The Tutor: A Novel

by Andrea Chapin

  Dear Will,

  I pray you have rested from your travels, your pupils are happy to see you and you have returned to your verse. I believe it best if we cease our conferences. The winter is nigh, the days have shortened and my duties to the family have increased. The time has come for me to step back. It pleases me to think that my participation, these last weeks, has been worthwhile and spurred you onward. The great and good thing is you are launched. You have finished sonnets and set the stage for ‘Venus and Adonis.’ You have the conceit, the argument, the characters and their destiny—’tis all there and ’tis wondrous. Your Venus is not the goddess in Ovid or Spenser; your Venus is unto herself. We need not meet in the future. It has been a pleasure, a pleasure, indeed, and I treasure the time we have spent together. I think ’tis natural for such relationships to shift and to settle, much like the earth does over time.

  Fare thee well,

  Kate.

  She folded the paper, melted wax, stamped the seal, and handed it to Molly. “I’ll not be down today, Molly. Prithee, carry this to Master Shakespeare.”

  “Thou art tallow-faced, my lady. Mayn’t I bring a bit of ale and bread?”

  “I am dulled,” said Katharine.

  “Broth?” offered Molly.

  “I have no stomach for it.”

  Molly peered at Katharine’s face.

  “Molly, I beseech you. Do not measure me.”

  “Your humors are off, miss.”

  “Yes, I suppose they are.”

  “Your spirit has gone out.”

  “I had a night without sleep.” Katharine’s voice was quavering; she tried to keep it level but was afraid if Molly stayed one more minute she would fling herself into her maid’s arms and cry. “I will stay in my chamber and rest awhile,” she said.

  “Rest, then,” Molly said.

  When Molly was out the door, Katharine lay on her bed, placed her head under her pillows and burst into tears. She had not sobbed this heavily since she could remember. She did not understand why he ran hot one moment and cold the next. She had misread the situation. His talk of the gazing and the pleasing and the lady in London had been purposeful, instruction—he was tutoring her as to her place in his world, lest his attentions make her think otherwise.

  She was still gasping when there was a knock.

  “My lady—”

  “Molly, you can leave the food by the door.”

  “He wanted me to convey these words to you.”

  Katharine sat up. She was not expecting to hear from him with such haste. With her note, she had let him off gently. She assumed he would go away, his dalliance with her done. She wiped her eyes and pulled her covers up to her chin. “Come in,” she said.

  Molly rushed in. “He broke the seal on your letter when I was scarce out the door. I was down the path when he beckoned me back. He looked very black. Mistress, your eyes are red.”

  “Did he send a note?”

  “No, he stomped around a bit, and I waited. Then he said, ‘Tell your mistress that I want to see her.’”

  “Verily?”

  “Aye. Then I said you were taken with a spot of illness.”

  “Gramercy, Molly.”

  “And he said he would come to your chamber himself, then. Fetch you himself.”

  “He dare not.”

  “He dare.”

  “Tell him I will see him in the library when the sun has set.”

  As soon as Molly left, Katharine regretted weakening. She would avoid him. Lufanwal was large, and she would take the back stairs and stay locked in her chamber all winter if necessary. She had written the letter as a stonemason, to build a wall. Why did Will desire to see her? She tried to imagine him stomping around as Molly had described; he seemed a man too much in check, not the stomping sort. And now she had agreed to meet him.

  —

  The first thing that caught her eye was an earring in his left ear. She had not noticed it in the firelight the night before, but now with sunlight streaming through the leaded windows the gold ring glinted. She was sure when he had departed for Stratford there was no hole in his ear. How strange, she thought. She had heard adventurers like Raleigh and Drake wore earrings, the gold brought back from foreign lands, but a player, a poet, a tutor? Will did, indeed, look the rake today rather than the dandy. His flat linen collar was open at the neck and he wore no doublet. His fine red shoes had been replaced with rough leather boots. Though it was she who had not slept the night before, it was Will’s complexion that was pallid: his hair askew, his beard neglected, his sleeve untied, his polish off.

  He was sitting in Katharine’s favorite chair in the library gazing out the window when she walked through the door. She examined his profile: nose prominent like the Romans, rounded at the tip; brow a presence, shiny; hair gone at the temples, long in back; and now the earring, glinting, gold, new.

  He turned when he heard her step, and she stopped her advance. She had never seen his face so serious. His eyes, she was shocked to see, held tears.

  “I must speak with you,” he said.

  “Why? Methinks you spoke enough last night!” Katharine burst out. “If you were trying to sharpen a point, you have succeeded. We need not continue here.”

  “You have been too hasty in your decision,” he said. “Kate, I—”

  “I have brought the pages you enclosed with the gift.” She had marked his “Venus and Adonis” verse that day when all seemed so hopeful, a future brimming. She walked to where he sat and held the verse and the gloves to him. “These gloves are a thing of beauty, but I cannot take them.”

  “You are a thing of beauty, Kate.” His voice had none of the steel of the previous night; it was soft and slightly broken.

