The Tutor: A Novel

by Andrea Chapin

  Young Barlow nodded. “In London.”

  Katharine raised her eyes from Isabel to see Will entering the great room. He was standing talking to folk she did not recognize. There he was: his black doublet snugly fit, white collar pointed and starched, beard shaped and trim. Who had invited him? She had not seen him since their last encounter, nor had he sent her any words.

  She waited for him to come to her; she would make the perfunctory introduction to Isabel’s betrothed. She waited for Will, but he never came. In fact, Will acted as though she weren’t even there. She charged out of the great hall and ran up to her chamber.

  If Will had wanted a different type of bond with her, Katharine thought, pacing the floor, if he wanted love, he would have aimed his dart and landed his mark—the way he was aiming at everything else he wanted: sonnets, a long poem, a patron, a part with Lord Strange’s Men, a coat of arms, the largest house in Stratford.

  And what of the Smythson news? He, it now seemed, dissembled as easily as Will. A mere trifle of time after he’d told Katharine he was in love with her, he’d gone off and wed. He had moved on. A nunnery was heaven compared to this prison.

  As the days passed, Katharine began to doubt God. Her life thus far had been built on faith, but she could not find that faith now. Even deep down there was nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be God, she thought, please forgive me. She had such a deep longing for God, but she could not find Him. She had no faith left, no love, no zeal. She sought refuge in the ancients, made Molly bring her books from Edward’s library. She reread Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum as if it were the gospel, immersing herself in all the mistreated, neglected and abandoned heroines from Greek and Roman mythology: Penelope, Phyllis, Briseis, Phaedra, Oenone, Hypsipyle, Dido, Hermione, Deianira, Ariadne, Canace, Medea, Laodamia and Hypermestra.

  —

  “You should give him up for Lent, mistress,” Molly said. She set bread, cheese and ale on the table and with a click of her tongue she handed Katharine several sheets of folded paper.

  Katharine opened the papers and read: “‘The boar,’ quoth she: whereat a sudden pale . . .” Katharine felt as if Will had struck her. The boar—it was only a matter of stanzas until Adonis would leave to hunt the boar with his friends.

  Venus, with her arms around Adonis’s neck, “He on her belly falls, she on her back.”

  Now is she in the very lists of love,

  Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.

  All is imaginary she doth prove;

  He will not manage her, although he mount her:

  Katharine drank the ale in one gulp as she read on. “The warm effects which she in him finds missing / She seeks to kindle with continual kissing.” He seemed to have plucked his words from the night she’d shared his cot.

  But all in vain; good queen, it will not be.

  She hath assay’d as much as may be prov’d:

  Her pleading hath deserv’d a greater fee:

  She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d . . .

  She jumped to her feet and threw the pages into the blaze. He’d done it again! He had mined her ore! Her jaw was set. Her eyes wide. “She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d!” she shouted. How could he do this? What had she done but love him and help with his verse?

  She stormed out of her chamber. “She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d,” she chanted as she swept down stairs and through doorways. But all in vain, he wrote. But all in vain . . . Katharine wanted to kiss him and to crush him all at the same time. These past months, now seeming a whole life, could not, must not, would not be in vain, for if they were, what was there?

  She pulled the hood over her head and flew through the house and out the door. She was a witch, for it was not her natural limbs that propelled her thus, but a sick wrath that boiled in her veins. She marched to Will’s door, envisioning him, quill in hand, poised mid-thought, mid-rhyme perchance. At first she did not knock. She tried to pull the door open, but it was latched from the inside.

  Later, she tried to recall if he had begun to open the door before she banged her fist on it, or if her banging had roused him and made him open it. She played the scene over and over again in her head. The door opening, but only a sliver.

  “Who goes there?” he asked.

  “’Tis Kate.”

  She waited, expecting him to open the door farther, expecting him to let her in.

  “How now,” he said.

  How now.

