The Tutor (7 page)

Sir Edward was so taken with Sidney, he had encouraged his charming guest to write a book that defended poetry, and now Katharine wondered if he ever had. She’d never encountered Sidney again, but she’d followed the stories of him. He’d been a darling at Elizabeth’s court for a while—the fate of all handsome smart nobles—and lingering there, he had become an unabashed anti-papist; so many poets were, all playing into the queen’s silky hands—a prioress with her coterie of favorites. How could any young man at court refuse such adoration from a queen? Until, of course, her blood thinned to him, and she found something upon which to unleash her fury—that he was betrothed to a woman of whom she didn’t approve; or perhaps the young lord or earl was too passionate about her Protestant Church or not passionate enough; or maybe he’d cooled on Her Majesty’s endless battles with Ireland and the money and lives spent there—reports continually came from Ireland that yet another soldier or settler’s throat had been cut; or he voiced a political point which she thought either futile or dangerous, or he had too much hubris or he had too little. It seemed all too often the queen’s displeasure with these young men was a whim. Whatever the reason, one by one she tossed each one of them out—sometimes wooing them back again, other times chopping off their heads.

Sidney was two and thirty when, in a battle in the Netherlands, a
musket ball in his thigh took his life. All of England mourned. He was given a funeral fit for a king. As far as Katharine knew, now four years since the gravediggers lowered him to rest, no printer had yet issued a volume of Sidney’s words. His sister Mary Sidney Hubert, the Countess of Pembroke, tirelessly copied his poetry in beautiful curling black script—the busywork of a woman’s hands, like needlework or lace-making—and passed it around to family and friends. A cousin had sent a copy of his sonnet cycle to Katharine.

Katharine had read sonnets in Italian: Dante and Petrarch. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Wyatt had both tried their hands at the form in English, but the sonnet—with its prescribed syllables, meters and lines—was still relatively new to England. She held the paper up to the light and read Sidney’s first sonnet once, twice, three times. Here was a whole story in fourteen lines! Sidney’s language was graceful, marked with emotion, yet muscular and utterly masculine; he was able to get at the truth of the moment. “Great with child to speak . . . Biting my truant pen . . .” His images were thrilling, and at the same time simple and direct. “Beating myself for spite . . .” The tension grew between the meter and the speech, and then the last line rode the crest of a wave and trumped the rest of the poem. “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”

She read it again. His words affected her bodily. They seemed to leap from the paper directly into her veins. This intense, and only the first of many poems in Sidney’s cycle—she was not sure she could live through the rest of it. She tried to calm herself, tried to breathe evenly. She sat very still. It was silly, but that was the way she was, the way she always had been. Words did this to her.

Someone entered the library. She peeked through the tiny holes between the carved ivy leaves in the screen.

She saw the broad shoulders first. As he examined the volumes, he did not round his back but kept it surprisingly even, bending from the waist.
He wore no doublet, no jerkin, but a simple white tunic, the sleeves blooming round his wrists. He pulled out books, glanced through them, put them back on the shelves. She did not move but watched him. He was searching for something. The air was warm, but she shivered, and just as the straight-backed visitor pulled out a dark red volume with gilt tooling, she sneezed.

He spun around, book in hand. “God bless you.”

Katharine was silent.

“A favorable sign from the gods, say the Greeks,” he continued.

She sneezed again.

“God bless you. Twice blessed by the gods. And twice blessed by me . . .” He walked up to the screen and leaned in close—a priest awaiting her confession? She felt his breath, and from his skin was a hint of herbs, of lavender or rosemary. How unusual for a man not to smell like a horse.

“You think it a blessing? More would have it that my sneeze augurs death,” she said.

“Then twice blessed by me . . . to protect you from such an end.”

He walked around the screen and stood in front of Katharine. Again she was struck by his insolence. He was no lord, yet his carriage spoke otherwise. He had practiced, perhaps, for years in front of a looking glass. She heard from Ursula he had come to Lancashire from mucking about in theaters in London and that his father was a glover in Warwickshire: no noble lineage this—making skins for the hands from other skins.

He stood as if waiting for something. She stared at him, not knowing what to say next.

“Twice blessed by me,” he repeated.

“So, a giver of blessings. Art thou God?” She rose from her seat. She wanted to walk out of the room, but this man, this Shakespeare, stood in her way.

“A plain gramercy would do.”

“I’ll thank God,” she said.

“A lady I once knew, not my wife,” he continued, “told me a sneeze is akin to what a woman feels when she is . . .” He paused, leaned in close to her and lowered his voice. “When she is in the throes of Eros.”

Katharine slapped him. He did not step back but put his hand on his cheek, his eyes steady on her. When she saw a grin appear on his face, she raised her hand to hit him on the other cheek, but he caught her wrist and held it. Yanking her wrist from his grasp, she calculated her exit. In the throes of Eros, indeed! She had heretofore only been in the grasping arms of a juddering old man.

“How fares my lady?” Shakespeare asked, his voice now supple.

She glared at him. Any other swain of his station would have, after such a cuffing, bowed so low his nose touched the ground, begged a thousand pardons, and scurried out the door.

“I’ll with the Greeks align,” he said, no longer closing in on her but with a timbre now light and open and sunny, “that good will come, not death. Odysseus’s son, when his father returned home dressed as a beggar . . .”

