how the water-nymph beseeches a kiss from the youth, while clasping him “about the Ivorie necke,” how she is “so far beside hir selfe” by his naked beauty that she casts off her garments and dives into the pool and catches the lad up fast in her arms and the wrestling and struggling, the hugging and the grasping commence: “The members of them mingled were and fastned both togither.”

Leaping from her seat, Katharine pulled on her cloak—though in truth the lines from Ovid had made her skin hot. She stepped out of her chamber and with a fast gait was down the stairs and out the door, striding through the inner courtyard. Even with snow still on the ground, she was determined to march around the perimeter of the grand house. She kept apace out in the cold dark air, wanted to feel her heart beating within her. When Katharine neared the scullery door, she saw a small figure
crouching in the snow. As she got closer, she saw it was the milkmaid Mercy on her knees without a cloak. She was vomiting.

“Mercy, can I help you? Are you ill?” Katharine asked, stooping down.

“Came on at supper,” Mercy said. “The victuals’ smell sent me out here retching. Dunno. Was fine but a few minutes ago.” She wiped her mouth with snow.

As Katharine helped Mercy to stand, she noticed a stone on a black ribbon resting above the girl’s white smock and generous bosom. Katharine leaned in close and saw in the small light of the silver moon that it was a turquoise.

“How old are you now, Mercy?” Katharine asked.

“By Shrovetide I’ll be fifteen.”

“Time shoots by. I remember when you were born.”

“My mother worked the cows then.”

“Aye. She carried you in a pouch on her chest when she did the milking,” Katharine said. “Go in, Mercy, before the cold air gets into your bones.”

“You, too, my lady, and gramercy.”

“Yes, yes, Mercy. A good even to you.”

“A good even to you, my lady.”

When Katharine got to her chamber, she didn’t wait for Molly but pulled her own cloak from her shoulders and undressed. She was sure there were many such blue-green stones in this world, mountains full of them in faraway lands. As she climbed into bed, she imagined market stalls in London and other cities overflowing with soft kidskin pouches of these bright, opaque
stones.

23

efore the end of Christmastide, when Katharine and Isabel were returning one day from town, the groom took a different route on account of a tree felled along the regular road. They happened upon a stately new mansion lined with so many windows it seemed more glass than stone. Katharine realized they were passing Sir Christopher de Ashton’s house, for it was on the spot Mr. Smythson had mentioned. There were men gathered round the grand house, still working in spite of the cold and the holiday season, putting on the finishing touches, Katharine supposed.

“I wonder if Mr. Smythson is in there,” said Isabel, when Katharine told her this was the house he was building.

“I wonder,” said Katharine.

“Let’s stop and see!”

“I think it best we carry on, don’t you, my dear? The darkness will soon be upon us,” said Katharine, though in truth she was interested in how one built a house. She’d seen Mr. Smythson’s careful drawings that day in the library, of the alterations he was going to make at Lufanwal.

“’Tis far from dark, and this house is the most beautiful house I’ve
ever seen. Look at all the windows! The light must pour in all day. Not our old, dark, gloomy hall, where it’s hard for a ray of the blazing midday sun to find its way into the chambers. Sir Christopher de Ashton must be a rich man, to afford all those thousands of panes of glass. And the lines of the windows and the roofs are so even.”

“’Tis most symmetrical,” agreed Katharine.

“Isn’t that tall man there Mr. Smythson?”

“I suppose it is.”

“We must stop and say hello,” Isabel continued. “I’ve met him several times at the hall. He’s a nice man. A bit serious but nice. Have you?”

“What?”

“Met him.”

Katharine nodded. She didn’t know why she was feeling so resistant to stopping, because Mr. Smythson had only shown her kindness, but in a strange way she felt his kindness diverted her from Will, and she did not want that distraction. She wanted to shut her eyes at any instant and think of Will, and only Will. But Isabel had her way, and their driver stopped the cart, and the ladies got out. Mr. Smythson was so busy with his builders that it took them a few minutes of standing there before he realized he had visitors and walked over to them. It looked as though he’d been crawling around on stone, for dust covered his black coat and breeches.

“I love your building!” exclaimed Isabel.

“Many thanks,” said Mr. Smythson, bowing.

When he lifted his head he was smiling, which surprised Katharine because he seemed to smile so seldom. Isabel must have noticed it, too, for she burst out in a grin.

“Can we look inside?” she asked.

“Isabel, we mustn’t disturb Mr. Smythson when he’s in the middle of working—”

“I would be honored for you ladies to come inside. I can’t guarantee
your skirts won’t get a bit of dirt on them. The place is finished on the inside but hasn’t been cleaned yet, so there’s a film on all the surfaces from cutting the stone and the wood. There’s no furniture yet, but Sir Christopher says he’s moving in before Twelfth Night. Somehow I don’t think that will come to pass.”

The ladies followed Mr. Smythson into the house, and he escorted them from room to beautiful room. If they thought the outside of the mansion was handsome, the interior was astounding, with elaborate columns, chimneypieces and friezes of carved stone and richly embellished plasterwork. They looked up at vaulted ceilings and walked on floors of intricately patterned stone. There were no curtains yet, so the light from the outside did, in truth, pour forth into every nook.

Katharine found herself drawn into conversation with Mr. Smythson: how could she not? The way he explained the designing and construction of the house intrigued her. The process seemed akin to writing a piece of music, there were so many elements to take into account. The house had taken him eight years to design and to build, and now, after all that time, the house would soon be inhabited.