The Tiger Catcher Read online

  Julian busies his hands while his soul climbs the walls.

  Together he and Krea roll empty barrels out onto the lawn to collect rainwater and then roll them full into the buttery. They boil plants, leach them, add potash to the clarified oil, fill thick glass jars with wicks and tallow. Krea teaches him how to braid the wick to make it thicker and stronger and how to dip the braided wick into the grease, though she cannot teach him how to wait for it to harden before he dips and re-dips. Julian must learn patience on his own. She teaches him how to make mash for ale. It takes forever, like candle-making; there are a dozen steps, and like the candles, the ale is gone in a day or two, and in any case doesn’t keep, so the process must begin anew.

  No one drinks the water, as if they know it’s sewage. They drink ale for breakfast, dinner, and supper. Ashton would approve. Poor Ashton. Julian hopes Devi has told his friend about what’s happened to him. Sometimes it’s hard to believe the other life is gone. Julian tries not to think about it.

  He can’t find one private minute alone with Mary. During the day while he toils by Krea’s side or sits with Cedric at the stables, Mary stays by the corner window in the great hall and reads, always in the presence of one or two members of her family. Occasionally he hears her singing or performing bits of plays in front of them. In the evenings, while Julian and Aurora spend time entertaining themselves with cards and conversation, she remains by herself near the fire or in the library next door.

  Edna refuses to join Julian and Aurora in their frivolous games since she disapproves of cards only lightly less than she disapproves of Julian. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Edna says to him, “but education in Wales is quite poor, isn’t it? Non-existent, really.”

  It’s no wonder Edna is suspicious of him. Every time Julian opens his mouth, he says the wrong thing. His one pithy King Lear quote falls on confused ears. “You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return it back to you.” King Lear must not have been written yet. His careless defense of Shakespeare as a genius sui generis who helped write the King James Bible is met with the same troubled reaction. James, the first of his name, has not been crowned yet. “Which King James Bible could you possibly mean, Master Julian?” Edna asks.

  Even beverages are not safe. A few days ago, he asked if there was any tea, and Edna said tea?

  The British didn’t have tea in 1603? It’s the end times.

  Julian is afraid to say anything lest his ill-chosen words betray him. Krea has told him how the witches and the insane are treated in Elizabethan London. “Equally, sire,” she says. “Both are burned at the stake.”

  Lady Collins often talks about the crackdown on Catholic priests in post-Reformation England. One could be hanged for harboring a Catholic priest, she tells Julian. Edna, who isn’t even part of the conversation, pipes in with, “What about harboring just a plain old Catholic? What is the punishment for that, dare I ask?”

  “Oh, the Catholics are also burned at the stake,” Krea tells Julian.

  Correction to those who are burned at the stake: The witches, the insane, and the Catholics.

  In the manor’s dark paneled library, the books are bound between ornamented gilded covers and proudly displayed. Nothing is spined. This isn’t Book Soup. The covers, like the books themselves, are works of art. They’re all in color, gorgeously illustrated, elaborately inked and typefaced, they are precious jewels. Julian is awed by their craftsmanship.

  One evening after supper and wine, Julian follows Mary into the library and pretends to browse alongside her. They’re not alone. Blind Uncle Henry is by the window, his wife Angmar by his side, and Edna is by the fire, close to Julian and Mary, listening in. Mary has picked out several volumes, pressing the books against her bodice. She wears a starched puff collar like a white Frisbee around her neck. Her arms are hidden with oversleeves and undersleeves, she is laced up through the waist and hooped out with a farthingale skirt, whalebone rings rippling out, keeping her at an untouchable distance from him. He can still gaze at her bored annoyed face, her luminous skin, curls expertly arranged, adorned with pearls and a gold-fringed bonnet, a whole life burning behind her large brown eyes that try to maintain a glassy composure.

  He wanted a sonnet out of the dust?

  Here she is.

  Casual as all that, Julian asks Mary what she’s reading. (Is that for your one o’clock? No, that’s for my 4:30.) She thrusts at him the three tomes in her hands. A blue velvet copy of The Book of Hours. An exquisitely embossed and illustrated Canterbury Tales. And The Art and Craft to Know How Well to Die.

