Katharine’s eyes filled with tears—for the first time that day. She had not yet wept for Edward.
“Pray pardon, I did not mean to—” Mr. Smythson broke off midsentence and walked toward her. As he walked by the table, his bag caught the little box with the crystal ball that young Henry had tossed in the air that afternoon months ago and now, with the swipe of Mr. Smythson’s leather satchel, the box and ball flew off the table. The ball landed on the hearthstone and shattered. “Fie! I am a clod,” he said. He knelt down and started to pick up the pieces.
Katharine rose, still swathed in Edward’s robe. “Leave it be, Mr. Smythson. You’ll cut yourself. I’ll call for the steward.”
Mr. Smythson continued until he picked up all the shards. Then he stood, his large hand holding the jagged but beautiful bits he had gathered—an offering. There was nothing dainty about his hands. His knuckles were big, his fingers rough with calluses, his nails torn and lined with dirt. As Katharine came to him, she took a sheet of paper from the table. “Prithee, place them here,” she said.
He emptied his hand onto the paper.
“You see,” she said. “You have cut yourself.”
There was blood on a finger of his left hand.
“No matter,” he said, “my hands are my tools and get battered about. They are not, I’m afraid, the hands of a gentleman.” He grinned and popped the finger into his mouth and sucked on it, while running his other hand through his dark curls.
His smile took Katharine aback. There was about him a serious air, and now the smile suddenly broke through it.
He held his finger to her. “The blood is gone,” he said, and then opened his hand to her. “I will take that. No use you cutting your hand now.”
She handed the paper with the shattered pieces to him. He folded the paper into a packet and placed it in his leather bag.
“I will find another,” he said.
“No need,” she said.
“I will. Sir Edward was of a fine and rare character. This room was his . . .”
“He loved to sit by the fire, there,” she said. “He loved to sit and read. He was a scholar. He loved the written word and he loved his family and he loved his faith, and it was his faith that drove him away,” said Katharine. “Where do you come from, Mr. Smythson? You are not from Lancashire, but from your accent I suspect you hail from farther north.”
“Penrith by birth.”
“The lands of ancient Cumbria. The shuttlecock of the Scottish chieftains.”
“Aye, ’twas their riches. No recent raids, thank the good Lord. ’Tis now but a road to the south, not a bounty.”
“The valley, I have heard, is beautiful.”
“’Tis.” He nodded.
“And do you make your home there still?”
“Have made my home in Nottinghamshire for many years, Wollaton, though my work takes me away from that village much of the year.”
“And your children, do they travel with you?”
“I have but the one son, John. He does travel with me now. He’s just out of grammar school, before he lived with my sister Elizabeth, while my houses took me away. He has cousins who are as brothers and sisters to him, as I trust you understand. He’s a young man now, but my heart still breaks when he is not beside me.”
Katharine nodded, wondering if when he said, I trust you understand, he was referring to her orphaned childhood, and if so, how he knew. “Take off your cape, Mr. Smythson, and set it by the fire. I am afraid our house is but fresh with mourning, and we are inconstant hosts. I will tell the kitchens to bring you some food and ale, for you must be hungry.”
“Many thanks. I will be off soon. This is no time to discuss plans to alter the hall, when all is altered enough by grief.”
“The day is unfortunate,” said Katharine. “I am sorry you had to come all this way for naught.”
“I am at work with my men on a new building not five leagues thither—Sir Christopher de Ashton’s house. The snow stopped our hammering for a spell. I will ride back this afternoon.”
“Farewell, Mr. Smythson,” Katharine said, and held out her hand.
“Fare you well, my good lady.” When he took her small hand in his, he looked as though he did not know what to do with it, whether to kiss it or to shake it as if she were a man. He did not lift his eyes to Katharine’s but kept his lion head, with its mane of curls, bent. He seemed to study her hand with wonder—as if it were a new tool for shaving stones or cutting timber. Still holding her hand, he turned it so the palm faced upward. She knew not why, but she let him continue his examination.