  “I am a thing of beauty now? Where is the lady from London whose beauty so bewitched you? How could the statue you carved so fully and so real last night vanish so quickly? Or perhaps your golden goddess is not flesh and blood at all, for in truth she holds a strange likeness to Dante’s donna gentile!”

  The tears, no longer lodged in Will’s eyes, now dwelt in hers. She turned from him and wandered the room, finally sitting in front of the virginals, her back to him. The spark that had prompted her to play them had been snuffed out. He came to her and sat down on the bench next to her. She could feel the warmth of his body.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  She glared at him without speaking, her hands still on her lap.

  Will had said that when a man sees his maid with another man he assumes they have couched together. She had thought the comment silly. Yet had he turned the brief unplanned moment she’d shared with Mr. Smythson into a sharing of a different sort? How utterly odd. And his anger. Was that because she had praised Mr. Smythson’s drawing? Was Will the only male allowed to circle in the orbit of art? The peacock again. The stallion.

  “Kate, your hand,” he demanded.

  She looked away but held out her right hand. He pushed his fingers between hers to spread them apart, as though the two hands were part of the same body and had come together in a clasp. He kept his hand thus entwined with hers, and at this moment she felt utterly naked; every tip of her tingled. He withdrew his hand.

  “Be still,” he said. He held one of the soft white gloves and gently, using both hands, pulled the glove onto Katharine’s fingers, as though he were dressing her, then urged the soft doeskin up over her hand. The spangles glittered, the peacock on the gauntlet shone.

  “Give me your other hand.”

  She took a deep breath and gave him her left hand. She still did not dare face him, for he was too close.

  “There,” he said. “My father made these gloves.”

  She put her gloved hands back on her lap.

  “Your letter put us at an end,” he said, “whilst methinks it marks a beginning. Kate, look at me
.”

  She turned to him.

  “I may be married but that will not prevent us from joining together.”

  Katharine nearly fell off the bench. She was not expecting these words.

  “What we have is rare, precious, a pearl. I cannot deny it. You cannot deny it,” he added.

  “And your wife?” she asked. “Is your bond with her a rare and precious pearl as well?” As far as Katharine knew, Will was married to a woman he rarely saw. She pictured his wife, stoop-shouldered and coarse, with ruddy cheeks and rough hands, a survivor of her sex, with an absent husband whose dreams of art had bewitched him. Could Will’s wife read his words? If she could, Katharine reckoned, wouldn’t he have stayed in Stratford and at this very moment wouldn’t he be dashing to meet her, showing her his verse?

  “More a common stone,” he replied.

  Katharine waited, but Will offered no more.

  “How is it,” she pressed on, “that you did not finish a sonnet or a poem before you came to Lufanwal?”

  “As you saw, I had a dozen starts, but I . . . I . . .” He paused. “I have never confided this to anyone, not even to my wife, Anne, but I was afraid if I seriously embarked on writing I would leave my family,” he blurted.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yet now you have.”

  “I suppose I have,” he said slowly, his countenance grave. “But I have found you.”

  She reddened, for she had no real family left on this earth and his words filled her heart.

  “Let us meet in the schoolroom in the future,” he said, “after the children have gone. The privacy will benefit our work. I feel anyone could wander in here at any moment. And let us meet more often. Will that serve you?”

  “Yes,” Katharine said faintly. In truth, she knew tongues would wag.

  “Excellent,” he said. The way he stared at her, she half expected him to lean over and kiss her. Instead, he shifted his gaze, placed his pages on the lid of the virginals and started to read what she had written.

  “I agree, though Adonis is a huntsman, Venus is the hunter here, the huntress, the predator. Wonderful idea,” he said, “I, too, have been pill’d.”

  I, too, have been pill’d. What did he mean by that? Who was his pillager? His wife who was eight years his elder?

  Will looked up at her; his eyes, their usual brightness, lingered. “Beautiful. Brilliant,” he said.

  Was he referring to the words scribbled on the margin, or to the woman sitting an inch from him?

  “You say here that I have not yet got fully at Venus’s passion,” he continued. “I have aimed at it, certainly.”

  “Yes, aimed, but the arrow has missed its mark.”

  “How then do I pierce the heart?”

  Katharine pulled off the glittering gloves, snatched the pages from his hand and leaned into the light.

  “Kate, methinks you are the huntress. I best be glad my fingers are still intact.”

  She glanced up. He was smiling at her.

  “The sun is shining again,” he said. “Our cloud has surely passed.”

  She wondered at his need to narrate.

  “Two lovers after a quarrel,” he said playfully.

  “Lovers?” She narrowed her eyes at him, then returned to the page and tried to focus on the words there. “Inopem me copia fecit,” she said.

  “Inopem . . . abundance . . .” He jumped from his seat and began to translate.

  “Abundance makes me want, makes me poor,” she said. “From your friend Ovid’s ‘Narcissus.’ A tree laden with fruit breaks her own boughs.”

  “’Tis good,” he said.

  “Desire creates hunger, which it cannot satiate,” she continued.

  “Venus . . .”

  “Venus to Adonis. She tells him that her kisses will not satisfy him but rather make him famished for more.” She handed his pages back to him. His gold earring caught her eye again, and she turned away.