  “Why would you ever read such a book?” a frowning Julian asks about the last one. He doesn’t give it back to her.

  “Why does Lady Mother say a prayer of Extreme Unction over me each time I leave the house?” Mary asks, scanning for other books on the shelves while Julian continues to hold hers. She sighs theatrically. “Because death is never far away. It’s in every soup pot, every mushroom, every hoof of the horse. Isn’t that right, Aunt Edna?”

  “That is correct, child,” the eavesdropping Edna replies. “Now choose your books and get on with it. It’s almost time for bed. Catrain is waiting to bathe your ladyship.”

  The briefest blink passes between Julian and Mary after the word bathe, as his mind fills up with the image of bathe around the image of Mary.

  “Death is the reality of life,” Mary continues. “Last week our baker got the sweating sickness in between dinner and supper. He was gone by sunrise.”

  Julian blinks. “What’s the sweating sickness?”

  “It’s a sickness where you sweat,” Mary replies as if talking to the village idiot.

  She promptly drops the books he’s just handed her and waits for him to pick them up and hand them to her again. His hand brushes against her silk glove, underneath which there’s a fire-breathing dragon of a real girl. The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living. “Shun death, Lady Mary,” Julian whispers. “That’s my advice.”

  “Thank you for your invaluable counsel, Master Julian,” Mary says, “I simply don’t know what I’d do without it.”

  For the first time, her golden voice has spoken his name out loud. Julian. Yes, her words were cutting, but her throat has summoned his name from her lungs, from the breath that rises and falls around her heart.

  “It’s time, Mary,” Edna says. “Say good night.”

  “You regale Lady Mother with so many bits of knowledge about vinegar and lichens,” Mary says. “Tell me, good sir, do you know anything about when the rains will stop?”

  So she still wants to go to London! Julian’s heart jumps. The hellish rain. “Judging by the sunset this evening, possibly tomorrow,” Julian replies. “Though I fear the ground will still be too wet for me to take the wagon.” The wheels sink into the mud. He knows this from bitter experience. He has tried the past two mornings. He and Cedric spent hours afterward, digging out. There will be no travel until the road dries.

  “You’ve done this,” Mary says in a hiss, and before he can protest, adds, “Lady Mother keeps saying the rain is because of you, and it’s ill-bred to argue with one’s mother.” She marches away in haughty disgust.

  What if she’s right, and the rain doesn’t end until the day of her wedding? Did Julian come all this way to be the man who doesn’t even take part in the race?

  The only reason he endures the rain half as well as he does is because of Cedric. He has made a friend in the grateful and reverential hostler, who enjoys Julian’s company and has taken the bad weather as an opportunity to teach Julian everything he knows about horses. Cedric is not Krea. He teaches patiently and pleasantly.

  In the stables, with the rain falling, Cedric shows Julian how to handle the horses and the wagons. Cedric never asks why Julian doesn’t know these things. Cedric is just happy to be alive. He shows Julian how to tie up a horse, and how to lead it to water, and how to make the carrot pulp to feed it. He teaches Julian how to jump up on the driver’s bench, h
ow to stop a horse, how to slow it, how to make it go. He teaches Julian how to saddle and pack a donkey. After all the instruction, Julian still doesn’t care much for horses or donkeys or the rain, but he likes Cedric.

  Though the rain stops, the lane out of the manor remains impassable. While he waits for the ground to dry, with Cedric’s help Julian harnesses Alastor and walks the beast to the nearby market at Smythe Field. The family needs food and Julian needs plantings. The soil is finally soft; it will take seedlings well. The woman meant to be his bride but betrothed to another lives in an empty orchard where the flowers have not yet taken root.

  Holding Alastor by the reins and yanking him through the gloppy earth, his workman boots covered with mud to his calves, Julian heads across Fynnesbyrie Field, where despite the recent flooding, women are laying out their washing on the wet grass to dry in the sun. Little boys run in puddles with their dogs, water carriers bobble rods on their shoulders, while a dozen men practice archery.