“You have cut yourself,” he said.
Katharine looked down at her palm. A red scab sliced across her pink skin where her nails had bit into her flesh when she last sat next to Will.
She pulled her hand from his grasp. “’Tis nothing. ’Tis an old wound,” she said, rubbing her hands together and then pulling Edward’s robe tightly around her. “Godspeed, Mr. Smythson.”
He stared at her, his dark eyes quizzical. “Gramercy, my lady. Farewell,” he said, and bowed.
Finally, she thought as she closed the door behind her. What did the stonemason think? That she was a saint with markings of the Savior’s suffering on her hand? Nay, her wound was no miracle but self-inflicted—a sad testament to her own confused passion.
She would tell the kitchens to send Mr. Smythson a trencher of bread and cheese and some ale, and then she would find the other members of the house. Where was everyone? An unwelcome silence persisted within the walls. If Sir Edward were still here, if Sir Edward were still here, he would have called for a meeting.
Katharine was on her way down to the kitchens when she saw Matilda at the bottom of the stairs. She stepped down to embrace Matilda, but her aunt recoiled, frowning.
“Why are you wearing Edward’s robe?” she snapped.
“I . . .”
“You have no right, Katharine, to wear his robe!”
“I . . . I put it on in the library because I was cold . . . I forgot . . .” She heard herself stammering like a child.
“Take it off now!” Matilda shouted. “Did you hear me? Why are you standing there like a fool? Remove Edward’s robe now!”
As Katharine tried to pull her arm from the robe, Matilda grabbed the sleeve and yanked so hard the frayed material ripped. Matilda did not let go and tore the sleeve asunder.
“Look what you have done!” Matilda screamed, shaking the tattered sleeve in Katharine’s face. “You, Katharine, have never known your place!”
Katharine stepped out of what was left of the old red and gold garment and let it drop to the floor. She was speechless, stunned. Rather than try to defend herself, she turned and walked evenly away. She had never, in her history at Lufanwal, been the target of such venom. Rounding the corner, she backed her body to the wall, shut her eyes and tried to breathe.
—
The day was without end. The melting snow seemed sand in an hourglass, and everywhere Katharine went, in every room and every corridor, she heard the herald of time. She had no husband, no children. She had not planned on such a life. As she walked from the kitchens, where she had ordered the victuals for Mr. Smythson, through the great hall, where the servants were setting supper, she realized that her error was she simply had not planned. How could one plan after the unplanned death of her family scraped away every shred of hope? She had glossed over her desires, buried her dreams, allowed the day-to-day to become the month-to-month and then the year-to-year. Here was Will, mapping his course: patrons and poetry; a player with plans to own part of a theatrical company and to buy the biggest house in his town, the house with ten fireplaces. Ten fireplaces. The world in which he walked was all cunning, all stratagem, all future, while hers, she was beginning to comprehend, was all past.
She returned to her room and shut the
door behind her. She went to the looking glass. She had never covered her head properly in the sun and now her face was crowded with freckles. When she was younger her dimples appeared only when she smiled, but they had with age become permanent creases on her cheeks. There were lines in her brow and strands of silver in her hair. She had said no to the various men Sir Edward had brought to her after her husband had died. She had said no because none of those suitors suited her. But she realized now another woman—a woman more like Will, with his visions of fine red shoes and ten fireplaces—would have said yes to one of those men. Katharine was amazed, not at what she saw mirrored in glass before her, but at what she saw mirrored inside of her. She was not poetry printed on a page—she was a word or two scribbled in the margins.
Katharine tried to make excuses for Matilda’s outburst. The poor woman had lost her beloved husband. But her lashing echoed what Mary had said at dinner that evening weeks ago: that Katharine had never been considered part of the text of the family.
