The Tutor (5 page)

Katharine had written to Ned. She’d been careful in her letter—for it could fall into the wrong hands—saying only there had been trouble and that it had passed. After Katharine returned to Lufanwal a widow, she and Ned were—as they had been as children—inseparable, walking, reading, laughing, lying on her bed for hours telling each other tales. When Ned left, she inured herself to his absence. The first year was the most difficult, for they were accustomed to sharing every shred of their lives, and to be unable to seek him out was indeed a bitter draught. She tried to keep a steady correspondence with him, but as time went on their letters grew farther apart. Several years earlier he had sent a sketch an Italian friend had drawn of him. She kept it framed by her bed. There was no taming Ned’s beauty: it burst through the lines. Whenever she gazed at his portrait, she painted in the violet color of his eyes and the sable sheen of his thick black hair.

Katharine’s room had originally been part of the keep built by her Norman ancestors: the turret used as quarters for sentries, who slept on hay. Her oak bed with four carved columns and canopy overpowered the scant space. A few centuries back, the circular walls had been paneled in wood as gloomy as the rest of the dark oak furniture—the cupboard, small table and a chair—that crowded the room. When Katharine returned to Lufanwal after her husband died, she’d tossed out the faded red and green curtains and bedcover and replaced them with muslin, canvas and bleached linen, hoping the blond cloth would brighten the room, for there was only one small window.

The ink dry, she was dripping wax when shouting, sharp and sudden, made her spill the red liquid across the paper. Quickly pressing the seal, she went to the door—left open with the hope of a breeze. She would have expected Ursula and Richard to be the players of these harsh chords, but it was not their voices that rang through the halls. The unlikely duet was Sir Edward and Lady Matilda.

Katharine stepped from her room. She had never heard her aunt and uncle raise their voices, yet she recalled all too clearly how her own parents had battled hard into the night: sometimes the walls and floors of their timber house seemed as thin as parchment. As a child, she would climb out of bed, venture to the stairs, sit on a step and listen; often her brother and sister, awakened by the clamor, came to her side. She had, those nights, put her arms around them and vowed to let no harm come to them.

As she crept toward Edward and Matilda’s lodgings, she heard fragments of what they were saying:
Informers . . . a plot to kill . . . the enemy within . . . Sir Edward, Sir William and Sir Rowland Stanley, Thomas Langton charged with harboring seminary priests . . . imprisoned in the Tower . . . Oh, Edward, you mustn’t, you mustn’t . . . What will we do? . . . What will I do?

Katharine was at the door of their antechamber when Edward burst out.

“Sir Edward, I . . .”

He put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes brimming with grief. “Kate, Lord Molyneux’s priest is dead, murdered with his men on their way back from our estate. His head was piked on Preston Road.”

“Dearest uncle,” Katharine began.

Edward sighed and added wearily, “’Tis a wretched world we live in.”

Katharine was searching for something of comfort to say when he turned abruptly, went back into his rooms and shut the door.

—

Three nights later,
Katharine awoke to the sounds of horses neighing and to her uncle’s grave and commanding voice. She rose from her bed and went to the window. A group of men were on horseback, Sir Edward’s hair lucent in the moonlight. She could see his noble profile. There was urgency in the way the horses moved, nervously clattering on the stones, then thudding away on the hard earth. She watched the band of riders drop below the rise. One second they seemed a small army, and then they were gone.

There was no bloodshed, yet Katharine felt the night oddly pillaged. She stayed at the window. Before the first cock crowed, when the moon was down, the stars fading into the hoary blue, she heard the raucous sound of rooks cawing. The noise grew, becoming loud and fierce, and then the rebellious birds burst forth from the rookery, swooping and plunging, steering wide, then rising into the sky. She waited for them to settle down and come back round again, but they did not. Instead, they shot out into the distance, in the same direction as Sir Edward, and then they, too, vanished. Had the rooks deserted the rookery? Never before, to Katharine’s knowledge, in the history of the De L’Isle family, had they lost their rooks. It was a disturbing sign.

The first beams of light were now climbing the rough-hewn façade, creeping into her room and warming her skin. She untied the ribbons of
her smock and watched the crimson streaks kindle the sky. A thrush started singing. She was about to pull her head in, when she saw the tutor walking swiftly. When he got to the gatehouse he turned, retraced his steps, then turned again and embarked on the path anew. His mouth was moving, as if he were talking to himself. She watched him walk back and forth, again and again. At one point he tore off his doublet and threw it onto a bush. Then, after another round, he unbuttoned his blouse. His skin glistening in the morning heat, he looked more a chanting druid than a schoolmaster. When he finished whatever ritual he was enacting, he grabbed his doublet and blouse and disappeared from view. Katharine pulled the window shut and knelt down to pray.

5

er cousin Richard called a meeting in the great hall. The darkness blinded Katharine when she came in from the sun-baked gardens, but once the lamps were lit and she was sitting, her eyes adjusted to the dimness. The cool gritstone provided some relief from the heat, but the linen hanging in the windows did nothing to keep the flies out. Richard, his short legs dangling, looked like a child perched on his chair. The large Flemish tapestry of a boar and bear hunt that hung behind Richard only dwarfed him further: the hunters woven into the piece were twice his size. The family was sitting on chairs and stools, fans aflutter, with the younger children scattered on the stone floor. The rest of the household stood in back.