“Sneezed?”

“Yes. And Penelope laughed, was hopeful again.”

Katharine wondered if the quick manner in which he jumped from one subject to another—Mercury’s swift flight from place to place—was a sign that he was mad. Had anyone at the hall checked his previous employ? “So you read Greek?” she asked.

He bowed. “I am a schoolmaster. And a poet.” He bowed again.

“And you read Latin.”

“Of course.”

“How learned you are.”

“More than many, less than some.”

“And what Greek are you teaching your pupils now? Aristotle?”

“No. The man in the marble chair.”

“His seat culled from the quarries of Paros,” she said, “Mestrius Plutarchus.”

“You know of him?”

“A master of history and a priest at the temple of Apollo in Delphi.”

“You know
of
him,” he said. “For I cannot assume you’ve read Plutarch—he’s far too rigorous a regimen for your fair sex. There are no knights, no maidens, no love songs. Though, fairly, there is much from him that women can learn, for he is not as much a chronicler of history—though war, death, valor, all walk upon his stage—as he is an examiner of character, a physic to mankind, in search of the pieces of the puzzle of men.”

“The puzzle of men. You are a poet.”

“A poet of mankind.”

“Ah. A poet of mankind. What a princely title. And do you fancy that men puzzle women?”

“Women puzzle men in that we know not what you are or how you work.”

“But in the last grain of sand, you spoke of the puzzle of men. I am puzzled. Are you now changing it to the puzzle of women? Do you include women in this riddle? As the puzzled or the puzzlers?”

“I—”

“Or is it that we women have our hands full of womanly things, of babies and stitching? And thus our minds are too weak to worry about how to put all the pieces of the great manly puzzle back together again. How lucky Master Plutarch was, with his powerful puzzling head, to have time to sit upon his marble chair. No babies crying to suckle at his breast, no children to wash or to put to bed or to cool their feverish brows.” Katharine sat down again and straightened Sidney’s pages on her lap; then turned them over so the ink was hidden from his sight.

“I would not—” he began.

“I suppose to complete the puzzle of man is an impossible task. Since the Garden, when poor Adam lost a rib, brought an end to any manly order. Was Eve up at night wide-eyed with worry that by gaining a rib—or is your history that she stole it?—she forever rendered the puzzle of men incomplete?” A newly sharpened blade would have been duller than her tone.

He backed away, leaned against the windowsill, the open air behind him. “I dare not presume that a woman—”

“My good sir, you have already presumed too much. But I’ve forgotten, you are the self-anointed poet of mankind and are used to such presumptions.” Katharine jumped up and pushed past him, Sidney’s sonnets now rolled in her hand like a club. “Which life are your young men studying?” she asked.

“‘Julius Caesar,’” he answered.

He was following her across the room. She was heading for the door.

“And they can read it?” she asked.

“They are at different levels. And they translate,” he said to her back.

“From the Greek to English.”

“Yes.”

“And when they make mistakes, you correct them?” She finally turned to look at him.

“I read Greek,” he said.

The dark red leather book with shafts of wheat engraved in gold at its edges was now behind his back. He obviously did not read Greek well, for he had pulled a translation of Plutarch from the shelf.

“I’d venture to say you speak Greek,” she said, spitting out the words.

“I speak Greek and—” He stopped mid-sentence when she waved her hand to cut him off.

She meant he spoke nonsense, but he had taken her literally. She rolled her eyes toward the heavens. “And you also read our fair language . . .”

“English? Yes, fairly. Our Saxons may have been fair of hair, but
their tongue was dark and brutish. When William conquered our lands, he brought a fairer, lighter lilt.”

“So when your students exchange Greek for English, do they use other texts to aid them or are they on their own?”

“The beauty of Plutarch is that he writes of character, of qualities, of the person first, the event second. Lessons we can all learn from . . .”

“So you said. But you have not answered my question. Are your students allowed to use another text to help them in their translation?”

“No.”

“So you must be truly a master, then, to sit with their ink scratches barely dry and read their creations.”

“Their translations. I am a schoolmaster.”

“Yes, a master, but of what I cannot tell.” Katharine stopped at the door and, facing him, pointed to the book he was holding with both hands behind his back. “That is Amyot’s Plutarch in French—you, I assume, want Sir Thomas North’s Englished version,” she said, pulling the brown leather binding from the shelf and handing the book to him.

Without waiting for a reply, she charged through the door. She felt like laughing but was afraid the sound would come out of her mouth in gales. At the end of the next room, when she was out of his sight, she picked up her skirts and ran.

7

ad they fallen to the floor? She pushed her skirts and bone farthingale to the side, got down on her hands and knees and looked under her bed. They were not there. Nor were they on the table, in the oak cupboard or under her pillows. She hoped to dear God that her maid Molly hadn’t thought they were rubbish and thrown them in the fire.

Sir Edward’s library was on the second floor, with two doors at opposite ends of the long room, one opening to a staircase and the other to a withdrawing chamber and several guest quarters. There was no central corridor in this part of the house, so Katharine retraced her steps with candle in hand, through one guest chamber and then another. The rooms boasted broad beds with fringed canopies trunked by oak pillars of carved thistles, ivy and doves. She passed windows framed in teal, emerald, gold and damask. The chambers of the grandest suite were elegant enough for a king, and indeed Henry VI had slept there.