Katharine lay down on her bed. She shut her eyes and willed the cottage in the wood to come back to her. This time, the play in her head was different than before. There was still snow reaching up to the windows and the smoke curling from the chimney, but it was night, not day. And she had gone to bed, while he had stayed at the table, lamp lit, ink wet, quill bounding across the page. She was soundly asleep in her smock when he came to her; she was not against the door or a wall. After hours with his poem, he removed his breeches and snuffed the candle he had brought to bed. The moon was so round and so luminous that even with the candle out the little cottage was ablaze with light. She had her back to him and he kissed her neck and grazed her buttocks with his fingers, glided by her hips, her waist, her stomach, his hand soft and gentle yet assuredly a bird of prey. In partial slumber she opened to him, was quickly wet, and shuddered—which did not, as he’d suggested that day in the library, feel like a sneeze, but lasted longer and was richer, more an ancient fire, a sacrifice, a tingling that reached all the way to her womb. By the second time, he stirred hard against her, kissed her deeply, then climbed atop her, looked into her eyes, as if to conquer, and conquer her he did.
17
ou are raw-nerved,” said Isabel.
Katharine had not realized that her left hand was tapping the table. “I am sad, as you are, gentle Isabel.”
Isabel nodded and sighed. “I have wept. I have wept an ocean.”
Katharine pulled Isabel to her and gave her a motherly hug. “You were well loved by your father, and part of him will live on in you.”
“But my dear father will never know my children. He will never lay eyes on them.”
“Oh, he will see them,” said Katharine. “He sees you now, from his perch up high.” She gently wiped the tears from Isabel’s cheeks with her table napkin. “Come, eat. Yesterday was all famine for grief. Today you need fuel.”
In truth, Katharine was having a difficult time sitting at the table. She waved to the servant girl to bring more wine. Will had sent more stanzas. The folded sheets of paper Molly brought were inches thick. Had he slept?
In Sir Edward’s time, the dinner hour on Sunday was lively, always a banquet after mass with whomever was in residence or nearby—guests, family, neighbors. Even at Advent, when Edward observed the ancient abstinences, he still opened his hearth and home with whatever simple meals were allowed. But this Sunday, though Edward’s russet-limned chair still presided at the head of the grand table, Matilda was not present, nor was Ursula, Richard, or Matilda’s mother, Priscilla, who was gravely ill and could not rise from her bed.
Richard, who was making his way back from the witches’ trial at the Lancaster Assize, would be shocked by the news of his father and by the change in his wife, for Richard had departed for Lancaster soon after Ursula had taken to her bed in grief over Guinny’s demise. Katharine guessed Harold had caused Ursula’s unmending and prayed that time would heal her broken spirit.
“You have lectured Isabel to eat, Cousin Kate, but you have not touched a morsel,” said Joan.
Poor Joan was not yet fifteen but looked today as if she were past thirty, her mother Ursula’s age. Joan had gained a stone since the summer and thickened around her middle, neck and chin. Her eyes bespoke an anxiety beyond her years. Katharine pictured Ursula’s gaunt and bony form and imagined how Joan—nurse but never daughter—must have, these past few weeks, tried to convince her mother to eat.
“True, my dear.” Katharine dipped a corner of bread into her goblet of wine. “Tell me news of Ned,” she said to Isabel.
“Since my dear brother was soon leaving to return to us, when he received word Father’s condition had worsened he made haste from Italy to France. Ned rode through the night but failed to reach Father in time. If only God had willed it, Kate. I so wish someone from our family had been by his side when the angels did take him.” Isabel started to weep again.
“My dear,” said Katharine, “your noble father was surrounded by those who loved him. He was and is at peace.”
“Ned prayed at the priory the night and day through and then paid them well for taking such blessed care of Father,” said Isabel.
“And now?” asked Katharine.
“He is bound home with Father’s few possessions,” said Isabel.
“Godspeed our dear Ned,” said Katharine. “His arrival will be a beam of light in this darkening hall. And your sister?”