If only Ned were here, Katharine thought, to stand by his mother during this troubled time. But he had never taken any real interest in family matters. He loved his painters and his poets, and the way the light in Italy made “everyone and everything look as if they had been kissed by gold.” Barred from attending Oxford and Cambridge because of his
Catholic faith, he had pursued his studies on the Continent. After touring Paris, Venice and Vienna, he had circled back to Italy, where he took up residence in Florence and then in Rome.

A servant rang a bell and the room hushed. Richard started to speak. “Our great family . . .” He coughed and cleared his throat before continuing. “Our great family has resided in Lancashire for centuries upon centuries. Our esteemed ancestor, the courageous Walter Grancourt, was a great companion to William the Conqueror, and our lineage on the maternal line is descended from the great Lady Wenlock, wife of Prufroc, Earl of Bucknall. The good Lord has smiled upon our deeds and our lands have grown and we have as a great family prospered. We are now and always have been the most loyal of subjects to great England, our motherland. Thus it is with great sadness that I relate to you that certain recent events have caused us great concern and that because of these events, my esteemed father, Sir Edward, has found it necessary to leave this country for France. He has safely made passage . . .”

It was true, then, the rumor Katharine had heard from her maid Molly, who had heard it from Ursula’s maid Audrey, who had heard it from Harold’s manservant. That was how news traveled at Lufanwal: as if the dairy barns, hawk houses, chicken coops, stables, kitchens, nursery, schoolroom and maids’ chambers were all inns along a post road, where tales of indiscretion, sickness and death stopped for a brief rest.

Richard droned on. How many times could he use the word
great
in one address? The word should have been hoarded and used only once, to describe Sir Edward, for he was a great man and certainly more eloquent than his eldest son. And
“certain recent events
”
seemed a tame way to describe the gruesome tales that arrived daily: the beheading of Lord Maltby on Shrove Tuesday for his supposed ties to the Irish rebels; the jailing in the Tower of the Jesuit Christopher Bagshaw, upon his return
from France—Bagshaw would probably never make it out of his cell alive.

On the way back to her chamber, Katharine heard Harold’s youngest son, Thomas, say to his older brother, Henry, “I think it shows a weakness, the running away. I would have stayed. Even if they locked me in the Tower. Even if they chopped my head off.”

Henry, who was now fifteen, tapped the side of his little brother’s head and said, “’Tis complicated, Thomas. You are still a child and know nothing of this world.”

I
know nothing of this world, Katharine thought as she climbed the stairs. She had felt Sir Edward’s exile the night she watched him leave under the moonlight but had not wanted to admit it to herself. He was gone. He was across the sea.

—

Ursula rarely played
with children, hers or anyone else’s, but today she was gamboling across the tilt field with her little spaniel Guinny, and the younger children were running after her.

Lufanwal Hall was on a hill. When it was first built in the eleventh century, the steep incline made it a natural fortress. The surrounding valley was rich with rectangular fields, apple orchards, plots of woad and weld and madder. Even with the dearth of rain, the land below seemed the stuff of a weaver’s loom, with warp and weft of orange, red, purple and green.

“Put that book down and join us!” Ursula squealed as she scampered past Katharine, who was reading
The Faerie Queene
.

After Sir Edward left, a servant had brought Spenser’s leather-bound volume with a note tucked in its pages:
Though we started this together, you may take the virgin read. I will resume when I return.

Ursula wore no cap, and her blond hair was spilling out of its pins. She
looked more a girl than a mother of four. She had tiny hands and tiny feet, and her waist was the size of a man’s neck. Katharine reckoned she could put her hands around that waist and her fingers would touch. Ursula’s eyes were light blue and her skin naturally white. She began to twirl, and the children watched her with glee.

“The world is turning,” she cried, her skirts and her petticoats swirling around her. “Round and round and round.” Ursula kept on so long Katharine began to worry. She finally came to a giggling stop, walked unevenly toward Katharine, fell to her knees beside her, then dropped all the way onto the grass, her chest heaving. “’Tis still spinning!”

The children were twirling now, with Guinny nipping at their heels.

“I might vomit,” little Lucy said.

“Perhaps you all should play another game,” Katharine called.

One by one the children dropped to the grass, then they started rolling down the hill.

“See what you’ve started?” Katharine said, smiling.

“’Tis better than wine!” said Ursula.

Katharine chuckled. They were quiet for a time. Ursula turned on her side facing Katharine, who was sitting on a stool.

“I want your life,” Ursula said solemnly. The blue of her bodice and the white of her skirts and skin made her look like a piece of china.

“My life?”

“You are free.”

“How so?”

“You have no husband and no children and you can lose yourself in all those books you so love.”

“All true. But my life is nothing to covet.”

Ursula rolled onto her back and gazed up. “’Tis endless.”

Katharine wondered if Ursula was talking about the sky or her marriage to Richard or her life.

“I married young because I was with child,” Ursula continued. “I should have become a nun.”

When Richard had traveled to Antwerp to meet Ursula for the first time and to marry her a week later, she was fifteen and pregnant with someone else’s child. She gave birth to Joan only four months after the wedding; Ursula’s parents, no longer able to invest in her virtue, had offered Richard a dowry he could not refuse.