The Tutor: A Novel

by Andrea Chapin

  Ursula’s grave was dug. The family gathered and prayed. Her three young children stood like little soldiers, straight and silent. Katharine planned to read to the children in the library the afternoon after the burial. She would do her best to bring them away from their hour of woe with a tale or two of brave knights and strong women. A few minutes before she was set to go, Molly brought a letter. Will wanted to see her, and he had sent more of his poem. All of a sudden Katharine’s body hummed again. It was unseemly at such a time of tragedy, but she could not resist him. She sent word to change the time for the children, and then she stood in front of the looking glass in her room and stared at herself: she was dressed plainly and darkly. Her chestnut hair was bound in a black caul; the blue turquoise Will had given her was round her neck.

  She waited on the same bench on which she had sat with him the day before and many days before that. As a girl of ten, she had sat one night in the chapel lit with the wavering flames of tapers, listening to Father de La Bruyère lecture her on grief: she was not to carry on about her family, for tears and wailing and other such laments, he said, would show the world that she did not believe the souls of her loved ones would land in heaven. She should pray, not cry. She should pray, not weep. She should pray. And that was what she did.

  Katharine unfolded Will’s pages and started to read. In his fresh verse, Adonis’s escape was impeded by the flight of his steed, which upon the sight of a lusty breeding jennet “young and proud” did break his rein and rush after her.

  “Ah,” Will said.

  Katharine looked up from the paper. She hadn’t heard him enter. He was light and easy in his step. His beard was neat and newly trimmed. Her face turned hot; her cheeks flamed as if with fever.

  “What competition your eyes do give that stone about your neck,” he said.

  She flushed anew and reached with her fingers for the turquoise hanging from the black silk cord. He sat opposite her. She was thankful the table stood between them; a moat perhaps would have been even better.

  “You have covered much ground,” she said.

  “The sad tidings made sleep impossible. I burned one candle and then another. How fares the family?” he asked.

  “One wonders if they can welcome any more grief.”

  “The children?”

  “A blow. They will learn to live with their history,” she said.

  “As you did.”

  “Yes.” Katharine was wrung tight, like the skirt in Molly’s hands the previous night. Katharine was not prepared for the rush of tears, but they came, spilling down her hot cheeks. Will handed her a cloth the children used to wipe their hornbooks. “Sweet Kate, your time is precious, and I am not worthy of it.” He stood.

  “No, prithee, sit, sir. There is nothing to be done this moment,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  “Read to me,” he said.

  She looked at him and cocked her head.

  “Where you left off when I did enter. Read to me. Let me hear my verse from your soft lips.”

  “As you please.” Katharine squared her shoulders, straightened the paper and read out loud Will’s keen and delicious detail of Adonis’s errant charger. Katharine stopped reading and looked across the table at Will. He was smiling. He had written much the same words he had spoken to her when they first met, in the very place they were sitting now.

  “That first night here, you described me thus!” she said. “A horse trader! You have no shame!” She laughed. She had no shame, having fun while the rest of the house was in pain.

  “My humble words turn proud when ’tis your voice that speaks them,” he said.

  She looked across at him. He stunned and beguiled her. She was helpless to it.

  “I will away for Christmas, Kate.” He saw her look. “Come, come. ’Tis no eternity but little more than a fortnight. I will, while there, write you a sonnet, my New Year’s gift to you, for writing of you, my constant Kate, will bring me solace.”

  Katharine wished to ask him why he returned to the family in Stratford from which he seemed askance. She felt like a loom, the different threads running in and out of her, the shuttle pushing the loose threads taut. While Will was now writing from his core—the words spilling from his pen—she was confused right down to her very core. He was across from her, the table now as wide as the sea, and she would have to swim a thousand leagues to stand and walk over to him. What if he, like Adonis, turned away from her advances? She shuddered at the shame of it, and then, out of desperation, she tried a different tack.

  “I have fallen in love with you,” she said simply.

  His eyes glinted.

  “And we will love each other and continue on,” he returned.

  Her heart trilling, she wondered: What next? Perhaps he had needed to hear those words, before he could truly love her back. Perchance this was where Venus had gone wrong. She had crowded Adonis with lust, but left little room for love.

  He stood. She stood. What next?

  “We will speak of this anon,” he said, gathering his papers, gazing at her, his eyes full of thought.

  “When go you hence?” she said, her voice weak, displaced, uneven.

  “Now, dearest Katharine . . .”

  He had called her by her full name. There was love in that, she was sure of it.

  “I leave tomorrow,” he said. “I will return by Candlemas.”

  ’Tis too long, she thought. She was afraid after his departure she might never see him again: she would die. He had breathed life into her. The poem, his presence, had awakened her. She remembered when Harold had dragged Ursula across the floor of the hidden chapel. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “’Tis harder for you than ’tis for me,” he said.

  She nodded. His voice was soft, his eyes loving. His words puzzled her.

  “I am here, Kate, look at me. I am standing here next to you. I may go off, to Stratford or to London, but I will return. I am, in truth, not going anywhere. You were, at a tender age, unmothered and unfathered. I will not abandon thee. What we have is special.”

