The Tutor: A Novel

by Andrea Chapin

  “I am surprised you are not blind,” said Katharine, pushing the needle of golden thread into the unicorn on the linen coverlet she was stitching.

  Where was Ned? Katharine wondered. They needed Ned. Matilda needed Ned. It was time for him to return. The spectacle of the witches seemed only another sign that the humors of this great house were off. Things were not as they had been, nor as they should have been.

  On the moonless night the witches were locked in the cellars, a strong wind had come up and raged howling and whistling through the great house. Molly had stayed on a pallet in Katharine’s chamber that night, but neither really slept, listening to every sound. At certain moments, Katharine heard bells, objects falling from the roof, doors closing, strange clanging, high-pitched laughter. When the sky lit up red at dawn, the mood at the hall was still dark and disturbed. Katharine stayed in her chamber but watched from above as the women were dragged out of the cellars and into the cages. The men whipped them like cattle to get them to move.

  Ursula had not dressed for the day but was sitting on her large bed without corset or farthingale in her white smock and petticoat. Every piece of fabric in Ursula’s room was blue and white—bedcover, canopy, chair seats and curtains—like the Delft pottery she had grown up with in the Low Countries. Her blond hair was down, and the pale color framing her face gave her a rather witchlike appearance. She had always been small, but her face and arms had thinned of late. And today Katharine noticed the bones below Ursula’s neck protruded in a sharp and alarming manner.

  Ursula’s spaniel Guinny stole the ball of gold thread out of the basket at Katharine’s feet. The little dog ran under the women’s dresses with her prize and broke Ursula’s spell. Joan and Isabel chased Guinny around and finally wrested the wad of thread from her teeth. Then she scampered out the door, and the women, except for Ursula, bent their heads over their work.

  “I am done,” Katharine announced, tying the last knot of gold thread.

  Isabel and Joan hopped up from their seats to look.

  “Let’s spread it out,” Isabel said.

  The girls took the corners and pulled the linen taut.

  “Oh, Katharine, ’tis beautiful,” said Isabel.

  “Every stitch so even and so fine,” said Joan.

  “The likeness is so real,” said Isabel. “Methinks the lovely animal is alive and will jump with cloven hooves from its garden of flowers and birds into Ursula’s chamber this very second. The golden mane seems to move. You have sewn spangles in it! How brilliant!” she cried.

  At the sound of a woman’s scream, everyone looked up. Katharine tried to figure out from where the hysterical noise was coming. It was getting closer. Footsteps . . . running. Ursula’s maid Audrey burst into the room carrying Guinny. Mary, dressed in somber gray with a simple white collar, came through the door behind her. Bright yellow pus bubbled from the dog’s mouth and the pup howled and panted.

  Ursula shrieked, jumped from her bed, rushed over and grabbed Guinny; the little dog spewed yellow ooze over her white petticoat. Moments before, Guinny had run through the room with gold thread streaming from her mouth; now she shuddered and shook, the sad little body a tempest of limbs. Ursula was still shrieking when Matilda entered, followed by Molly, who dashed in with a servant from the stable. Blood dripped from Guinny’s mouth. The pup looked like she was on a rack—her body twisting and tortured. The howling changed from whimpering to gurgling. Then the little dog went limp—her eyes wide with terror.

  Ursula stopped screeching. The women stared at the still body. The turn of events was so strange that everyone in the chamber, including Harold, who had just walked in, was utterly silent—until Ursula started breathing very quickly. She let go of the little body and it fell to the floor with a thud, its eyes wide open, its paws now sticking straight out. Ursula started wiping the blood and yellow vomit from her white smock, her hands brushing the stains over and over and over again.

  Mary went to Ursula. “There, there, my dear,” she said, putting her arms around her. “Come to my chamber while they take poor Guinny away.” Mary’s hair was pulled tight in a black caul. She seemed, in her new faith, to have lost any softness she once had; even her “There, there, my dear,” sounded sharp rather than soothing, more tooth than tongue.

