Free The Tutor by Andrea Chapin Page B

when Ned will arrive,” said Matilda, biting a red thread with her teeth. “But surely we will provide a warm welcome for our guests.”
    Ursula stopped dancing. “ My guests. Mine. Richard and I invited them. The duke is my cousin. The new cook and I have gone over the menus. Monsieur Delaney is from the duke’s province, and Monsieur Delaney is an expert in the dishes of that country. I have been fitted for my new gown: the lace is from Belgium, the silk from France, the velvet from Italy. I will look like a queen.”
    “Queen of what?” Katharine asked, sticking a needle into the spiraled horn of a unicorn and drawing gold silk through the linen. She was stitching a linen coverlet for a bed.
    The question gave Ursula pause and she was silent for a moment. “The queen,” she replied flatly. “Our queen. Her Majesty.”
    “What alchemy is this, dear Ursula?” Mary said, her head still bent over her stitching. “Your tailor must be a sorcerer, verily, if he is able to transform you into our queen right before our eyes. Better pay your dressmaking wizard well, for all of England will be knocking at his door.”
    Isabel giggled, Katharine smiled, and Joan suppressed a grin.
    “Cease!” said Ursula, her tone shrill. No one looked up. She sighed loudly and then stalked out of the room.
    “What next? The Virgin Mary?” Katharine said.
    There was laughter.
    “Ursula is a child,” Matilda said.
    Ursula was past thirty. Katharine recalled their conversation on the grass that day. She’d seemed no child then. And now she appeared to possess a newly found hunger. She could stomp her feet one minute, yet she also seemed quite capable of dropping poison into Matilda’s wine the next.
    Katharine stood to give her legs a stretch and went to the window. Mr. Smythson was below with several workmen. Two men were rolling something that looked like a large skein with a ribbon round it. They staked one end of the ribbon to the ground and continued walking. Mr. Smythson called out numbers while a man next to him hurriedly wrote them down. The mason cut a striking figure with his height and his long black coat. Katharine assumed they were measuring the dimensions of the new addition. At one point Mr. Smythson looked up at the window, held an instrument to his eye and peered through it. Then he removed the instrument but continued to gaze at the window where Katharine stood. She did not know if he had seen her and was intentionally looking up, or whether he was blind to her and merely intent on gauging the height of the house. She had just raised her hand to wave, when he turned away to talk to one of his men.
    —
    The children were gathering leaves and jumping feetfirst into the piles. Henry brought a three-legged stool for Katharine to sit on, and she held her umbrella to shield the sun. Henry no longer ran with the younger children, and his voice had deepened. He stretched his long legs on the linen spread on the grass and read not a leather-bound book but pages sewn together with thread.
    “Whose pages?” Katharine asked, glad Henry was near and that his head was buried in words.
    He held up the slim volume, a cheap penny pamphlet, the type sold on the streets in London. “Robert Greene,” he said.
    “Don’t know him,” she said. “A new curriculum from Master Shakespeare?”
    Henry grinned. She remembered when he was born and the first time she was allowed to hold him. He had a shock of black hair at birth that fell out before he was a month old. And then the blond hair grew in, andeven at this age it was soft and bright. Katharine had to stop herself from reaching down and running her fingers through it as she used to when he was a child.
    Two girls from the kitchens brought baskets filled with bread, cheese, quince, nuts, cider, ale and a few stunted apples and pears from the orchard. When the food appeared, the children leapt from the leaves and dove for the offerings. They ate and then played again in the