The Tutor (40 page)

On the seventh day, Molly brought her a letter from him.

Dear Kate,

Gramercy and gratitude for the enormous amount of brilliant attention you bestowed upon the verse I sent at Christmastide. Your ideas did much improve my lines. Kate, I never take you for granted, but I thought you should know that I am wholly grateful and thankful for all you have done. ’Twas a bit hard to endure some of your words writ upon my page, not because you are wrong but because you are right and it reminds me of how far I have yet to travel as a poet. I will try to toil and to continue on, as you recommend. I shall brook no excuse for not moving ahead. I have read through what I have got, and I must say it sits well, which is much for me to say. Verily, I must advance, though I’m now stuck as to what follows. I cannot seem to set my quill upon the page with any ease. I hope you are well.

Adieu,

Will.

Will was playing the humble and appreciative student. Katharine threw the letter in the fire and burst into tears.

—

On Candlemas,
Ned said mass in the hidden chapel, for it was a day of hope, purification and renewal. Katharine tried to listen, tried to take it in, believe it, but hope seemed far away, purification unattainable and renewal utterly impossible. Then Ned and his squires left for a Jesuit mission. Young Henry went with them, to journey as far as the coast, where he would book passage on a ship to the Continent. Parting with Ned and Henry was a sad and serious blow, for Katharine simply did not know if she would ever lay eyes on either of them again.

The following day, Isabel and Katharine were in Isabel’s chamber, trying to warm themselves like cats in the only patch of sunlight.

“’Tis one thing to be young and naïve,” Katharine said.

“And you are neither,” Isabel finished.

“I am as a teller of a tale. I see what goes, I see what he doth do, but at the same time I am a character, too, and am strangely tethered to him and his poetry. I stay in the story as it unfolds. I’ve tried, Isabel, I’ve tried to break away.” Katharine put her face in her hands.

“Perhaps he loves you,” said Isabel.

“How I have hoped for that, dreamed of it, but I am not at all sure he knows how to love. And what of his family? His wife? His children? He rarely speaks of them. What about passion? He seems to have it for his writing and the stage, but nowhere does he seem to have it for people, or a person. I thought in the beginning he had a passion for me, but I was wrong, for if he did, I would not be sitting in front of you wringing my hands. What of chaos? What of messiness and tangled lives? He can write a poem that snares this, but he stays at the remove, while others play it for him.”

“But was it not his ambition and the chaos in your heart that did excite you at first, my dear?” Isabel asked.

Katharine did not answer Isabel, for it was true. But now that very bedlam he created did threaten to bleed her dry. “Perhaps he loves Ned,” said Katharine.

“Loves Ned? I think not,” said Isabel. “Your bones are showing.”

“Food holds no interest for me.” Katharine gulped a cup of wine like it was water. “Why this shaky cosmos, Isabel? Why the fire and then the freezing and then the thaw? I had such hopes for something special, grand in truth, because I felt we were two ends of a ribbon, not a ball and chain. He made me say it once.”

“What?”

“He made me repeat after him. Say it, Kate, he said, say, ‘What we
have is special.’ And I said it. I repeated it. He said, ‘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.’ He said those things. I remember every word he ever spoke to me. Today, this minute, I feel there’s been yet another death in my life. That a vision of a future with him, some sort of life, has sustained me all these months and now ’tis finished.” Tears rolled down her face. “He has not mentioned London. He has not reprised his offer.” Katharine continued, “What am I left with? He’s kept it all so contained, while I have let it invade every breath I take. Now I see it. ’Tis winding down for him. His poem will be finished soon. And he has made his mark with the Stanleys. He has done, I suppose, what he came to Lufanwal to do. He has crafted his future, and he will leave. And he will not think of me after he leaves, whereas I will hold on to this year with him. I will hear it and see it and feel it forever. I cannot bear that this has never amounted to anything more than a kiss at the dance or the pulling of pins from my hair. Did I tell you he leaned in and kissed me on the mouth and I opened my lips once? Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you told me,” said Isabel, hugging her weeping friend. “You seem tired of this man.”

