The Tutor (9 page)

He grimaced. “Furniture? To write words in rhyme is an art, madam; to rend them, beat them into submission, is a sin.”

Katharine crossed her arms, a nurse scolding a child. “He’s done no violence. His words are beauty. His feeling pure. What right have you to mock him?”

“‘In truth, oh Love, with what a boyish kind . . .’” he recited. “‘Yet
of that best thou leav’st the best behind.’” He grinned. “Is he musing on his fair Stella’s behind? I should hope, after he compared her features to nature’s furniture, he has at least the grace to praise her buttocks.”

She could have sworn, with a movement as quick as a cut to a quill, he peeked at her backside. This fellow’s rudeness had no bounds.

“I’ll not listen to you dismantle one of the world’s most gifted poets,” she lectured, “who if he had not died so young—”

“Aye, the mantle of such greatness hangs heavy upon his poor soul. What he hath writ, my dear, stands separate from pity. Another poet down. A playwright dies every week, it seems, yet one Sir Poet takes lead in his leg and the whole world stands still. I cannot weep because I cannot follow where this poet leads. A maze of language, with trees scarce cut to fit, stops me at every turn.”

“‘Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show . . .’” She recited the first sonnet in the cycle. “His path is easy. You cannot follow it?”

“You are more nimble than I. Perhaps you’ve not read far enough to get lost in his woods. I read all. The songs, too. A woman, it seems, by your fair example, is not the weaker sex with Sidney.” He waved his hand in mock surrender. “Yet a man must have stamina, perseverance and strength to couch with him.”

“And you are not such a man?”

“With him? I have tried and I have failed.”

“You are jousting with a dead man because you cannot come close to his wit, nor his rhyme, nor his meter, and that angers you. I don’t pity Sidney. I pity you!”

He smiled, keeping her eyes in check with his, and declaimed,
“‘But with your rhubarb words you must contend,’” and then in a melodramatic voice, “‘To grieve me worse, in saying that desire
/
Doth plunge my well-form’d soul even in the mire
/
Of sinful thoughts, which do in ruin end’? Many a sugar’d sentence doth your fair Sidney pen. The sweetness, I suppose, counteracts the rhubarb, or perhaps counterattacks it.
’Tis not his ‘sinful thoughts’ that ‘do in ruin end,’ but ’tis his insufferable rhymes.” He took the roll of Sidney’s sonnets from his belt and handed them to Katharine. “I have no more use for these.”

“The envy you wear upon your sleeve does not become you,” she said. “Find a glass and gaze at the image there.”

“‘Oh no, her heart is such a citadel, / So fortified with wit, stored with disdain, / That to win it, is all the skill and pain . . .’ Dear lady, to write that is all the pain and no skill.”

He seemed to have read all one hundred and eight sonnets and memorized a good portion of them, though he’d only had them for less than three days. She’d heard of people who read something once and held pictures of every single word in their mind, so they could recall not only lines but whole poems without ever having to study them again. Perhaps he was one of those.

He chuckled. “Sidney vexes me. A few stanzas inspire envy, yes, but sonnet after sonnet of eyes beaming and gleaming. Oh, and the dreary repetition of ‘Stella’s rays’ and the dull ‘two stars in Stella’s face.’” He paused and looked into Katharine’s eyes. “Could he not think of a better image for beautiful eyes? Something to do with heaven, perhaps? His pen too often marks with ‘dribbed shot,’ to steal a phrase from the master himself. ‘Desire, mire, sake, slake, same, shame’ . . . come, now, even I could do better than that. Love and virtue, love and virtue . . . up and down, a seesaw, again and again, how tedious.”

“Then do it.” She glared at him.

“What?”

“Have you ever tried to write a sonnet? Have you one hundred and eight tucked under your bed? Or perhaps they are the stuffing of which your bed is made!”

