The Tutor by Andrea Chapin

translate,” he said to her back.
    “From the Greek to English.”
    “Yes.”
    “And when they make mistakes, you correct them?” She finally turned to look at him.
    “I read Greek,” he said.
    The dark red leather book with shafts of wheat engraved in gold at its edges was now behind his back. He obviously did not read Greek well, for he had pulled a translation of Plutarch from the shelf.
    “I’d venture to say you speak Greek,” she said, spitting out the words.
    “I speak Greek and—” He stopped mid-sentence when she waved her hand to cut him off.
    She meant he spoke nonsense, but he had taken her literally. She rolled her eyes toward the heavens. “And you also read our fair language . . .”
    “English? Yes, fairly. Our Saxons may have been fair of hair, buttheir tongue was dark and brutish. When William conquered our lands, he brought a fairer, lighter lilt.”
    “So when your students exchange Greek for English, do they use other texts to aid them or are they on their own?”
    “The beauty of Plutarch is that he writes of character, of qualities, of the person first, the event second. Lessons we can all learn from . . .”
    “So you said. But you have not answered my question. Are your students allowed to use another text to help them in their translation?”
    “No.”
    “So you must be truly a master, then, to sit with their ink scratches barely dry and read their creations.”
    “Their translations. I am a schoolmaster.”
    “Yes, a master, but of what I cannot tell.” Katharine stopped at the door and, facing him, pointed to the book he was holding with both hands behind his back. “That is Amyot’s Plutarch in French—you, I assume, want Sir Thomas North’s Englished version,” she said, pulling the brown leather binding from the shelf and handing the book to him.
    Without waiting for a reply, she charged through the door. She felt like laughing but was afraid the sound would come out of her mouth in gales. At the end of the next room, when she was out of his sight, she picked up her skirts and ran.

7

    ad they fallen to the floor? She pushed her skirts and bone farthingale to the side, got down on her hands and knees and looked under her bed. They were not there. Nor were they on the table, in the oak cupboard or under her pillows. She hoped to dear God that her maid Molly hadn’t thought they were rubbish and thrown them in the fire.
    Sir Edward’s library was on the second floor, with two doors at opposite ends of the long room, one opening to a staircase and the other to a withdrawing chamber and several guest quarters. There was no central corridor in this part of the house, so Katharine retraced her steps with candle in hand, through one guest chamber and then another. The rooms boasted broad beds with fringed canopies trunked by oak pillars of carved thistles, ivy and doves. She passed windows framed in teal, emerald, gold and damask. The chambers of the grandest suite were elegant enough for a king, and indeed Henry VI had slept there.
    She scanned the edges, the rugs and the planked floors for her lost pages. She had hungered for Sidney’s sonnets all day, and then, at the moment she started to feast, the tutor had interrupted her, and now allthe glorious morsels—the words and their rhymes, the rhythm and the form Sidney had worked so hard to create—had vanished into air.
    Katharine pushed open the library door. Her candle cast shadows along the rows of bindings. She hunted the floor, then the chair by the window. She searched the seat creases with her fingers—nothing hiding there. She’d held the sonnets high as she ran from the room. Why hadn’t she struck the silly man over the head with them? When she returned to her chamber without the sonnets, she climbed into her bed, feeling empty and out of sorts.
    —
    “You told the cook what?” Matilda asked.
    Matilda was sitting by the window in her antechamber, alternately fanning herself and wiping her face