The Tutor (37 page)

atharine did not sleep that night at Lathom House, but stared into the darkness. Jealousy was not something she had much experience with, and certainly to be jealous of her beloved Ned seemed a sin, but here she was filled with a searing, unstoppable, wild jealousy. In one of Will’s sonnets, he had called jealousy as “cruel as the grave” and compared it to “fiery coals,” and indeed those coals burned within Katharine now. He was finishing his poem, and now perhaps he thought it was time to finish her off—his words came rushing back,
The day you tell me that,
is
the day I have no more use for you!
—but that he had embroiled Ned in his game was perhaps the most malicious thing of all. He had sensed her deep connection with Ned, and then he had used it on her—not to wound her with a dagger but to put her to the sword.

The little group returned to Lufanwal the next day. Katharine tried to seem lighthearted during the ride, but her heart was in such torment she said little. Once back at the hall, she kept to her turret. She was on her bed, curled in a ball, her knees almost touching her chin, when she realized she had not seen Mr. Smythson after the play. She had not even
thought of him. Perhaps he had been there with a clever costume on, and she had not recognized him—though in truth he did not seem the sort to wear a disguise.

She replayed the strange scene with Will and Ned in her head. It was a tyranny. If Isabel and Ned had not supported her vision, she would have thought her eyes wrong. This was her question: Did Will act thus toward Ned to wound her or because he could not help himself? She felt in some strange way he was jealous she was seated at the high table, that it was envy that made him retaliate, the same way jealousy of Mr. Smythson had made him retaliate that day he returned from London. He’d been asked to perform with Lord Strange’s Men and perhaps didn’t understand that the Stanley and the De L’Isle friendship went back many generations, and the De L’Isles would be invited as they always were to the earl’s Twelfth Night revels. Or perhaps he had not thought of Katharine or the De L’Isle family at all.

Katharine could not settle on the reason for Will’s behavior, but he had discarded her, in truth dispatched her, with his unbridled focus on Ned and his disappearance at the dance. Will and Ned were both dazzling—and perhaps, in that instant of introduction, when eyes met, emerald to amethyst, beauty to beauty, Will and Ned had fallen in love. Perhaps Will’s inclination for men was the same as Ned’s, and Katharine had never known it. Perhaps that was why he had never bedded her. Perhaps right at this very minute, while she lay with a blanket of wretchedness wrapped round her, Will had returned and was laughing and talking with Ned, her Ned. Perhaps her Ned had become his Ned. She tried to push back the images of their nakedness entwined, but Ovid’s words of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus flared up, “the bodies of twaine were mixt . . . the members of them mingled,” the wrestling and the struggling to and fro, the hugging and the grasping of the other.

Was this what Will did in front of his wife? With maids and lads? Was this why, as the young woman from Hoghton Tower had said, his wife, Anne, tossed him out of their house?

It was a whole new vision of Will: that Anne made him leave. Perhaps Anne realized if he were to stay, all of her attention, focus, mothering, nurturing would go to him: to flattery to make him feel that he was the only one, the special one, the brilliant one, the one with the ideas, and to vigilance—that she was a sentry of sorts—to make sure he was not in a meadow or a bower kissing another. Perhaps Anne understood that if Will stayed, he would suck the lifeblood out of her, that her bond would be with him and him only because that was what he required, and their three sweet children would go unmothered because her minding would go to her husband, and unfathered because all Will’s minding would go to himself. So now, in Katharine’s eyes, Anne was intelligent, heroic even, in that she chose her children over Will.

Katharine’s belief in men, good men, came from Sir Edward and from Ned. Was Will a good man or a bad man? At first she’d thought him good, a gem, but now it seemed the cut and carat came with a steep price. Katharine was helping Will navigate the human heart in his verse: love, yearning, passion, desire and loss. He clearly understood these feelings. But did he embody them? Or had he shut the door on them? If he had, when? Why? Maybe he was born that way. Maybe God, in creating Will, had gotten something wrong; the humors were off. It was a mystery—the curious, brilliant alchemy of his mind. And if she hadn’t fallen in love with him, she would have been able to admire his mind for all its strange gaps and incongruities.

Perhaps this imbalance could be blamed on his craft, the theater, portraying one character while living his true self beneath. She recalled once when he demonstrated every manner of talk the islands of Britain had to offer: from Ireland to Scotland to Wales to the whole compass of
England, the strange swallowed sounds of the south to the almost perverse lilt of the nobles at court, a lisp that seemed false and only for effect. He had shown her how he could cry at will. And he had an amazing memory—he could repeat verbatim poems, pages of plays, passages from poets living and dead.

But with this hall of mirrors, with the mimicry and the memory, there was the gnawing question of what Will in truth was feeling. Reflections were only surface. No one could hold a looking glass to the soul. And it wasn’t, Katharine decided finally, that his skill as a player was to blame. She had met other players over the years: one who had tried to drown himself in the river because of a broken heart, another who had proclaimed he was in love with Katharine and sang under her window one night. They were passionate, a bit silly perhaps, but without the words of others on their tongues, they were who they were, regular folk. Yet Will oft seemed he was playing a role, even when he was not. He seemed to control his image at every breath. Katharine wondered if he mapped out their meetings before they met, as if they were both characters in a play, with their speeches, their actions, their entrances, their exits already writ.

