“Everything about this is beneath me,” she said.
As quickly as he flashed his fury, he quelled it: with haste the merchant usurped the poet. “Let us forget this moment,” he negotiated. “Let us not speak of these things. Let us continue on as we have.”
This could have been the end—her final resolve. Katharine sat in his small room, surrounded by his black quills, his order, his paper stacked neatly like hay after the harvest. This could have been the end, but she nodded and leaned again into the light to read the rest of the stanzas he had thrust at her.
“There seems an even field where mountains and ravines should be,” she offered. “There is little action here between Venus and Adonis. We’ve heard enough of idle chatter. Cannot Venus fall in a faint?”
“What makes her swoon?” he asked. He was sitting on his cot. His doublet and shirt were open. The skin of his chest that showed was smooth and without hair. “What makes her faint?” he demanded, there was nothing gentle in his tone.
“His look,” Katharine said, shifting her eyes to his face.
“How so?”
“His look is so full of anger, so racked with fury, so verging on hate, that when she sees that, before he even speaks, she is struck down.”
“And when she falls, Adonis comes to her,” he said.
“Yes, he might. The silly boy believes she’s dead,” Katharine said, wishing she could feign a swoon.
“He claps her pale cheek,” Will added.
“Till clapping makes it red,” she continued. “For on the grass she lies as if she were slain.”
Will darted to his table, dipped his quill, wrote, then spoke: “Till his breath breathest life in her again.”
“To mend the hurt that his unkindess marred,” Katharine offered. “He kisses her, and she does not rise, so he kisses her again. She opens her eyes.”
Will was staring at Katharine. “Her two blue windows,” he said.
He lingered in his look at her. She countered him, her eyes on his, unwavering. Perhaps all that had gone on was just stone upon stone—what they were building—and she would, after all, make a life with him and go to London as he had promised.
He dipped his quill and bent his head. “The night of sorrow now is turn’d to day,” he said. “His kiss has roused her.” He tapped the point of his quill on the paper, making a trail of little black dots. “And as the bright sun glorifies the sky, / So is her face illumin’d with her eye. / Whose beams upon his hairless face are fix’d . . .” He scratched the words across the page. “She opens her eyes, beholds him leaning over her,” Will said. “Her eyes are caught in his eyes, and his in hers. She feels his hot breath upon her face.”
“Her dream made real,” said Katharine. The untied ribbons of his shirt caught her eye.
He stood.
She stood.
She kept thinking, This is it, now he will run his hands down my face and kiss me tenderly; after all this time of waiting, now comes the eternity of his mouth on mine. Or he will, in a passion, tear the clothes from my body and crush me with his kisses. But there was no such blessing, and no such kissing. He did not move from his spot. He did not come to her, so she went to him. Her cloak still on, she took the quill from his fingers, then put her hands, not on his shoulders, but on his waist. She felt her way under his shirt to his skin and pulled him to her, but he did not yield. She put her mouth on his. The Will who had kissed her after pulling the pins from her hair was gone. This Will was not insistent with his tongue, nor was he the hunter, indeed he didn’t seem keen on her advances, and turned his face away, but she pressed on.
She took her hands from his waist and moved his ruby-colored mouth back to hers. Lips on lips. She was not soft; she was not gentle. She had imagined myriad stories of this moment, but what was actually happening matched none of them. She was driven to this harshness because anger had seeped in, appalling and uninvited, but there it was nonetheless. She would’ve given herself to him so many times in the last weeks, but now she had to take him. And that was how it played. She held his wrists to the wall, and she kissed and kissed him, as if her thirst could not be quenched. He had said a few weeks back, “I, too, have been pill’d,” and now she was his pillager. She felt his smooth chest with her hands. She kept her mouth on his.
He finally gave in, and they moved to his cot. But after all these months of his maneuvering her with his eyes, now he would not look her in the eye. She undid his breeches and, without taking off her cloak, she pulled up her smock and pinned his hands above his head as she climbed on him. He stirred hard against her. At least, she thought as she moved on top of him and felt him inside of her, at least he is not resisting, yet after all that had occurred, after all the teasing, the tenderness, the flattery, the focus, after all the words, he did bed her but he did not welcome her.
She wanted him to hold her after it was done. She wanted him to kiss her, but he rose and so she did the same. He pulled a doublet on and buttoned it, sat down at his table and picked up his quill. She tried to convince herself that everything was fine, that what had happened was progress, that she’d written a cruel letter out of desperation and he’d gotten angry, but this was now a part of their history and finally they had given themselves to each other, and his lack of attention during their act of love was due to leftover fury from the letter she’d written or maybe because she’d been too aggressive with him. But didn’t he want her to be Venus, the huntress? Katharine bent over Will at the table and carefully kissed him on the mouth. She would mend the final hurt of her unkindness—replace any drops of vinegar with honey.
“Write well,” she said from the door.
He nodded but did not look at her.