  How now was all he said, but he did not invite her in, nor did he open his door wider. He stood there behind the door. How now.

  Her vessel cracked.

  “You told me: ‘I may be married but that will not prevent us from joining together!” Katharine hissed.

  “I said that?”

  “You do not recall?”

  “No.”

  He could spew stanzas of Chaucer or lines of Ovid as if his mind held a mirror, but he could not summon up what he had said to her a few months past. The words had seemed fine gifts to her then, like pearls or gems or strands of golden chain. She had mulled and mused over those words, drawn them into her heart. Now he did not remember them. Now those same words seemed knots on a shroud or spikes in a coffin.

  “When I said I could not continue, when I said my heart had become attached. You said we had forty years, a future together, London! Why? What was I to think? When a man says such to a woman.”

  “I must’ve been afraid you would leave me.”

  “I see,” she said. She was not sure whether she should feel flattered or shattered by the words he now tossed at her.

  “You have done this,” she said. “You are like our queen with her courtiers—you need people to fall in love with you. You had to harness my heart and make me love you in order to write your poem. I know that now.”

  “I’ve done nothing of the sort.”

  “You have! You dangled words that kept me fastened to you!”

  “I have not.”

  “You will say what it takes.” Her voice was rising. “My love hasn’t just nourished you, you’ve fed upon it! You’re a child who drinks his mother’s milk to thrive, and you’re a beast who devours the flesh and bones of its prey to survive!”

  “Stop this mewling, Kate!” he ordered.

  “Did you make merry at the Stanleys’ Twelfth Night?” she asked.

  “Aye, verily,” he said coldly.

  “Did you make merry with Ned?”

  “Who is Ned?”

  “Ned, my cousin. Ned, the lastborn son of Sir Edward?”

  “Oh, that Ned.”

  “‘Oh, that Ned’?” she screeched. “Along with advance and retreat, you have added retaliation to your tactics!” she fairly spat at him. “Perhaps you should be a general—certainly the queen could use a man who commands his troops with such fearless strategies!”

  “What is it you seek, Kate? ’Tis no surprise you have taken no second husband,” he said.

  She could not see his face completely, but she could fill in the flesh of his sneer.

  “Or rather one has not taken you,” he continued. “’Tis no surprise at all, for your behavior would thwart even the strongest of men. I am surely not fit for such a task. ’Tis a wonder they were able to marry you off to that old man who was your first, but ’tis no surprise he died so soon. Methinks perhaps you best lay off the mead, if that is what urges you to such tawdry business. You have caused me much offense, Kate. You have wounded me down to my very bones.”

  Will’s malevolence fanned her fury. “What is this?” she bellowed, the words issuing from deep within. “I know not what we have. Friendship? Love? A poem? I am not your mother, wench, wife, whore, nor your Venus! What was that fit the other night on your cot? Not love, verily, nor lust, but more akin to the siege of Troy! ‘I will win!’�
� she mocked. “I am no Helen, surely. What do we have here? What! What! What!” She was shouting, but she did not care. She was at this instant begot from her beloved Greeks, from Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles. She was Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone. She continued, the bile rising. “Why did you say such false things to me? Why? Why did you say you missed me? Longed for me? Why did you kiss me? Pull the pins from my hair? Why did you give me gifts? I should have listened to the gossip: ‘A bad lad, that one. A lewd lad. A wanton lad. A swain whose own wife sacked him, for he was caught in the sward too many a time with too many a lass.’ I was deaf to such rumors. You are a man profligate with words, yet parsimonious with love, a man who flings words at people to conquer them. Desire, secrets, a special bond, forty years, London. Love. Fie on you!”

  By the end of her speech she was shrieking. She still saw Will’s face through the door, but behind him, on the bed, she saw something move in the candlelight, a body, skin.