  She nodded.

  “Let me hear it from your tongue.”

  She wiped the tears from her eyes and slowly repeated his line. “What we have is special,” she said. She felt as if he had asked her to undress in front of him. She added, “You will not live here always, that I know.”

  He did not move to her but looked intently at her. “We have the rest of our lives, Kate, you and I. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, God willing. You must not leave me. I will buckle at the knees and fall if you do. You must remain by my side.”

  “But you will leave,” she said. “It takes no soothsayer for such a prediction.”

  “Well, if I do, you will come with me.”

  “How . . . can . . . that be?”

  “If I make my perch in London again, well, dear Kate, you will come with me.”

  “Verily?” She sat back down on the bench, for she could not trust her legs to hold her.

  “Yes. How can I write without you? For writing is living now. I will cease to write when I cease to breathe. You urge me on, you command me. Night after night, as I sit in that damp chamber scratching my quill across the page, I write for you. I have been mapping plays for the playhouses in London whilst here at Lufanwal. When the time is right, I will show you all I have.”

  Katharine was filled with the promise of what was to come. She let herself peer into the future: a life, somehow, with Will in it. After weeks of his calling her brilliant and beautiful, she had begun to feel brilliant around him, and beautiful, too.

  Will helped her on with her cloak. They parted with a tender embrace. What might be—those words coursed through her body. She could step away from the misfortune that circled round her. They might live in London in a house with a small garden, not too far from the playhouses. They would, their he
ads bent over his pages, stay up late, burn one wick after the other, until the dawn itself would light their work. She imagined Will’s first book, their book, the leather the color of wine, gilt leaves sprouting up the spine. Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare—her name written on a page in thanks and dedication and love. She saw stacks of his burgundy books sold by a bookseller in St. Paul’s churchyard in London. On future books, she would fix rhyme and meter, deliver one image when another did not fit, tame his errant spelling, make constant the marks he used between words and clauses. The sheets of paper with writing scattered across tables and chairs would be their children. She had lived a life of reading books—now she would live a life of helping to create them.

  She was hurrying down the path, her head dizzy with such thoughts, when she bumped into someone.

  “I crave your pardon,” he said, bowing low.

  “Oh, Mr. Smythson,” she said.

  “Madam,” he said. His dark breeches and doublet were covered in white dust.

  “I was saddened to hear what happened and hastened here to tell you—” he said.

  “You hastened here to tell me? Why me?” she asked, but then was sorry she had said it. She saw the confusion on his face and quickly came to his aid. “I am grateful to you, Mr. Smythson. These are, indeed, trying times for us all. Gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.” She was eager to be alone, dreaming of a life with Will.

  He nodded gravely. “Would you care to walk a bit before the sun has left us? These December days, like too many lives, are cut short by winter. You have no gloves. Are you warm enough?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He smiled. “Good.”

  He turned and waited for her. She realized he had misunderstood her “Yes,” thinking that she had agreed to walk with him, when she had responded merely that she was warm enough.

  “Wear these,” he said, pulling a worn pair of gloves from the leather satchel slung over his shoulder.

  “No, Mr. Smythson. I’ll tuck my hands in my cloak. Thank you.”

  Not knowing what else to do, she started to walk with him.

  “The sun baked away much of the snow,” he said.

  They stayed on the stone path that split the orchard. Not a piece of fruit or shred of leaf remained. The branches of the cherry and peach trees on one side reached out like an old woman’s fingers: the apple and pear trees on the other looked as crooked and wizened as an old man’s elbows and arms.

  “How is your hand, Mr. Smythson?” she asked.

  “My hand?”

  “The crystal ball that shattered in the library.”

  “Ah, yes, of course.” He opened his large hand and examined his finger, as if he had not done so since they had last met. Then he showed it to her. “Healed. That mark has now taken its place amongst the scars that map my skin.”

  Katharine thought of the other meaning of scar, a rocky cliff, and how the craggy nature of Mr. Smythson’s face was interesting and even quite beautiful: it reminded her of the steep limestone scars she had seen years ago at the Yorkshire Dales up north when visiting Grace.

  They stopped at the crest of the orchard before descending the stone steps to the outer garden. They stood, without speaking, in the quiet of the evening. Mr. Smythson was a curious fellow. She recalled his son and thought how fortunate this lad was to have a father who knew stillness, for with stillness came an inward peace. Her own father, or what she remembered of him, was always in motion, and the house that she was raised in was always in motion, too. He had never felt comfortable in his own skin, had to talk or to move or to drink. But her years at Lufanwal had taught her differently, had made her understand solitary life and learn from it.

  To the west, between the hills, the sun was setting the sky on fire. Indeed, the clouds were ablaze with the spectrum of a flame, yet other colors, too: garden tints, those found in rose petals and fields of violets. The sky was so extraordinary that Katharine sighed deeply.

  “We must not forget nature,” said Mr. Smythson. “It replenishes the soul.”

  She nodded. They stood a few minutes longer, not speaking, and then they turned and started to stroll back to the hall.

  “I brought you some verse. Did your maid deliver it to you?” he said. “I heard you read much,” he added.