“I am. I feel slightly ill always now. I have been fighting a war that was at first battle exhilarating, but now the constant mutilation makes me weary.”

“Dearest, sweetest Kate, I have never seen you thus.”

“I am on Ursula’s trail.”

“You are not and must not talk thus. You must not see him. What started as a tonic has turned toxic.”

“And when I am with him I feel as if in a dream, because I am lost to him, because I cannot
not
meet with him.”

“Yes, you can. Pray, be strong. Do not see him. You are stricken,” said Isabel. “You need a priest.”

“Yes, what a shame dear Ned has gone, for he must perform an exorcism here at Lufanwal,” said Katharine.

That night at supper, she drank cup after cup of wine, and with each sip her anger grew. In her chamber, her head lurching, she dipped her quill in her inkhorn and let her words spill across the page:

Dear Will,

Do you in truth desire to be a poet? I wonder. I am a champion to those who desire it. I wonder if in some way you do not. You are so gifted ’tis uncanny, yet not a word was writ the weeks we did not meet. What happened? Hast thou ever tried to bare thy soul? Much of the time, I have no idea from whence you come or indeed what you are feeling. I no longer care what you think of me or how I might fit into your life. You and I are as different as the sun and the moon, and after these many months perhaps that is, alas, crystal clear. Poetry is not a game. ’Tis not the muck of players, of changing fine flaunts for a role. ’Tis from a well far deeper. You could have written these weeks, as you did during Yuletide. Yet you have nary a line created, when you could have much. Your pouch overflows with talents of word and thought, of rhyme and meter. From your pen flows pure abundance. You know how you feel when you are writing from that place. Perhaps it makes you afraid, makes your world whirl with inward uproar and unruliness. If so, then you are right to cease. Leave your quill and paper, and as is your inclination, mouth the words of others upon a stage.

Adieu,

Kate.

She stared into the darkness much of the night, tossing from side to side. She found no peace, no even keel. When she awoke, her head was heavy, her body in a sweat. Molly had replenished the fire and brought her bread and ale.

“Art thou ill, mistress?” Molly asked.

“Demons raided my sleep, is all,” said Katharine, wiping her brow with her sleeve, pulling her damp hair from her neck. She swung her legs over the side of her bed and sat like a child, feet dangling, not quite touching the floor. “Molly, did you . . .”

“Yes, my lady, I slipped your note under his door.”

“Ah,” said Katharine, her mouth dry. She wished now she had thrown her missive into the fire.

Molly pulled open the curtains and poured a pitcher of water into the basin. Her red hair shimmered in the sun. Though light was streaming in, the day seemed not yet begun, for Katharine’s mood was as black as night. She recalled what she had written to Will, the words like spears.
Do you in truth desire to be a poet? I wonder . . .

“Is it late, Molly?”

“The sun is high,” said Molly, leaning over Katharine and touching her forehead with her cool hand. “You mustn’t read ’em no more,” she said.

“What, Molly?”

“The papers he sends to you. ’Tis lewd, that lad . . . in person and in word . . . but ’tis not his lewdness that makes me warn you off his verse . . . ’tis what I see happening to you, mistress. Look at yourself.” Molly brought a looking glass to Katharine.

Katharine stared. “So?” She handed it back to Molly.

“Don’t you see?”

“See what, Molly?”

“How ye’ve changed.”

“Verily?” said Katharine, taking the mirror back and looking again. In truth, she saw a change also.

“This man and his poetry are not fit for a lady. They say in the scullery—”

“I know what they say, Molly! I know. I know.” Katharine’s eyes filled with tears and when she moved to wipe them, the looking glass slipped from her fingers and fell with a crash to the floor.

“Oh!” It was Molly who let out the cry, for there was nothing good about a broken mirror.

Katharine was stunned and silent while Molly fetched the broom and swept up the shattered pieces.