“I certainly have written . . .” He put his blade in his belt. He stared at her, his eyes steady. “I—”

“Oh, I mustn’t forget,” she continued. “You are the self-anointed poet
of mankind. Do you actually put those quills to paper, or do you just spend your hours carving up feathers and poets alike, poets who have created whole books, whole worlds?” All of a sudden she felt faint and leaned against the tree. “The smoke . . .” she began but did not finish.

He moved to her, but she put her hands up to stop him from coming closer.

“’Tis nothing,” she said, straightening herself and walking to a stone bench. She was mortified that she and this glove-maker’s son were in plain sight, for the windows of the household above were prime seats for viewing. She wished she’d never ventured down from the library.

“Where did you come by your learning?” he said when she was seated. He remained on foot.

It was the first time she’d heard the tutor utter a word that did not sound choreographed, and she was as much taken aback by what he said, that he had asked about her, as by his tone, which had lost its edge and was gentle.

“Sir Edward,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. If her uncle were at the hall, she would have leaned on his warmth to shield her from the man who stood before her.

Shakespeare nodded. “Sir Edward was a scholar. The walls lined with books, which I have started to plunder. I thought a father, or a brother, or a husband had sat you down with a hornbook.”

“Sir Edward
is
a scholar. He
is
still with us, though for a time abroad.”

One black crow landed in the garden, and then another and another. It wasn’t the rooks, for they hadn’t returned, but carrion crows, their beaks black and stout. Shakespeare waved his arms at the cackling tribe and shooed them away.

“And no one sat me down with anything,” Katharine said.

“How came you to live at Lufanwal?” he asked, sitting on the bench next to her.

“I was brought as a child, when my parents and my brother and sister perished. I married and moved five leagues from here. My husband died and I returned. ’Tis not a complicated history.”

“A child robbed of parents is always complicated—a hollow in the heart that endures. The plague?” he asked.

“A fire,” she replied, her tone sharp, scorning his softness.

She looked away and felt a touch on the scar on the back of her neck. The movement was so swift, so light, such a feather of unfathomable liberty, that in an instant she convinced herself she’d imagined it, that indeed it was the breeze that had skimmed her skin, not his finger. Yet in a flash the contact wreaked havoc on her flesh, moving down into the depths of her body. She was relieved to hear voices—though at this moment Ursula’s high-pitched giggle was unwanted music. Katharine rose from the bench.

Ursula swept across the brown grasses, gathering dry leaves in the hem of her full red skirt as she walked. She was with her brother-in-law Harold and the master mason who had saved her little dog. Harold began to introduce Katharine, gesturing with his right arm, the hand of his shorter arm hidden in the fold of his doublet.

“Katharine met Mr. Smythson when he rescued Guinny from Richard’s horrid hawk,” interrupted Ursula.

Mr. Smythson bowed his head but not his body. He ran his fingers through his hair in an effort to keep his dark curls out of his face. His mop was as unruly as the hair on the sculpture of Laocoön Ned had sketched and sent from Italy.

Harold presented the tutor last. “Walter Shakespeare, our new schoolmaster up from Stratford.”

“William Shakespeare,” Ursula corrected.

Shakespeare bowed deeply.

“We are considering some changes to the hall,” continued Harold, his
cropped light red hair and neatly trimmed beard making a sharp contrast to the rough-hewn appearance of Mr. Smythson, whose leather jerkin was stained and who wore no proper doublet underneath.

“Richard and I are to have our own set of chambers,” said Ursula. “With Sir Edward away, we think it’s time to make additions. We are to have our own wing. We’ve been crowded in the back for too long.”

Katharine wondered if the departure of Sir Edward had given birth to Ursula’s interest in the shape of the house. The black crows in the garden masked nothing of their greedy nature when they attacked the berry trees and busied themselves in thieving. Was Ursula perhaps a bird of a similar feather?

“I met a Smythson in London,” said Shakespeare. “He creates scenery for theaters. He is a magician.”

“My brother,” said Mr. Smythson, nodding.