  Ursula bent down, picked up her dead dog and started moaning and crying and kissing it. Harold strode over to her and with his good arm grabbed the thing by the throat. Ursula started hitting him on the head and on the back as he turned away.

  “No!” she said, following him. “No! No! No!” Her fingernail somehow snagged the skin of his cheek, for a red line appeared with drops of blood.

  In one swift movement, Harold dropped the dead dog into the arms of the stableman, turned around and slapped Ursula in the face, twice. The dog’s violent demise was the first shock to those standing in Ursula’s Delft chamber, and Harold’s slapping her face the second. He stalked out of the room.

  Mary’s face was composed. She began petting Ursula’s blond unbound tresses with swift little strokes, as though Ursula herself were a dog.

  “’Tis the witch who did it!” screamed Ursula, a red welt rising on her cheek. “The witch! She bewitched Guinny!”

  “The witches have gone, dear,” said Mary.

  “But she looked at me! And my eyes, they felt a thousand stabs.”

  “Were you not in your chamber when they were brought in?” asked Matilda, concern creasing her brow.

  “I went down. I wanted to see them.” Ursula was sobbing now.

  Matilda crossed herself and murmured a prayer. Mary led the gasping Ursula to her bed and dismissed the servants as well as Katharine, Isabel, Joan and Matilda. Matilda did not put up a fight. With her ancient bloodlines, Matilda had a regal bearing, but there was a new frailty to her bones and a resignation in her gait Katharine had never seen before. Her shoulders had lost their meat over the last year and were slightly stooped.

  When Richard returned from hawking he found his wife weeping with several servants around her. At supper Katharine heard that, after the lifeless dog was taken from Ursula and she was put to bed, they had brought trays of food from the kitchens, and cider, sack, wine, then mead, but she would have none. She had, it was said, cried less when her infant had died several years ago. Ursula did not pay particular attention to her living children. Nurses brought the three younger children to her once in the morning and once before bed. But her dog was a different story. She was rarely without Guinny. While Sir Edward presided, Ursula was forbidden to keep the dog on her lap while dining—hounds were allowed to eat scraps in the room but not at the table—but the day Edward left, Ursula made a point of feeding the dog from her lap during dinner and had done so ever since. And now Guinny, named after Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife, was in the cold earth, and Ursula was inconsolable. Katharine did not want to believe the strange death had anything to do with magic, but what had befallen the poor dog was most puzzling.

  The creaking convoy of cages making its way down the hill was not the last they saw of the witches, for in spite of the chains and the bars made of brambles, somehow the youngest one, the armless Susan, had broken free that day when the horses stopped for water. When a messenger arrived with the news, the house went into an uproar, with doors barred and the men sent onto the grounds to keep watch. A day later, the woman was found cowering in the hawk mews, naked. No one wanted to touch her, for fear of spells and enchantments, so they bolted the doors from the outside and waited for men from the jail to come get her. She was still alive when they took her out in a falcon cage, her body doubled over and her head pushed next to her feet.

  —

  Molly was bent over a wooden tablet with the alphabet, the numbers from zero to nine and the Lord’s Prayer covered by a thin plate of horn. Katharine had borrowed the hornbook from the schoolroom. They were working through “A per se A, B per se B, C pe
r se C . . .” Katharine stood by the fire and looked out the window. The November light had dimmed, the day cut short by the coming winter.

  “’Tis your saint’s day,” said Molly as she carefully formed the letter H.

  “’Tis,” said Katharine.

  “’Tis perfect for you. Saint Katharine was as learned as any lad, mayhap more learned.”

  “She knew her Greek.”

  “She refused to wed,” said Molly.

  Katharine remained gazing out the window.

  “Ursula thinks the witch did make a hex on her and her dog,” said Molly. “But I heard the men at the stables talking, and they said ’twern’t a witch’s curse that caused Guinny’s death.”