She sat in front of the fire. Reading was impossible. Dressing was impossible. She stared into the blaze. How had she let herself be seduced by this glover’s son from Stratford? How had she, Katharine de L’Isle, who’d believed she’d gained some wisdom after one and thirty years and come to some understanding of life, let a man mine her emotions and then extract what he needed like ore?

Molly came with a letter from Will. He had returned to Lufanwal. So he was on the grounds—in his chamber, in the schoolroom, riding in the hills, laughing with Ned perhaps. Katharine took the letter and threw it into the fire unread. An hour later Molly came with another letter, and Katharine threw that in the fire, too. Why had he not tried to find her at the dance? She had been wearing the gloves he had given her—he would
have recognized her. Her mind was a wheel now, running round in circles. Perhaps he’d thought she was Alice. Perhaps Alice was wearing gloves he had given her also.

After Katharine tossed the third note from Will into the fire, she grabbed a quill and, dipping it deep into the dark ink, started to write through her wrath. She felt as worn as a pebble on the shore. She had no idea what was in his heart, or even if he had a heart at all. She wrote and wrote and then threw each page into the fire and watched the flames consume her fury.

She pulled a new sheet of paper in front of her and without intention found herself writing verse. She wrote and rewrote long into the night, going over each line, changing words for rhyme and rhythm. Perhaps it was all these months of working with Will that made the poetry flow from her veins. She warmed her hands by the coals and went back to her words, and by dawn the following morning, without an hour of sleep, she had finished a sonnet:

O call not me to justify the wrong

That thy unkindness lays upon my heart:

Wound me not with thine eye but with thy tongue,

Use power with power, and slay me not by art.

Tell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,

Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside.

What need’st thou wound with cunning when thy might

Is more than my o’erpressed defence can bide?

Let me excuse thee: “Ah, my love knows

His pretty looks have been mine enemies,

And therefore from my face he turns my foes,

That they elsewhere might dart their injuries.”

Yet do not so, but since I am near slain,

Kill me outright with looks, and rid my pain.

With the hills still cloaked in shades of blue and purple and the light just rising from the east, Katharine told Molly to deliver the sonnet to Will and tell him she would meet with him today. Face-to-face, not paper-to-paper, Katharine would tell Will that she would not sit with him again, not read his lines, not pore over his words. Was he more a trickster than an honest man, who used his trickery for people’s hearts, not their gold?

Even without tragedy, the dark days of January were always a descent after the heightened pitch of Christmas. The hall resounded with the recent deaths and jailings. Katharine tried to pray and not to dwell on Will staring at Ned, but to no avail. She imagined that Will might take the opportunity of her shutting him out to welcome and to cultivate Ned—though in truth Ned had other business to attend to, for he now spent days traveling to the grand houses of Lancashire and York to rekindle, amidst secrecy and danger, the flame of their religion.

Katharine dressed with care—she could not help it—and donned her black and white bodice with the scallops of black and white lace. Why, she asked herself, as she patted cinnamon powder on her cheeks, could she not free herself from the desire to pull Will in, even after that vile Twelfth Night? And why did she send him her sonnet? She had never written a sonnet before. Did she think that pretty attire and witty verse would make Will love her? He was as coy and tempting as his Adonis, and now she, Katharine, was as entrenched with lust as his Venus. And what of all Will had promised her? The move to London?
Thy unkindness lays upon my heart
,
she herself had writ,
but here she was, hair done up in pearls and scallops of lace framing her breasts.

She was at the door of her chamber, Will’s pages posted during Yuletide in her hand, when Molly came to her. She supposed Molly had another letter from Will.

“He is waiting for you in the great chamber,” said Molly.

“I thought he was in the schoolroom,” said Katharine.

“Mr. Smythson, my lady,” said Molly. “He begs a word with you.”

“Oh, Molly, ’tis of Master Shakespeare I thought you were speaking . . .”

“And Master Shakespeare has changed the place of meeting to his lodging.”

“Pray, what can Mr. Smythson want?” Katharine asked. In sooth, she was thinking: Pray, what can Master Shakespeare want? His lodging? She was surprised by Will’s boldness.

When Katharine found Mr. Smythson, he was standing in front of the fire. He looked up when she entered, then bowed. Will would have said something flattering about her apparel or her eyes, but Mr. Smythson seemed not to focus on her details. He smiled at her.

“Good day, my lady,” he said.

“I saw you at Lathom House,” said Katharine, “but missed you after the play. I have wanted to say how much I enjoyed the poetry you gave to me. I have no recollection of a woman putting quill to paper in such a manner. It inspires.”

“She has much skill.” He paused, as though he were trying to gather his thoughts. “I left before the dancing. I had spent much of the week walking through Lathom House. They want to alter the house and have asked for my services. My son and I were eager to return to our cottage on the sea west of here, so I left before the festivities ended.”

“I thought you hailed now from Nottinghamshire?”

“My wife’s family is from land near Poulton. The house passed to my son. We spend time there when we are not in Wollaton.”

“Must be bitter cold at the cottage this time of year, with the winds off the sea.”

“’Tis raw, but the house is in truth not large, and we keep the fires going and a family lives there year-round to help. The snow is less there than here on account of the shore. ’Tis beautiful any time of year, for you can see the water from many windows and the waves even in a tempest sound like music. Perchance you will see it someday.”

His last sentence hung in the air, and she was silent, then she began.

“Mr. Smythson, I am not young . . .”

“You are younger than I.”

They were in front of the fire facing each other.

“I feel much past the years when I might wed . . .”