The Tutor (6 page)

“A nunnery seems not the life for you,” Katharine said.

Ursula laughed at Katharine’s joke, for the word
nunnery
meant a brothel as well.

“In truth, marriage to God must be better than marriage to a mortal,” said Ursula, still staring at the blue sky.

Ursula usually seemed far younger than her years, childlike, even silly, but today her current had changed.

She sighed. “Come down off your stool,” she beseeched Katharine, “and feel the ground beneath your back.”

“My farthingale will surely pinch.”

“I don’t have one on!”

“Ursula!”

“I hate them. As if our lives are not prisons enough, why do we have to wear such . . . such cages?”

Katharine shielded her eyes from the sun and watched a goshawk stooping and soaring. The hawk whooshed up into the sky, circling. What? Looking directly below, she saw Ursula’s little dog running across the rolling land. The children were no longer with Guinny. The flat-headed spaniel was the size of a hare. The goshawk marked its prey and stooped, closing its wings and diving, its talons ready to hack.

“Guinny!” Katharine yelled. “The hawk!”

Ursula was on her feet and running. Katharine jumped up, threw down her book and followed. The hawk paid no heed to the women, but
having missed its mark rose into the air and then hurtled down again at Guinny, who now realized she had gone from pet to prey and was in a panic, darting this way and that. By the time Katharine was two hundred paces from the little dog, she could hear not only the hawk screeching and the beating of its wings, but also the bells attached to the bird’s feet, which meant the hawk was not wild but most likely from Richard’s mews.

When the hunted dog charged for the nearby brambles, the bird soared into the air again, then fell with talons ready, cutting the pup off. A tall workman in an apron strode toward the dog, and in one graceful movement scooped her into his arms. The goshawk swept up into the air, shrieking in anger.

Ursula and Katharine were out of breath by the time they reached the man, who had slipped the frightened dog under his apron. Guinny’s little brown and white face peered out at them, panting.

“Gramercy, Mr. Smythson,” Ursula said tearfully, then introduced Katharine. “Mr. Robert Smythson is a master mason who’s come to look at the house.”

The man bowed and Katharine nodded.

“I had a dog killed by a hawk, a wild hawk, though,” he said, patting Guinny’s furry head.

“I would like to know why one of Richard’s hawks is out, hoodless and unattended!” demanded Ursula.

Guinny’s savior had a strong nose and a head full of brown curls thick-twined as ivy tods. He was outside the fashion of the times, had no beard, not even a mustache, and his skin was dark from the sun. He handed Guinny over to Ursula, who started cooing, petting and kissing her dog’s face. Katharine thanked the mason and bade them farewell. Then she started walking toward the hall but turned and glanced back. Mr. Smythson was still patiently listening to Ursula, who was going on about Richard and his hawks. Katharine wondered if she should try to
rescue the poor mason just as he had rescued poor Guinny—for there was no stopping Ursula once she’d launched into a rant. One of his men arrived, and as they were bowing and taking their leave, Mr. Smythson looked up at Katharine. Katharine, not quite sure what to do, smiled and then hastened to the
house.

6

he clamor of insects, metered and rhythmic, rose up from the dry brush. Katharine was standing at an open window in the library, thinking of how the trip across the sea could not have been easy for her uncle at his age. By now the queen would know Sir Edward was gone, and she would, Katharine hoped, fix her focus elsewhere.

And here was Henry, breathless, grinning, fresh from his flight up three score steps, asking for help with his Greek.

“Plutarch?” she asked, turning to him.

“Yes. ‘Julius Caesar,’” he responded.

Henry went to the leaded window on the other side of the room and pushed it open. He leaned out over the courtyard. “Martin,” he bellowed to the boy below, “get ye off your sleeping arse and get to work.” He hid behind the casement, then stuck his head out again. “Get ye off your—”

A stone came whizzing through the open window and Henry ducked. Katharine stepped back and the stone hit a chair.

“Henry, such a vulgar tongue. What would your mother say?”

As another stone shot through the window, Henry picked up a green leather-bound book and used it as a shield. Katharine swept past him and, standing with her hands on her hips, shouted, “Enough!” down at Martin, the steward’s son, who was gazing up with his hand over his eyes to block the sunlight. He hung his head when he saw her and scurried in through the scullery door. She pulled the window shut.

Henry put the dark green book back on the marble table. Then he picked it up again and opened it. “
Il Decamerone
,” he said, poking through the pages. “Italian?”

“
Sì
.
You were talking of Plutarch?”

“We read a translation of ‘Caesar’ last year, so I don’t see why we need bother . . .”

“Perhaps your new schoolmaster wants to see if you can learn from the original text. Henry, try your best. And then you are welcome to ask me. But do not reach for me first.”

“How did you come by Greek, coz?” Henry asked, dropping into a chair and swinging his legs over the wooden arms in one athletic motion. He was good on a horse and skilled with a lance, and she thought, if not for the changing times, with chivalry on the wane, he would have become an excellent knight, perhaps even made the Order of the Garter.

“Your grandfather Sir Edward taught me. It started as a game when I was your brother Thomas’s age, and then it turned out I had a head for it.”

“And Latin.”

“I had a head for that also. With the Latin, I taught myself Italian. You could, too, and then in time you could read this instead of using it as a shield.” She picked up the copy of Boccaccio’s green-leathered book and tapped him lightly on the head with it.