  “Not ’twern’t, Molly, best to say, They said it was not a witch’s curse.”

  “They said it was not a witch’s curse that caused Guinny to quiver and quake and puke up all her guts,” said Molly. “They said it was poison plain as can be.”

  “Poison?”

  “A strong’un.”

  “A strong one. Try to separate your words. Perhaps Guinny got into the poison somehow, thinking it was food.”

  “Or maybe someone poisoned the pup,” said Molly.

  “Who would poison a pup?” asked Katharine, but she was only half listening. Will wanted to meet with Katharine in the old chapel-cum-schoolroom.

  “A mean type would,” said Molly. “’Twould take a stone for a heart, that’d be cruel to a poor defenseless pup.”

  “You don’t think Guinny was bewitched, then?”

  “Methinks most oft the old shrews tagged as witches are the same as that poor pup. They tried to chain my grandma’s sister for a witch, and the family that pointed at her was crazier than she! They were wretched folk, soiled and cheap and ugly as boils.”

  “But she was innocent?”

  “Aye, she was. All she done was be so poor that she was starvin’ and had to beg a bit of bread and ale. They turned her away and she then done curse at them, and the next day one did fall into a peat pit and die, and then they said she’d put a spell on them, but she was blessed ’cause she died before they could drag her to trial.”

  “Perhaps it was a broken heart that caused her death,” said Katharine.

  Molly looked up from her quill and stared at Katharine. “A broken heart? No. She was just old. Nothin’ had broken her heart. Everythin’ all right, my lady?”

  Katharine sighed. “I must go out, Molly. Stir the fire and stay here, if you can, and try to finish your letters.”

  When Katharine pushed open the schoolroom door, she was surprised to find Will already seated. Usually he was late and she had to wait for him. She wondered if his need to make an entrance had something to do with his vocation as a player. The stage. The torches. The audience. Ned had told her of going to a large playhouse in London on the Bankside in Southwark—a real cannon was shot off during the play, and the roar of the crowd from a nearby bear-baiting pit drowned out the words of the players.

  The fire was stacked full of wood, the flames reaching high into the chimney. The room was warm. Perhaps Will had tutored the boys in the morning and then never left. He was dressed all in black—doublet, breeches and hose. The lack of color in his attire made him look serious and severe.

  “Kate,” he said.

  His voice was tender; she felt it on her skin.

  “Your costume bespeaks a change of church,” she said.

  “I have witnessed too many changes of church for one lifetime. Every day, it seems,” he said, coming to where she stood at the door. He took the cloak from her shoulders.

  “The Puritans favor grim hues,” she said. “Black suits you. Peacock plumes compete with your colorful intelligence.”

  He bowed. The black did make his face more striking than usual.

  “Let us look at your ‘Venus and Adonis.’ I have questions and ideas.” She sat down on the bench.

  “A woman of business,” he said, sitting next to her.

  She looked at him and smiled. “Comparing Venus’s hunger for Adonis to bugs feasting on the flesh of a deer sucks the beauty from the moment.”

  “I spent a whole morning on those lines.” He jumped up and started pacing.

  “Venus may have a strong appetite, but we must still love her.”

  “I like a lady with a strong appetite . . .”

  “Instead of bugs, maybe Venus can be like a bird.”

  “A buzzard?”

  “No.” Katharine burst out laughing.

  “I like a lady with a strong laugh. Oh, Kate, I should just take you here and now.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she said. Perhaps she’d heard him wrong. She took a deep breath.

  “Why not a buzzard?” he asked.

  “A buzzard would paint the same horrid picture as bugs. Why not an eagle?”

  He walked to the fire, then to the side of the table where she sat, and sat next to her on the bench again. She was acutely aware of how close their bodies were, but not an arm, nor an elbow, touched.

  “A hungry eagle . . .” he said.

  “Much better,” she said.

  “You are right, though I loathe to part with my munching maggots.”