“Ah,” said William. “A family of magicians.”

Katharine could not gauge whether Shakespeare’s comment was a compliment or an insult.

“I’m no magician,” said Mr. Smythson. “Merely an artificer. A stonemason by trade. Not skilled at sleight, never have been.”

“Your houses are splendid,” Ursula said with a sigh. “This marvelous man is largely responsible for Sir John Thynne’s beautiful home at Longleat. And he did the renovation of Sir Matthew Arundell’s castle in Wiltshire. Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire is one of his masterpieces, and recently he’s been quite taken up with the Earl of Shrewsbury—”

Harold cut Ursula off. “We are flattered that the talented Mr. Smythson has taken time away from his many projects and duties to look over our humble cottage here,” he said.

Mr. Smythson nodded and squinted his brown eyes at Harold in what seemed a smile but might have been a grimace. Perhaps, Katharine thought, it was hard for the builder to be in this circle of strangers; maybe stones were easier for him than people. Shakespeare whispered
something to Ursula. He was as nimble with his attention as he was with his words.

“Pray pardon, I must leave,” Katharine said. Her voice was higher than usual, and sounded artificial even to herself.

Katharine tipped her head but did not bid a proper farewell. In truth, the tutor-poet addled her, and she needed to escape. She left by way of the orchard and the chapel and continued walking. As she passed the barns, she saw the milkmaid Mercy. When Mercy curtsied low, Katharine noticed something dangling between her ample breasts.

“Ho, there, lass, what have you round your neck?” she asked, pointing to the small discs.

“I . . . I . . .” the girl stuttered.

“What?”

“I found ’em on the floor ’neath the birds, my lady, yonder,” she said, nodding in the direction of the mews.

Katharine couldn’t help but notice how Mercy had grown from a girl to a young woman. She had curves now, her broad hips filling her skirt.

“Give them to me,” said Katharine.

Mercy hurriedly pulled off the cord with the wax discs. “I didna mean no harm, my lady. They were in the hay.”

“Do you know what these are?”

“No’m.”

“They are what priests wear. They have been blessed by the Pope. What were you doing there?” She did not question her further. She could imagine what Mercy might be doing in the hay in the hawk house. No doubt some lad had taken her in there for a doddle.

“Get along, now,” Katharine said to the girl, who curtsied low again before she fled.

Father Daulton had said the priests from Rome rarely carried Agnus Deis anymore, for they broke any disguise the instant they were discovered. The wax discs impressed with the Paschal Lamb had been outlawed
by the Parliament close to twenty years before as “popish trumperies,” and the punishment for wearing them was death.

Katharine had heard tales of the miracles worked by Agnus Deis. Once, during Lent, an elderly lady was at death’s door. An Agnus Dei was hung around her neck, and that instant she recovered her voice and memory, and the following day she was perfectly cured—to the great confusion of her heirs, who, having prematurely taken away her possessions, were forced to bring them back.

Whose Agnus Deis were these, and why were they on the floor of the hawk house? They had to belong to a priest. Were they Father Daulton’s? Perhaps one of the birds had found them and brought them in its beak. Or Richard had taken the wax discs from Father Daulton’s neck when he found him dead? If so, why leave them in the hawk house? Katharine would have taken the blessed medallions directly to Sir Edward, but his chair was still empty. On her way up the stairs, she met Mary going down.

“I met one of the milkmaids outside, and she was wearing these around her neck.” Katharine held the Agnus Deis up to Mary. “She found them in the hay.”

Mary’s eyes widened. “I wonder why Richard would hide these in the hay.”

“I don’t know that they were hidden,” Katharine said, thinking it odd that Mary had assumed Richard had hidden the Agnus Deis.

“Next thing, someone will find a bloody dagger in there, and then the tongues will surely wag! Get rid of them with haste. Throw them in the river.”

Katharine continued to her chamber, resolved to lock the discs in a chest under her bed.

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