“My mother doesn’t have a clue about the ancients.” Henry was sitting but couldn’t keep still. He picked up a crystal globe the size of an orange from Seville and tossed it from his left hand to his right. The
translucent orb belonged to Katharine. Sir Edward had given it to her when she turned sixteen. It had the aspect of a sorcerer’s shewstone used for peering into the future.

“Your mother, Mary, knows many things of which I know nothing. It all balances,” Katharine said, her eyes following the crystal ball as Henry threw it in the air. “Henry, put that down,” she said finally. “It might shatter.”

Henry placed the crystal back in its leather box.

“In truth, cousin, who needs Greek?”

“You do, and Latin, too.”

“Well,
he
doesn’t.”

“Who?”

“Master Shakespeare.”

“Why?”

“Because he confessed to us that he doesn’t really know Greek . . . but for a bit. And Latin he says he learned but not well, for in his school it was rare that a boy went on to anything that needed it, except maybe the Church, but even that has all changed now. And, he says, everything is being translated.”

“Henry, our language is built on Latin and Greek. And French and Saxon and . . . but so many of our words come from Latin and Greek and you need, must, study them. And much history is still in Latin. Only parts of the Bible are in English—our fellow Englishmen are working hard in France translating the rest. So you still need to know Latin to know the Bible, for a few more years at least. And you need to know the Bible.” Katharine was walking back and forth in front of Henry, her little leather heels trilling across the wooden floor.

“Why?” said Henry.

She turned and faced him. “Don’t ask that, Henry. I pray you were speaking in jest.” She paused at the map of England, stretched out and pinned under glass like one of Thomas Moffett’s butterflies. Then,
placing her hands on the rosewood frame, she straightened her back as if she herself were a schoolmaster at a lectern or a priest preaching the gospel from a pulpit. “Is this Shakespeare unsound? ’Tis not his place to fill your head with such foolish thoughts.”

“He isn’t a good tutor,” Henry whispered. “He doesn’t seem . . .”

“What?”

“Learned. He makes us laugh, though. He also confessed to us that he never attended university and—”

“He likes to confess.”

“They could have found someone who had gone, maybe not to Oxford or to Cambridge on account of our faith, but to university abroad like Ned.”

“Or at least someone who kept quiet about his lack of the academe,” said Katharine.

“Exactly,” said Henry, then added, “He does sing rather well.”

“Go.” She pointed to the door. “‘Caesar’ awaits.”

Henry got up from the chair, walked past her and pulled a brown leather book down from the shelf as he was leaving.

“Henry . . .”

“What?” His back was to her.

“Sir Thomas North’s translation.” She held out her hand.

“Aw . . .” Henry turned around. He was smiling. Katharine saw he was taller than she was now. And his hair, though it still gleamed, was no longer white-blond but more the golden color of harvest rye. Henry put the book in her hand.

“Is that what you came up here for?” She replaced it on the shelf.

“I came to find you,” said Henry with mock sincerity.

“Of course. Go.”

When Henry left, Katharine drew a high-backed chair close to the window to get the full slant of sunlight. Long hours of candlelight often hurt her eyes. She had been waiting for this moment all day, and now,
tucked in a corner, hidden almost entirely by a screen of staghorn filigree and mother-of-pearl inlay, she sat in the cool shadows above the garden with the unbound pages of “Astrophil and Stella” by Sir Philip Sidney on her lap.

Sidney had come to a banquet at Lufanwal while staying with Lord and Lady Strange. Katharine was married then and lived an hour’s ride away. Less than a fortnight earlier she had suffered the loss of an unborn child, but she had forced herself to get out of bed and go to the hall that evening—not because she knew anything about Sidney, but because she had stared at the ceiling for too many days. At the time of his visit, Sidney was five and twenty, five years older than Katharine. He had left Christ Church, Oxford, without taking his degree and traveled the Continent. Young men like Sidney, like Ned, journeyed to foreign cities, while young women stayed at home.

Sir Philip Sidney had regaled the dinner guests, not with his poetry, but with his views on the purpose of poetry. He drank enough wine to launch a loud attack on a book just published called
Schoole of Abuse
by one Stephen Gosson, who thought all poets immoral and faulted them for creating unnatural desires. Gosson had, according to Sidney, in “the spirit of malice” dedicated his book to Sir Philip. “Who is this knave,” Sidney fumed, “who claims to be a scholar but is nothing more than a squire—no, a page, better a fool—in the employ of unsound ideas?
Schoole of Abuse
 . . .
he
should go back to school!” There was laughter. “I would not, I daresay, want to be a maid or page in his household, or a cow in his barn or a poor sheep in his meadow, for a man who rails against unnatural desires is most often the keeper of such fare . . .”

Katharine remembered thinking how the handsome young nobleman with dark brown curls was at one end of the spectrum and her aging husband at the other: except for a few long gray strands, her husband had lost most of his hair. He was kind, but with his days of hunting and hawking behind him he had very little to occupy him. He did not
read. He loved his three sons, who were older than Katharine, and who, like their father, were avid sportsmen. He spent most of his afternoons in their company.

She had come to Lufanwal that night still grieving for her lost child and praying she would not weep before the first meats were placed on the table, but by the time dinner had ended and she was returning home, her cloak wrapped around her shoulders and the rugs in the cart swathing her feet, she had resolved to read as much as she could. Reading was something besides stitching she could do: she would make it her vocation.