  “Why does Adonis stay with Venus yet turn his head?” she asked. “What keeps him by her side if he thinks her kisses, as you wrote, murderous? Instead of welcoming a woman robust in her attentions, fearless in her actions, Adonis thinks Venus immodest, her behavior amiss. He could easily push the fair goddess away. He is not tethered to her. He is free to go. Why does he not leave?”

  “Conflict.”

  “Between the two?”

  “Within him.”

  “The pair’s connection is complex,” she offered.

  “I like complex connections,” he said. His face was not a hand’s length from hers.

  Minutes before, their dialogue had felt like a lure; now it was a trap. She pointed to the next page. “’Tis very good.”

  “I get a ‘very good’ today. What happened to ‘’tis brilliant’?”

  “Bear-baiting, bull-baiting, flattery-baiting, cockfighting. The sporting world of men does make me cringe. I’ve suggested changes,” she said.

  He took the paper from her hands. “Your words are better in most cases, perhaps in all,” he said.

  He began to read aloud. She stared down at the lines on the paper as he spoke, words he had wrought and she had rendered. As he read, her words became his words, and his words became her inward voice.

  “‘Look how a bird lies tangled in a net . . .’”

  Will sat so near that she could feel his breath on her skin.

  “‘So fasten’d in her arms Adonis lies . . .’”

  For a second Katharine turned her head to watch him, but then she looked back down at the page. By the time he reached the words “she cannot choose but love” she felt her whole being well up. She stared at the verse, but under the table she dug the fingernails of her left hand into the palm of her right hand.

  “‘Till he take truce with her contending tears,’” he read, “‘which long have rain’d, making her cheeks all wet . . .’”

  She breathed evenly and kept stabbing with her nails, not caring if she drew blood, because anything was better than tears at this moment.

  He finished with: “‘And one sweet kiss shall pay this comptless debt.’”

  Katharine did not look at him. While in her chamber, she had read the stanzas, indeed she had reordered lines and pruned words, but she had not been overtaken by them then as she was now.

  “You have used the word shame four times in fourteen stanzas. It repeats and repeats. Can you not think of another word?” Her face was hot, her voice trembled. She grabbed her cloak and hurried to the door. He sprang off the bench and followed her. She turned to him, her eyes w
ide.

  “Fare thee well?” he said, a question.

  She did not answer him, nor did she put her cloak on, but pushed out into the early evening, and raced down the path to the hall, eyes brimming. Once in her chamber, she flung herself on her bed, the rain of tears making her cheeks all wet.

  Soon there was a knocking at the door. “Mistress, I have a note for you,” called Molly.

  Katharine wiped her face with her shawl, but she could not stanch her tears. She let Molly in.

  “He wants to know your state. He insists on knowing. A hound on a hunt, he is.” Molly handed her the letter.

  “Did he ask you that?”

  “No, he done wrote it.”

  “I won’t be down for supper, Molly,” Katharine said, then realized what Molly had said. “You read his words!”

  “I guess I have. Beg mercy.”

  “All your hard work and you are reading now. Pray don’t tell him anything.”

  “Yes, my lady. I’ll keep me mouth mum. He is no friend.”

  “Why do you say that? He is a friend.”

  “A friend wouldna make you weep and such. Can I bring you some broth?”

  “No broth, thank you. I need to be alone is all.”

  Molly left, but scarce a half hour had passed when she was again knocking at the door.

  “Molly, I need to rest. Please do not worry,” she called.

  “Katharine.” The voice on the other side of the wood was not Molly’s. “Katharine.”

  She wiped her eyes one more time and then opened the door. Matilda, whose eyes looked as red and watered as Katharine’s, walked in. She was dressed in her smock and a worn black velvet dressing gown. Her hair was down and uncovered. Katharine could count on one hand how many times over the years Matilda had come to her chamber.

  “You have heard,” Matilda said. Her voice was edged with anger.

  “Heard what?” said Katharine.

  “You have been weeping.” It sounded like an attack.

  “Yes. But I have heard nothing.”