  The laying out of the clothes on wet grass amuses Julian, but the arrows that are shot indiscriminately through the air do not. Where do those land? It doesn’t seem to trouble anyone else, not even when one of the arrows whistles down and lodges in the squishy ground three feet ahead of a woman carrying a baby.

  At Smythe Field market they sell cabbages and beets and leeks and onions, they sell wild garlic and soapwort plants for bathing. They don’t sell potatoes. No one’s even heard of potatoes. (How is that possible?!) Julian buys other things a mule can carry, things to protect Mary.

  He buys lavender to keep moths away from her in the coming summer, and flea bane to repel ticks and mosquitoes, and marigold to comfort her hands sore from work, though he is relatively sure this novice soul Mary has never done a real day’s work in her life. Julian doesn’t buy anything just for esthetic value. Everything has a dual purpose. If it’s attractive, so much the better. Aside from its medicinal benefits, marigold is a sturdy plant and pleasant to look at. But Julian’s priority is keeping disease away. He loads up the donkey with calendula and cinnamon, with dried cloves and yarrow flowers, with grain to make ale, and apples for cider vinegar.

  Pleased with his purchases, Julian is less pleased with Alastor. The mule walks slow with a heavy load, and at one point, the ass halts and refuses to budge. Julian must stop and rest until the beast chooses to lumber onward. His hand kneading the crystal stone around his neck, Julian watches the meadow, the children running around, the couples arm-in-arm, mothers and daughters arguing, two friends competing in a friendly archery game. Julian gazes at the two friends a long time. Ashton will be all right. He’ll move back to L.A. He’ll be fine.

  The field is tranquil. This particular field doesn’t exist in the land of the future, having been replaced by streets and buildings, but something like it does exist. Julian knows this firsthand (not first hand), having grown up with five brothers in a little house with woods for a backyard, and a mother who was always home when her kids were small.

  Slowly he walks his purchases back home. Julian doesn’t know how any of this turns out. What will happen to him and her? He can live here with her, he knows it, he feels it. He will live with her anywhere. The question is, how does she learn to live here with him?

  43

  The Boy and the Boatman

  THE NEXT MORNING BEFORE DAWN THERE’S A KNOCK ON HIS latticed window. It’s Mary, though Julian scarcely recognizes her in the dim blue light. She wears a long brown tunic with a black belt, and a black overcoat. He can’t see her hair; her head is covered by a man’s cap with a long hood over it. Her face is free of white paint. In her hands she holds a large wicker basket filled with clothes and food.

  “What time is it?” He is so happy to see her.

  “Is your head broken?” she replies. “You can’t look up at the sky yourself? It’s before sunrise. Why aren’t you ready?”

  “I am ready. What did you do to your hair?”

  “Don’t question me, don’t evaluate my appearance. Hurry before someone sees me. I’ll meet you by the stables. Did you get the carriage? I have to put my basket in it.”

  “We have the covered wagon—”

  She stomps off without waiting for the rest. It’s glum and soggy out, but at least it’s not raining. Cedric has already woken up, harnessed Bruno to the wagon for Julian, and gone back to sleep. Julian guides the animal carefully down the narrow lane, walking alongside it, holding the reins, the way Cedric taught him. In her male cloak and hood, Mary looks like a boy. A boy with a soft face.

  The face is the only thing soft about her.

  “Why are you walking?” she says. “Why don’t you get up here and drive the horse? Are you going to walk the horse like it’s a mule all the way to London? We should get there in a fortnight, then. At this speed, we might miss my wedding, so perhaps your plan is sound, if hellish. Look at your boots, they’re filthy, they’ll never dry, you can’t walk inside any establishment with footwear that awful, unless it’s inside a shop of dirt, is that where you’re taking me, to a shop of dirt?”

  Julian has been wishing all these days to hear Mary’s voice. Well, here it is. He trudges on in silence, hoping St. John’s Lane is drier and he can actually sit next to her, awful boots and all.

  St. John’s Lane is drier. He sits next to her. She remains extraordinarily cranky. Nothing Julian does pleases her. Her rounded features are sharpened by the constant stream of complaints piping forth from her lovely mouth.