26
hat night, Molly arrived with more pages from Will. He had continued from the moment when Venus awakened to find herself freshly kissed by Adonis. “‘O where am I?’ quoth she, ‘in earth or heaven . . .’” Then Venus beseeched and demanded that Adonis keep kissing her. When Adonis replied, his tone was softer now, his tongue not laced with scorn. He addressed Venus as “fair queen,” and begged her to measure his “strangeness” with his youth. “‘Before I know myself, seek not to know me,’” he said.
Before I know myself, seek not to know me. Was this a message from Will? Katharine wondered. Was Will, though six and twenty, feeling yet half grown and hence not ready for her? Perhaps she had utterly misjudged him, thought him promiscuous when he was principled, deemed him philandering when he was pure. Katharine moved from her bed to the table, and in her haste to dip her quill into the inkhorn, she knocked over a mug of ale Molly had brought her. She was relieved the ale did not drench Will’s page. Without waiting to find a cloth, she snatched her beloved silk shawl from the back of her chair and mopped the table with it. Then she circled his lines of verse and wrote: Think of an image here of youth, of unripe years. A green plum sticks to its branch and when plucked early ’tis sour, while a ripe plum falls and is sweet with juice. She barely recognized her own handwriting. There was something wild about the shape of her letters. She hoped he could read her writing, for she barely could.
Will had made Adonis, as dusk descended, a man of negotiations. “‘Now let me say good night, and so say you; / If you will say so, you shall have a kiss.’” After Venus accepted the terms of Adonis’s contract, like Ovid’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, “Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace; / Incorporate then they seem, face grows to face.” Will’s next lines seemed a winged horse: with words like “breathless,” “sweet coral mouth,” and “Their lips together glued, fall to earth . . .” There was in his pace a panting of word and rhyme, meter and foot. A stanza with “And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth. / Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey . . .” ended when Venus indeed became a vulture. He’d used the image that weeks ago Katharine had thwarted; he then described that ravaging:
And having f
elt the sweetness of the spoil,
With blindfold fury she begins to forage;
Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil,
And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,
Planting oblivion, beating reason back,
Forgetting shame’s pure blush and honor’s wrack.
Though Will had turned Venus into a monster these last stanzas, Katharine could not read his words fast enough. “Hot, faint and weary with her hard embracing” charged on to “He now obeys, and now no more resisteth, / While she takes all she can, not all she listeth.” Next Will shot his arrow directly at Ovid’s Pygmalion: “What wax so frozen but dissolves with temp’ring, / And yields at last to very light impression?” While she continued reading, she held the paper with one hand and pulled every pin out of her hair with the other. Then ran her fingers through her thick locks. His poem, these words coursing across the page, seemed to her a living, breathing thing that filled her head and penetrated her heart. “Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast,” Will wrote, “Yet love breaks through, and pricks them all at last.”
Then, “For pity now she can no more detain him . . .”
She had to go to him.
Will’s chamber was bitter, the fire almost dead, and the sun long gone when he let Katharine in. She found it hard to believe that it was just that morning when she had been with him on his cot. He wore a green suede jerkin over a white blouse, hardly enough cover for the dank air. She wore a cloak over her skirts and bodice: her hair was a wild waterfall of tresses. She placed his pages on the table and remained standing. He looked at her in silence.
“Your verse,” she said.
“My verse?” He cocked his head to one side and raised an eyebrow.
“Your verse,” she began again. She did not know how to say it. She had already said she was in love with him, and she had given her body to him, or rather taken his, in love, but this feeling was something more, or in addition, perhaps, to love. His words were now a bounty, a harvest, a surfeit of richness and majesty.
He was but inches from her. He did not kiss her. His lips never touched hers. He pulled her to him and reached down her bodice and grabbed her breast—there was no softness to his touch. He raked his nails across her skin; the sting shocked her. Then he pushed her onto the bed, his action so abrupt, so brusque, so unexpected that she let out a cry. Within seconds he was on top of her and had yanked up her skirts and her petticoats. He was not smiling. He pinned one of her arms to the bed. The motion of him above her and the way he pinched her wrist made her fear a bone would break. This was perhaps retaliation for this morning. Will worked at it and worked at it. Each thrust burned; each thrust felt like a brand. She wanted it to end. But he rode on without heed to her discomfort, without heed to her. At the height of his incursion, he shouted, “I will win!” through gritted teeth, and then rolled off.
Mayhap the “I will win” applied to her, though she doubted it, for he seemed not to notice her. It was some strange battle he was fighting in his head. In this vainglorious instant, of some undetermined triumph, she could have been anyone or anything.
A man of abundant words, he said nothing after he rolled away. He left her on his cot. He did not look at her. He strode out the door and left her.
She picked herself up, pulled down her skirts, passed the table strewn with brimming pages, and when she walked outside, he was nowhere in sight.
—
Though the chair Katharine sat on was covered in gold velvet, she felt uncomfortable and sore. “I’ll meet you outside,” she said to the girls.
The last time Katharine had been in the hat shop, all had seemed so simple with Will then, so hopeful. Today, while Isabel was fitted for a pearl headpiece, Katharine was barely aware of the two girls chatting about the betrothal and the banquet. In the many scenes Katharine had concocted in her head of bedding Will, none matched what actually happened. He could have taken her at any moment in the preceding weeks. He knew that. Why had he waited, forced her to it? Perhaps the jousting with language finally failed them and the cot had become their tilt field.