  She turned. It was as if the house of her childhood were burning all over again. She put her hands to her ears to block the screams as she fled. She remembered the terrible smell, a blazing timber crashing. She made it down the stairs before the wood gave way. She was running through the garden with her smock in flames, then rolling down the hill. And now she was running also. When she was partway down the path, she tripped and fell with such a fierce force that her hands could not stop her and her head hit the stone.

  All was quiet. She did not move. Her bones felt at rest finally. Her cheek was stuck to the icy path. Her knees were raw and throbbing. She had not died in the fire, by some miracle, but she might die in the cold on this sable night. She would go deep, to sleep and then at some point, a tick only God knew, she would take her last exhale. Her flesh would go stiff; her body would freeze. She was calm. She accepted that she had loved Will. She could not change that history, just as she could not change the fate of her family.

  She heard footsteps, a scampering, light and weightless, like a small animal, or an angel. Then she felt warm breath on her neck, and she smelled a sour scent. Perhaps this was it, then, death—though she was surprised at death’s heat.

  “My lady,” a soft voice cooed in her ear. “My lady.”

  Katharine opened her eyes but did not move her head.

  “You’ve had a nasty tumble.” The small face moved in close to Katharine’s. Katharine said nothing but tried to focus on the little upturned nose and the large blue eyes. “You’ve cut yeself. There’s blood. Canst thou move, my lady? ’Tis Mercy here, ’tis Mercy. I will fetch someone.”

  “Gramercy, Mercy, but no need.”

  Katharine remained still, bathing in Mercy’s blessed breath.

  “I was come from the scullery in the big house, when I saw you running. You’ve banged yeself above the eye,” said Mercy.

  “I will get up, Mercy, though this hard stone feels like a feather bed, and if you were not here I suppose I would fall asleep upon it.”

  “’Tis too cold fer ye to do that,” said Mercy. “Uncle drank a jug of sack and then lay down on the snow one winter night and died. ’Tis too cold. ’Tis not e’en Shrovetide yet. Your blood will ice. I’ll bring you to me mum—she can fix your head and give you some hot milk with honey.”

  Katharine did not answer, but started to raise herself on her hands. Mercy helped her up, and they slowly walked toward the cow barns.

  “How fares your winter?” Katharine said, after they’d walked a ways in silence. “You were sick when I saw you out in the snow. Have you your health back?”

  “I was puking my guts out in the snow, but turns out I wasn’t sick, my lady.”

  “No?”

  “Turns out I was with child.”

  “Oh, Mercy.”

  “I done lost the babe, came too early, came too fast, and we buried the little thing out yonder. I feel better now.”

  “I am so sorry, Mercy. Methinks you have plenty of years ahead of you, plenty of time to have plenty of babes. You told me last that you were nigh fifteen.”

  “Just, my lady. Me, the babe—’twasn’t meant to be. The lout who made me so did promise to be with me, take me to London e’en, then slammed the door on me face when I told him I was with child. He said he had too many brats already.”

  “To London, Mercy.” The word London pricked Katharine’s heart.

  “To London, we were to make a life there, he said, and I would wear my hair up high with pearls in it and meet grand folk.”

  Though Katharine was walking slowly on account of her bruised knees, all of a sudden she had trouble catching her breath.

  “Should we stop and rest, my lady?” asked Mercy.

  “Were you with this lad a long time, Mercy?”

  “No, ’twas a few months but felt like years. He started at me the minute he got here before the harvest. Oh, the words he did employ. He said I was special to him and said so soon I knew him in a way no one, not e’en his wife, did, like we had a special bond, like we was meant to be together. The gifts he give me—never seen such fine things—and we were together soon after. He was my first one.”

  “Did he give you gloves, Mercy?”

  “Aye, he did. The likes I’d never seen before, with beads and skin that felt like silk upon me hands. He loved me hands. Methinks they are ugly, so red and chapped on account of the milking. He said they weren’t the hands of a lady and he loved me for that. He would trace me stubby, rough hands with his fingers, as if me hands were somethin’ fine. He had the lightest touch, then, sent shivers down me. That’s how I fell for him—’twas the way he touched my hands, as light as a feather he was. Now I know better. He’s a trickster, he is, a trickster and braggart and a bawd, who apes his betters in dress and manners but is no true gentleman. His heart is filled with lechery.”