  She didn’t like how slowly he was walking, and now she doesn’t like how slowly he’s driving, but when he drives faster, she doesn’t like that either. She is unhappy with his inability to navigate potholes, which jostle the wagon and cause commotion to her insides. At one point she loses the cobbler’s cap in her hands, and Julian has to jump down and retrieve it from a puddle. She scolds him for the wet cap, for the mud it fell into, and for how long it took him to bring it back to her. “Take your time, by all means,” she says. “It’s not as if I have anywhere to be.”

  He says nothing.

  “This is all your doing,” Mary says, “the rain, the mud. I hope you’re happy.”

  Julian is not unhappy. He wants to talk to her. He wants to tell her about how familiar some strangers can be, as if you’ve known them forever, about the music of destiny, about the smoke of stars through which she shines so bright. But she’s impossible to speak to. He can barely concentrate on keeping the horse from galloping and killing them both, he can’t also respond to her harangues. To be fair, she doesn’t really require a response, except occasionally when she asks, “Are you even listening to me?” to which he replies, “Of course, Lady Mary, please continue. You were saying how the horse is a thousand times more valiant than I.”

  She is not wrong. As Mary is a novice to her soul, Julian is a novice to the horse. As she is new to herself, he is new to this life, which has in it horses, not Volvos. He either pulls on the reins too hard or loosens them too much. It’s like learning to drive a stick shift in rush hour—with a live, half-ton animal, next to a beguiling heckler, riding shotgun. He can’t get the horse to maintain a steady walk. Conversation is thus awkward. “So, what play are the Lord Chamberlain’s Men staging, Lady Mary—Bruno! Go!”

  “Are you deaf as well as blind?” she says. “I don’t want to speak to you. I must practice my lines, and I can’t open my folio because your driving is making me want to vomit. Look over there”—she points to the horse’s head—“One of its blinders has come off. That’s why it’s so jittery. It can see the wagon.”

  “What should I do?”

  “What should you do? Am I the driver? Am I the yeoman? I don’t bloody know. Do what you want. I suppose you jump down and fix it.”

  Julian fixes it, but now the horse is running. “Whoa,” Julian says. “Whoa, horse. Bruno, steady on, girl.”

  “Does Bruno seem like a female horse’s name to you?”

  He wants to place a hand on Mary to keep her safe. His driving is abou
t to topple her over.

  “You’re majestic with a horse,” Mary says. “You must be a knight. Where’s your coat of arms? Where’s your noble sword?”

  She’s not wrong, but she is beastly.

  This continues for a long painful while, but somewhere on Goswell Road, Julian finally manages to get the horse to walk. Good thing too, because Goswell Road is the worst. None dare call it a road. It’s one pothole after another. The wheels are going to fly off his wagon the way they’ve been flying off the conversation with the moody beauty by his side.

  As the horse comes under control, Mary also comes under control. She likes talking about herself. She tells him she hopes to get the role of Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. A couple of years ago she auditioned for Twelfth Night. It was staged at the Fortune, near Fynnesbyrie Field. Julian knows where it is; he has walked by there with Alastor. It’s not far from Collins Manor. He has even met Philip Henslow, the irascible man who runs the theatre. “Oh!” Mary exclaims, “Let me be boiled to death with melancholy. Yes, I was very good. I managed to dress like a boy and get a part as Viola, but unfortunately Mother caught me sneaking out of the house with one of the Italian spicers.” She sighs dramatically. “He used to drive me to the playhouse. He was ever such a nice man. Not like you. Massimo was polite . . .”

  “I’m not polite?”

  “Not even slightly. He was handsome.”

  “I’m not handsome?”

  Mary says nothing. “But when I was caught riding with him . . .”

  “Like you are with me?”

  “Nothing like this, believe me. Mother assumed the worst.”

  Julian has heard this story from Aurora, but from a different perspective, the perspective of a mother. He becomes distracted by the horrifying condition of the road to Cripplegate, one of the main gates through the Roman wall into the city of London. It’s a gulley of mud and filth. He’s certain if he fell into it he would drown. He really wants to put his hand on Mary; she is sitting too close to the edge. “Are you sure your mother wasn’t worried about other things?”