After both encounters, Will had said nothing. The first time he seemed indifferent, the second time angry. Katharine recalled his sonnet, which conveyed the fury of the speaker after the physical union. Maybe, she thought, Will embodied the shame he gave Adonis. She had been digging to find the real Will, and now perhaps she had.
Katharine stood in front of the shop. The month of March just starting, the air still felt raw. A tall young man caught her eye. She watched him for a moment, then decided to cross the street to greet him. John Smythson bowed.
“You’ve been shopping, I see,” she said.
He held up his package. “Aye.” He grinned. “A gift for my father.”
“Lovely. What did you buy him?”
John opened the leather carton and pulled out a glass case with a large blue butterfly pinned inside.
“How extraordinary,” Katharine said.
She looked from the opalescent wings to John’s beaming face.
“He fancies things like this,” said John. “Odd things. They fill his rooms.”
“What sort of things?”
“Oh, shards of pottery from the Greeks and the Romans—a handle, the neck of a jug, part of a bowl. And old glass. Shells. Oh, my, the shells he picks up at our cottage on the shore. He arranges them and won’t let the maid touch them. He dusts them off himself. He found a few feathers last week, wild turkey, I think, maybe pheasant, where they were molting. He was so pleased and showed me how each feather had a different design but were all from one bird.”
“Will he make them into quills, then?”
“No. He’ll stick them in a vase like flowers. Then he’ll pull them out when he’s designing a mantelpiece or some such, to follow the lines and the dots. He says ’tis uncanny how full of patterns nature is. I guess he’s right.” John carefully put the blue butterfly back in its leather box.
“Your father will love your gift, I’m sure,” she said. For some reason her throat tightened.
“I think he will,” said John. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it when I saw it. Someone brought butterflies back on a ship from somewhere and put them under glass. There’s a whole lot of them at that stall over there,” he said, pointing. “I should get on with my business. Father sent me here with a list of items and I’ve gotten distracted.”
“That’s what happens on market day,” said Katharine. “How is Mr. Smythson?” She didn’t want John to go. He was as affable as his father, and she wanted to bask in his warmth for a minute longer.
“Oh, he’s fine. He’s up to his ears in work. We are.”
They were silent for a moment, then she said, “Well, you best be off, then. Please send him my regards.” She wondered if the father had shared his intentions about her with his son.
“I will,” John said, bowing. “Farewell.”
“Fare thee well, John,” she said, and watched him until he disappeared into a maze of stalls.
—
The great hall was alive with candles. Dishes savory and steaming framed the tables. Matilda had invited other known Catholics from local estates, for the Barlows were as tied to the old religion as the De L’Isles. Katharine recognized some faces and not others. She snatched a goblet of wine and drank it without breathing. She welcomed the distraction of Matilda’s small banquet for Isabel and Nicholas Barlow. She’d had Molly pile her hair high on her head. She’d dressed in her golden gown—too large now—and a blue velvet doublet borrowed from Isabel.
Isabel came to her. She was wearing a rose silk gown with a bodice of silver weave. A headpiece of gray pearls crowned her head.
“How beautiful you are, my dear,” Katharine said. “Your cheeks hold the same blush as your dress.”
“Here he is,” said Isabel.
&nbs
p; Katharine remembered Nicholas Barlow’s intelligent eyes from when they had been introduced on Saint Crispin’s Day and then at the Stanleys’ revels, but she had been in such a state she hardly recalled more about him. The young man walking toward them now was no taller than Isabel, but the fit of his garments showed a good shape in leg and waist.
“I have heard much of you from your fair cousin,” young Barlow said, bowing and taking Katharine’s hand. “I am never one to bother with details, and have a terrible memory, cannot recall the names of any of my horses except for the one I’m riding at the moment, which is . . . I can’t remember, but I have retained some important information pertaining to the agreement our esteemed parents have drawn up. There is a provision therein that specifically states Isabel have unlimited access to you,” he said, smiling.
“How fortunate,” Katharine said with a laugh, “that I am considered a part of dear Isabel’s dowry.”
“At the very least there is mirth in him, and that is good,” whispered Katharine to Isabel. “My gut says there is goodness in him.”
“You are most welcome whenever and always at Bridgeton Manor, Miss De L’Isle.”
“A thousand thanks, good sir. Prithee, call me Katharine, for we are to be cousins now.”
“And call me Nicholas,” he said, bowing deeply. “Dear Isabel,” he continued, “Lord Barlow and I have walked the grounds of Bridgeton Manor, and he is quite keen on making changes. No one has lived there for a long time, and Father is thrilled we are to have it. We had that man Smythson up to look at what he could do. He seems to have a hand in every house north of London and south of Edinburgh.”
“We know him. He’s been here!” Isabel exclaimed, looking at Katharine.
“He had but an hour to spend before he was off to his wedding, but in that short time he came up with impressive ideas.”
“His wedding?” asked Isabel, her eyes wide.
Katharine’s blood ran cold. “Mr. Smythson is to be married?” she asked.
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