The Tutor Read Online Free PDF Page A

ivory becomes soft, like wax beneath the sun. With his hand, he satisfies his wishes, again and again. Her pulse throbs under his thumb. He presses his mouth to the maid’s: lips on lips, she blushes, then raises her timid eyes to him.
    The words warmed Katharine right down to her very loins, and she worried the tale was too lewd a conceit for young boys, with the kissing, the touching again and again , the hard ivory turning into pliant flesh. “Pygmalion” was surely a lesson of Eros, with all its tantalizing passion. The new tutor seemed determined to shock and to make his mark at every occasion.
    By the time Katharine replaced the book on the shelf and made her way to her chamber, the grand house was dark and mostly quiet—though she could hear singing and laughter coming from down in the buttery or maybe from out in the barns.

4

    he hour was hot, the house hushed. Even the servants hid from the sun, staying within the cool confines of wood and stone. No pots clanged in the scullery, no dogs barked in the courtyard, even the stables were silent.
    Katharine had written to Ned. She’d been careful in her letter—for it could fall into the wrong hands—saying only there had been trouble and that it had passed. After Katharine returned to Lufanwal a widow, she and Ned were—as they had been as children—inseparable, walking, reading, laughing, lying on her bed for hours telling each other tales. When Ned left, she inured herself to his absence. The first year was the most difficult, for they were accustomed to sharing every shred of their lives, and to be unable to seek him out was indeed a bitter draught. She tried to keep a steady correspondence with him, but as time went on their letters grew farther apart. Several years earlier he had sent a sketch an Italian friend had drawn of him. She kept it framed by her bed. There was no taming Ned’s beauty: it burst through the lines. Whenever she gazed at his portrait, she painted in the violet color of his eyes and the sable sheen of his thick black hair.
    Katharine’s room had originally been part of the keep built by her Norman ancestors: the turret used as quarters for sentries, who slept on hay. Her oak bed with four carved columns and canopy overpowered the scant space. A few centuries back, the circular walls had been paneled in wood as gloomy as the rest of the dark oak furniture—the cupboard, small table and a chair—that crowded the room. When Katharine returned to Lufanwal after her husband died, she’d tossed out the faded red and green curtains and bedcover and replaced them with muslin, canvas and bleached linen, hoping the blond cloth would brighten the room, for there was only one small window.
    The ink dry, she was dripping wax when shouting, sharp and sudden, made her spill the red liquid across the paper. Quickly pressing the seal, she went to the door—left open with the hope of a breeze. She would have expected Ursula and Richard to be the players of these harsh chords, but it was not their voices that rang through the halls. The unlikely duet was Sir Edward and Lady Matilda.
    Katharine stepped from her room. She had never heard her aunt and uncle raise their voices, yet she recalled all too clearly how her own parents had battled hard into the night: sometimes the walls and floors of their timber house seemed as thin as parchment. As a child, she would climb out of bed, venture to the stairs, sit on a step and listen; often her brother and sister, awakened by the clamor, came to her side. She had, those nights, put her arms around them and vowed to let no harm come to them.
    As she crept toward Edward and Matilda’s lodgings, she heard fragments of what they were saying: Informers . . . a plot to kill . . . the enemy within . . . Sir Edward, Sir William and Sir Rowland Stanley, Thomas Langton charged with harboring seminary priests . . . imprisoned in the Tower . . . Oh, Edward, you mustn’t, you mustn’t . . . What will