  “I do. But I have not yet read what you kindly gave to me.” She had been so caught up with Will’s poem that she had completely forgotten about the packet from Mr. Smythson, yet she thought it sweet that he had acted upon what he had heard about her. “Do you write, Mr. Symthson? Are you a poet?”

  “No,” he said. He laughed—the sound deep and rich.

  What was he, this man beside her? Perhaps the primeval rock with which he worked had influenced his matter.

  “I met a young woman, and she has taken to writing and gave me pages of her verse, and I quite admire it and thought you might, too. She has nothing whole yet, she told me, but bits and pieces of poems and prose. She is with Lord Hunsdon, is his . . .”

  “Daughter?” Katharine offered.

  “No.” Mr. Smythson laughed again. “His . . . concubine.” He continued, “Henry Carey is a very old man, for her. She is just twenty-one. He is forty-five years her senior. She is the daughter of a court musician originally from Venice.”

  “Verily!” Katharine was surprised Mr. Smythson spoke so forthrightly. Concubine seemed an awkward word. “Is not Lord Hunsdon the Lord Chamberlain?”

  “Yes, the queen’s bastard half-brother and her cousin, too. ’Tis a fraught heritage, but he is a sympathetic soul, and treats this young woman very well.”

  “And she writes?”

  “She does, and is a lively lady whose parents died early. She lived at the house of the Dowager Countess of Kent, was given lessons along with the countess’s daughters and later became attached to the household of the Countess of Cumberland. She has been much at court and has a most musical mind. I thought it might interest you. She is a woman, and she writes poetry.”

  Again, she was startled by his manner. She was not used to such directness.

  “Zounds!” she exclaimed.

  “I crave your pardon. If I said something . . .”

  “No, Mr. Smythson. ’Tis nothing you said. In truth, I have completely forgotten the children!”

  “The children?”

  “I gave my word I would read to the children this afternoon, and now the sun is all but down and I have missed the hour. Oh, how could I have been so blind as to the time at a moment when their earth does quake? Mr. Smythson, I must take my leave. Perchance the children are still in the library. I will read this lady’s verses with interest. Fare thee well.”

  “Fare thee well, my lady.” He bowed.

  This time she did not give him her hand. She nodded to him, and before they had even passed through the orchard, she dashed toward the house. She realized, as she raced down the path with her petticoats hiked up above her ankles, that the picture she was leaving with Mr. Smythson was far from ladylike, but there was a quality about the mason, a tolerance perhaps, that made her feel her behavior wouldn’t offend him.

  21

  ill left the next day. Katharine watched him go. He sat a horse well: his back straight, his movement graceful. Katharine was intrigued that Will was so richly attired for his return home. A blue brocade arm with silver slashes peeked through his short riding cloak. She had checked the map pinned in the library; Stratford lay on the Roman road northwest of London and before Colchester and was roughly two days’ ride from Lufanwal. Maybe Will was making a stop on his way to Stratford.

  What did the townsfolk in Warwickshire think of Will, the boy who had worn a smock in his father’s rank shop, returning as a dandy from places they would never see? Did his three children miss him during his long absences? Did Anne? How could his family not yearn for him, as Katharine did, t
he minute he was out of sight?

  She picked up the packet of verse Mr. Smythson had given to her, untied the dark blue silk cord and unfolded the papers. The handwriting was tiny and elegant and not unlike her own. The name on the pages was Aemilia Bassano. Katharine wondered why this Aemilia had given her writing to Mr. Smythson, and how he had happened to meet her. Perchance he had worked on a house where she resided. ’Twas fascinating this young woman was the paramour of such a powerful person and that everyone seemed privy to the affair—along with, Katharine assumed, Lord Hunsdon’s wife.

  There were fragments of a poem on the Passion of Christ, which argued in iambic pentameter how men—not women—were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. Bassano first contended that “Adam cannot be excus’d,” from his part in the fall. Eve’s fault was only “too much love,” which made her give the apple to her dear. As for men’s sinfulness in the crucifixion: the author pointed to the guilt of Pilate, who had failed to follow his wife’s sage counsel. Bassano then proposed that since men’s fault in Christ’s death was “greater” than women’s, women should have “Libertie againe” and be equals, “free from tyranny.” Katharine admired the boldness of this lady’s ideas.

  The next page was a farewell letter to an estate in Cookham where Aemilia had lived, describing its peace and tranquillity, and how the gardens and grounds encouraged meditation and withdrawal from earthly things. Katharine put the pages down. Lufanwal had been her cloister, yes, but it had been her foundation, too, her education, yet perhaps, as with Aemilia and Cookham, it was time for Katharine to bid farewell. You will come with me, Will had said. The idea of leaving the hall was both exhilarating and frightening. Aemilia, like Katharine, was an orphan with no dowry. This poetess was clearly clever, with a most educated mind. Only one and twenty years of age, she was maintained by a rich and powerful lord, and perhaps therein lay a certain freedom, the Libertie of which she wrote, for Lord Hunsdon had a wife and, Katharine recalled, a huge family of twelve children or more.