“She is at this moment with Sir Hugh on her way. All will bring comfort to Mother. But Ned the most, because he has been gone the longest and his absence has torn at Mother’s heart for many years.”
Ned had been in his own exile. First living in the city from which Dante had been banished, then moving to Rome. Early on, he had bought a villa in Florence, along the River Arno, with gold his father had released when he completed his studies. He claimed that poetry, sculpture and painting were the bread and ale of the people of Florence: beauty, he once said, was their nourishment. In his letters, he described cities bathed in golden light, where cathedrals and churches, bridges, piazzas and palaces were akin to jewels. Katharine did not know how Ned passed his time, but the months and then the years drifted by.
Katharine lit her lamp and sat in front of the fire with a thick pile of Will’s poetry on her lap. He had written more than he had heretofore, fourteen stanzas since she’d last sat with him—the moon had risen twice. From the first line, Will’s new stanzas anchored her. They were his best yet. He was on fire. Will had found the pulse of the poem finally and was writing out of it. The lines boasted a new solidity, a new confidence. When she’d started her work with him, his images at times lacked harmony: the two characters had at moments seemed wobbly, their intentions unclear. The lovers were riveting now, and the stanzas sharp in image and action. What a thing of gentle beauty did Will render Adonis. And how perfectly he painted Venus’s lust for this landlocked lad.
Though Katharine knew the tale’s end from Ovid and from Spenser, as she read Will’s new lines she found herself wondering, What will happen in this battle of desire? Who will prevail? Venus entreated and implored Adonis to love her. The repetition of the word lips did, like seeds upon the fertile ground, make the passion grow. “‘Touch but my fair lips with those fair lips of thine . . . The kiss shall be thine own as well as mine . . . Look in mine eye-balls, there thy beauty lies . . . Then why not lips on lips, since eyes in eyes?’”
Katharine sent a note with Molly that she would meet Will. An hour later, hooded, cloaked, gloved and booted, she took the stairs two steps at a time, chose not the course through the house to the old chapel, but pushed the oak door open and ventured across the icy courtyard.
Richard was coming through the gate on horseback. Katharine scurried down the path so he would not see her. Will had told Molly he would be there, but the schoolroom was empty. Katharine lit one lamp and then another, poked at the logs in the fireplace an
d sat on a bench. The fire awakened, the shadows shifting along the whitewashed walls. She sat and started to read his verse again. She dipped a quill into an inkhorn, adding to her notes: fine and lovely and perhaps a different word. Dipping the quill once more, she began to write lines of verse along the margin of a page. Engrossed in her writing, she did not hear Will enter. She had never written poetry before, and she had not even known when she put the quill to the page that a stanza would spill out of her. Indeed, when she looked up at Will she stared at him, trying to place him.
“Hast thou seen a ghost?” he said, coming toward her.
He was beautiful in the shifting lamplight.
“It seems we have been apart for ages,” he said.
“’Tis been but a few days,” she replied.
He shed his cloak and sat across from her, a schoolboy.
“How sits your sorrow now, Kate? Does grief still guide your day?”
“’Tis too sad to believe that Sir Edward has left this mortal earth.”
“Your loss is heaven’s gain. Look to your family this day, dearest Kate, not to me,” said Will.
“Sir Edward’s eldest daughter is coming down from the north, and dear Ned, the youngest son, is returning home from across the sea.”
“The prodigal son,” said Will.
“Ned will provide succor,” Katharine continued. “’Tis hard not to feel a feast when he is around, even in the midst of famine. Our bond is blood, yes, but ’tis something of magic, too . . . ’tis hard to explain.”
Her hands were clasped and resting on the table. Will reached across the table and covered them with his.
“I have made some marks,” she said finally. “I was much impressed by the quantity.”
“I hope the quality impressed as well,” he said.
“’Tis your best work yet,” she said. “It seemed to pour from your pen.”
The Tutor: A Novel Page 18