  “He isn’t fit to tutor, is he, Mercy?”

  “Nay. How did ye know it was he?”

  Katharine stopped. “I’m feeling as if to faint, Mercy,” she said.

  “Must be the cows. I don’t e’en smell ’em anymore ’cause I was born amongst them. Hither. We lodge in the back of the barns, me mum and me sisters and me. Come. We’ll attend to thee.”

  27

  n the ides of March, Molly came to Katharine’s chamber and, though Molly was busying herself with the fire, Katharine could tell something was wrong. Katharine had not seen Will since the night of her fall on the icy path.

  “Prithee, Molly, your face is an open book. Tell me your worries.”

  “’Tis him,” said Molly.

  “What of him?” said Katharine.

  “’Tis confusing.”

  “What is, Molly?”

  “He pulled me aside the other day . . .”

  “Yes?” Katharine thought perhaps he had finally inquired after her.

  “And he said he was furthering his poem and asked me to read it.”

  “Asked you to read it? How does he know you read, Molly?”

  “I told him once or twice I thought him good with the words and the rhymes, and he asked me how I knew, and I said you had taught me to read and a’ times when he was passing his verse to you I would take a peek at it now and again.”

  “I see.”

  “And he said I wasn’t to tell you that he had asked me or that I was reading it—’twas to be our secret. His voice changed when he said that, and he leaned into me in a way that is, well, was almost . . .”

  “Uncouth.”

  “Yes, that. And said he wanted to know what I thought of what he had written, and he started saying how clever I was, how he could tell by how I spoke that I had a good mind and that I was in luck because my face was good, too, and not every wench had the two combined. I blushed from head to toe when he said those things and methought how this might bring you pain.”

  “Did he give you his poem?” Katharine asked. She imagined his t
able, the quills, the sheets of paper overflowing with words. Where was Venus now? she wondered. Had Adonis gone off to hunt the boar? Was he dead? Katharine kept her jaw set, in an effort not to weep.

  “He did give it me. Do you want me to bring it to you?”

  “No, Molly. No. And Molly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please never mention him to me again. Would you do that for me?”

  “Yes’m. I crave your pardon.”

  “And Molly, you do have a good head and a fair face and you also have a good heart.”

  “Gramercy,” Molly said, and curtsied low.

  What amazed Katharine about Molly’s tale was that Will would seek to murder her anew. Did he do such things out of cruelty, or was he thinking only of himself and his needs rather than of retaliation? Katharine had thought he needed her for his words, but she now realized what he’d needed her for was her worship, and when that stopped, he no longer had any use for her.

  Not only was the Ides of March the day Caesar met his fate, but it was the ancient Roman holiday honoring the goddess Anna Perenna as well. Ovid had written of the goddess and of her sister Dido, the lovesick queen of Carthage, who fell in love with shipwrecked Aeneas and then killed herself when he deserted her. She’d taken Aeneas’s sword atop her funeral pyre and plunged it into her flesh. Katharine reckoned she didn’t need Aeneas’s sword, for if she’d survived the death of her family when she was ten, then she could at one and thirty survive Will Shakespeare.

  As a player, Will could mimic accents and manners, and as a poet, he could imitate the terrain of the heart without ever truly visiting it. That, Katharine supposed, was his genius—or part of it—that he could project himself into a great variety of people and situations, allowing in his words on a page or his actions upon the stage a humanity that he, in truth, failed to possess. She’d always trusted words, and now she no longer found shelter in them, indeed she felt betrayed by them, for Will had shown her that words were not truths: they could be used as bait; dressed up and trotted out; spun like the gossamer threads of a spider’s web.