When Katharine finally rose and bathed her face, her heart felt heavier than stone. She moved through the morning with a certain caving and cleaving and carving within. She stayed in her chamber—as stooped and slow as an old hag. She waited. In the late afternoon, Molly brought a message. He wanted to speak with Katharine now. This news did not thrill her, as it might have days or weeks or months before. She sank even lower. What had she done?

“I cannot see him,” she said, “but I bid you, dear Molly, bring this letter to him.”

Katharine dipped her quill in the inkhorn with such gravity, ’twas as if she were on her deathbed composing her will.
I’ve come undone. I am unmoored. I cannot find the light. I crave your pardon for the letter writ late last night.

When Molly returned, the paper from Will was harsh and sealed with anger.

What did I do for you to deliver such cruelty? I did not write much these past weeks and now you fling my empty pages at me as though I have committed thievery. You judge. You slander. “If so, then . . . cease,” you hurl at me. If so, then cease? I am not dressing in character, as you so archly scribe. I cannot not write. These past months here have thickened my blood, made sauce where broth did run. If so, then cease? Would you then cut off my finger, dismember my every limb? I once more ask you: What did I do for you to deliver such cruelty?

Katharine walked her floor, her hair down, her hands clasped behind her back. What had she done? What had she wrought? Ned at the Stanleys’, the almond-eyed lady in London, the serving wenches at the De Hoghtons’, all the sordid tales from the scullery and beyond . . . had she blasted Will unfairly? Created a plot where there was none?

I crave your pardon,
Katharine wrote on the back of the paper he had sent her.
I am so very sorry. My thoughts are poison. My words are pikes. My shame is a heavy mantle. I believed you were in love with me, and now cannot abide that you are not.

There. She had said it. She had bared her soul just as she had urged Will to do.

She did not go to Will. She started to walk down the path that led out of Lufanwal, through one courtyard, then another. The tiny flurries of snow that fell from the sky did nothing to cool the hot misery she felt in every joint and every limb. She had not touched the bread Molly had brought, and now sorrow filled the spot where hunger should have been. She had not been this unsettled since her family had perished, but she had been so young and out of tune with her feelings then that she had gone on to her new life at Lufanwal Hall without much change in her complexion. Then her own babes had died, one born, the other not yet. She had survived.

Katharine wished she were made of a different mettle now or, indeed, it was metal she was made of, for she felt her flesh being peeled from her
very bones. She saw in Will strange and mismatched threads, but she had dispatched her heart to him. His need, so strong, so childlike, thwarted her from ending things. Perhaps, if she had children of her own, his craving would not woo her thus, or perhaps it would have. There was, after all, the specter of his wife and the gossip that she had cast him from their home. Again Katharine thought perhaps this Anne was strong rather than weak, who acted thus so she did not have to give ceaseless suck to the needy infant who had fathered her flock.

It occurred to Katharine that Will needed someone to sit beside him while he worked as his mother had done while he was home at night after grammar school. Katharine had always imagined poets such as Sidney and Spenser alone at a table, squinting into the candlelight, but perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps Will’s self-professed ability to be alone was not a true mirror. Will said his wife and children crowded him, yet he wanted Katharine to read his words and to meet with him every day. And crowding? Well, he had come north to a family that, though the house was grand and the grounds vast, was beginning to crowd itself.

As Katharine turned and circled back, passing the stables and then the barns, she heard cries and groans more human than animal, and in a move that was unlike her, she did not venture in. It was a woman in pain, but there were other women there, too, for she heard a voice saying over and over again, “Now, now, there, now, now”—a sort of cooing chant meant to soothe the poor soul in distress. Katharine stopped and listened. “Now, now, there, there, ’tis the will of God, Mercy. ’Tis the will of God . . .”

God. With Katharine’s focus on Will, she had been neglecting God. She had put Will before God. She would make a confession of her sins when Ned returned. And she would pray for Will. There was nothing Will had done to her that could be judged in a court of law as overtly unjust—and certainly a man seducing a woman with words and
embraces was nothing new—why, the character Will had played in that silly play at Lathom House had done just that to poor Em.