  “You are always beautiful, Kate,” he said. He was leaning against the virginals looking at her. “But today you are more beautiful than usual, your cheeks bone-white.”

  “Perhaps my illness has made me thus,” she said, referring to Molly’s earlier lie. “I have not dusted my skin with any powder, I assure you. I have earned my pallor quite naturally.”

  “My sweet Kate, methinks you are not much accustomed to compliments,” he said. “What next?”

  “What next?” she repeated.

  “What next does our Venus say to the lovely-limbed boy?”

  “Enough of her chatter, I suppose,” Katharine said. She felt if she were another woman, Ursula perhaps, she would seize this moment, rise from her seat, place her hands on his shoulders, lean in and kiss him. But she did not move.

  “So, if she does not speak more to him, what does she do?” he asked. His voice was tender, his words slow, as if he were talking to a child, but not a child, for there was something else in them, too, a wanton tone.

  She still could not move.

  “What does she do?” he repeated quietly.

  “She snatches his hand,” she said.

  “Like you just snatched the page from my hand?”

  “She seizes his hand,” she said.

  “His palm,” he said.

  “’Tis moist.”

  “A sweating palm, there is desire there, then, on his part, too. He is no innocent,” he said.

  She waited. He gazed at her.

  “Kate, you and I are from the same skin,” he said.

  “We are?” she asked.

  “We like being alone. I to write and you to read,” he continued. “They are solitary acts. My wife loathes being alone.”

  Katharine stood and went to the fire. “But your wife is alone,” she said, turning to face him, “for you are not with her.”

  “While I am not at home she keeps herself crowded at all times. While I am at home she crowds me. My wife does bridle me.”

  “Has it always been thus?”

  “I was a lad when we wed, and after I did once or twice or thrice or maybe more find myself in a dark wood or grassy mead, reeking of mead, with other maids. In truth, the mead and the maids became my sport for a time.”

  “How long have you lived away from your children?”

  “For much of five years.”

  “You return oft?”

  “Once or twice a year, a’ times thrice.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “Nay. ’Tis my sacrifice.”

  “And theirs, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “How came you to leave?”

  “My wife was carrying a child when we wed. After Susannah was born, I was . . . how can I relate it? . . . I was in a cave. I didn’t wish to live in Stratford. I didn’t wish to follow my father into his trades or businesses, within the law or outside of it, nor copy his many gained and lost titles in our town. Brew-taster, alderman, bailiff, debtor? I had no appetite for such roles. I had not gone on to one of our great universities as my mother had intended. I wondered all the while how I did get myself into this cave, for in truth I was to marry another wench when Anne did tell me she was with child. My other lass, when she learned of the Hathaway maid from Shottery, did toss every book and every piece of clothing I owned out the window onto the busy street. The folk in Stratford still laugh over a pint at the day my britches flew through the air.

  “I was two years into my wedded bliss, when my Anne, nearing thirty, was with child again, and I took to carousing with my friends or anyone in the alehouse who would join me. I spent much time out, would bed a wench now and again. Was a lout and oft stayed away from the crowded house on Henley Street till the cocks crowed. I’d given up. One day, ’twas after noon, I awoke to find my wife standing in the doorway. Her girth was great with twins, though we didn’t know t
hat yet, and she was gazing at me. ’Tis an image I will never forget. The lantern in her eyes was out. She’d given up also. My head ached. My lids stung. It came to me whilst I lay there, the throb of mead pulsing in my head; I must leave. For that life, my dear Kate, would have been the grave for me.

  “As a boy I was taken with schooling,” he continued. “Enamored with history, Latin, marched like a good soldier through much of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but it was the poetry of Golding’s translation to which I lost my heart. I would steal myself away from the noisy house on Henley Street and lose myself in its pages. As with Pygmalion’s ivory image, once touched by Ovid I was forever changed.”

  “Would take a passing hard heart not to soften under such a stroke,” Katharine agreed.

  “I was pulled from schooling by my father’s plight and found myself at fourteen currying and cutting kid for fine gloves. Then at fifteen up hither in Lancashire at the De Hoghtons’ for a time. Then I found myself back in Stratford, tied to the town like a man on a scaffold, and I awoke one morn with three children and no Ovid . . . No Ovid! I could not live a life bereft of Ovid. I screwed my courage and left.”

  “Hence to London?” asked Kate.

  “To Durham first for a spell with a company of touring players. Then to London, where I had as many jobs in two years as my father had in ten. But the playhouses drew me and ’tis where I seemed to cling.”

  “Make you London now your home?”

  “My home for present is here. With you.”

  Kate smiled.

  He looked at the gloves he had given to her on the inlaid wood of the virginals. “Do you fancy these gloves?” he asked.

  “They are beautiful.”

  “And you will keep them?”

  “Aye.”

  “Good. They are my first gift to you.”

  “Gramercy,” she said.

  He came to where she stood. He seemed taller than usual, as though he towered over her, or maybe at this moment she felt unusually small. She looked up at him and he brought his face down to hers, but his lips did not touch her cheeks. He turned his head so that her lips softly grazed his cheek.