The Tutor Read Online Free PDF

we do? . . . What will I do?
    Katharine was at the door of their antechamber when Edward burst out.
    “Sir Edward, I . . .”
    He put his hands on her shoulders, his eyes brimming with grief. “Kate, Lord Molyneux’s priest is dead, murdered with his men on their way back from our estate. His head was piked on Preston Road.”
    “Dearest uncle,” Katharine began.
    Edward sighed and added wearily, “’Tis a wretched world we live in.”
    Katharine was searching for something of comfort to say when he turned abruptly, went back into his rooms and shut the door.
    —
    Three nights later, Katharine awoke to the sounds of horses neighing and to her uncle’s grave and commanding voice. She rose from her bed and went to the window. A group of men were on horseback, Sir Edward’s hair lucent in the moonlight. She could see his noble profile. There was urgency in the way the horses moved, nervously clattering on the stones, then thudding away on the hard earth. She watched the band of riders drop below the rise. One second they seemed a small army, and then they were gone.
    There was no bloodshed, yet Katharine felt the night oddly pillaged. She stayed at the window. Before the first cock crowed, when the moon was down, the stars fading into the hoary blue, she heard the raucous sound of rooks cawing. The noise grew, becoming loud and fierce, and then the rebellious birds burst forth from the rookery, swooping and plunging, steering wide, then rising into the sky. She waited for them to settle down and come back round again, but they did not. Instead, they shot out into the distance, in the same direction as Sir Edward, and then they, too, vanished. Had the rooks deserted the rookery? Never before, to Katharine’s knowledge, in the history of the De L’Isle family, had they lost their rooks. It was a disturbing sign.
    The first beams of light were now climbing the rough-hewn façade, creeping into her room and warming her skin. She untied the ribbons ofher smock and watched the crimson streaks kindle the sky. A thrush started singing. She was about to pull her head in, when she saw the tutor walking swiftly. When he got to the gatehouse he turned, retraced his steps, then turned again and embarked on the path anew. His mouth was moving, as if he were talking to himself. She watched him walk back and forth, again and again. At one point he tore off his doublet and threw it onto a bush. Then, after another round, he unbuttoned his blouse. His skin glistening in the morning heat, he looked more a chanting druid than a schoolmaster. When he finished whatever ritual he was enacting, he grabbed his doublet and blouse and disappeared from view. Katharine pulled the window shut and knelt down to pray.

5

    er cousin Richard called a meeting in the great hall. The darkness blinded Katharine when she came in from the sun-baked gardens, but once the lamps were lit and she was sitting, her eyes adjusted to the dimness. The cool gritstone provided some relief from the heat, but the linen hanging in the windows did nothing to keep the flies out. Richard, his short legs dangling, looked like a child perched on his chair. The large Flemish tapestry of a boar and bear hunt that hung behind Richard only dwarfed him further: the hunters woven into the piece were twice his size. The family was sitting on chairs and stools, fans aflutter, with the younger children scattered on the stone floor. The rest of the household stood in back.
    If only Ned were here, Katharine thought, to stand by his mother during this troubled time. But he had never taken any real interest in family matters. He loved his painters and his poets, and the way the light in Italy made “everyone and everything look as if they had been kissed by gold.” Barred from attending Oxford and Cambridge because of hisCatholic faith, he had pursued his studies on the Continent. After touring Paris, Venice and Vienna, he had circled back to Italy, where he took up residence in