The Lady's Tutor (50 page)

An aged,
stooped man who should have been retired long before opened the door. He
squinted up at Ramiel with milky eyes. “Good morning, sir.”

“We are
here to see Mrs. Walters.”

“If you
will be so kind as to give me your card, sir, I will see if she is—”

“It is all
right, Wilson.” Elizabeth stepped up beside Ramiel. “Is Mother home?”

The butler
bowed. “Good morning, Miss Elizabeth. It is so good to see you up and about.
Mrs. Walters did not tell me you had recovered from your ordeal. She is
resting.”

Elizabeth’s
lips tightened at the butler’s reference to the propaganda that had been fed
not only to the papers but also to the servants. “Thank you, Wilson. You may
tell Mother I will await her in the drawing room.”

“Very
good, miss.”

Ramiel
silently stepped aside for Elizabeth to enter first; he followed close behind
her. The foyer was a small, square room; a door identical to the front door
complete with a fan window and twin white marble columns opened up to a hallway
papered with rose-patterned silk. The drawing room Elizabeth led him to was
dark despite the sunshine outside. All the tables were dressed to conceal their
legs. Every space was crowded by family photographs framed in gold or silver. A
small coal fire burned in a pillared white marble fireplace. On the mantel a
gilded marble clock ticked away the seconds.

Clutching
her reticule, Elizabeth sat on a horsehair-stuffed sofa. Ramiel restlessly
roamed the parlor.

“Please do
not tell her about. . .” He could feel her gaze following his paces. “There is
no need. It would only hurt her.”

Please.

How
different the word sounded when a woman balanced on the edge of orgasm.

Ramiel
walked toward the fireplace, behind the sofa where she sat, away from her eyes
that stared at him as if he were a stranger. He picked up a silver-framed
photograph of her sons, a recent one, he would guess. Phillip, the pirate, smiled
into the camera; Richard, the engineer, studied it.

The doors
to the sitting room abruptly swung open. Rebecca Walters was a beautiful, aging
doll with her chestnut-brown hair only mildly streaked with silver and the
faintest of lines fanning out from glittering emerald-green eyes. There was
nothing of her in Elizabeth. Ramiel was devoutly glad.

At sight
of Ramiel, Rebecca froze on the threshold. For one fleeting moment it was all
there in her face. Shock, fear, icy frigid rage.
The game was over.
And
she knew it.

She
quickly recovered. “What is this man doing in my house? If you have no regard
for your husband’s reputation, Elizabeth, pray consider your father’s.”

Ramiel
waited. The French clock did not. Time was running out.

Elizabeth
was an intelligent woman. Her eyes were open now. It would not take her long to
figure out the truth. He had helped her, a little, by telling her that she did
not have to tell her mother about Petre and Walters.

“How long
have you known, Mother?” Elizabeth’s question was as dull as the rumble of the
carriage driving past the Tudor home.

“I have no
idea what you are talking about.” Rebecca returned accusation with scorn. “I
will not have you defile my home by bringing this bastard into it. When you
come to your senses, you may visit; otherwise—”

“I
wondered why you never mentioned the rumors about Edward having a mistress. Now
I know why. Because you knew . . . that my father and my husband are lovers.
Your husband and your son-in-law. I saw them together today. Father likes
dressing in women’s clothing.
How long have you known, Mother?”

Rebecca
stared at her daughter as if she were an impertinent dog that had nipped the
hand that fed it. There was no remorse in the woman’s icy green eyes. No
remnants of maternal affection for the daughter she had borne.

“I have
always known, Elizabeth. I knew about Edward before Andrew brought him home to
become your husband. It is a trial that the women of this family must bear. My
father and my husband were lovers. My mother endured. I endured. Why should you
not endure?”

“You.”
Elizabeth’s back stiffened with shock.
Ramiel’s fingers tightened around the silver frame.
He had not wanted her to
know.
And
she
would not, if only she had trusted him. “Emma said you wanted to awaken me
Thursday morning. It was you who whispered my name.
You
blew out the
lamp.”

Rebecca’s
unrepentant silence confirmed the question that was no question.

“Why?”
Elizabeth’s agonized whisper ricocheted down Ramiel’s spine.

“You have
auburn hair.”

Ramiel
stilled. That was not the answer he had expected.

Another
factor he had not considered. Rebecca Walters was insane.

And now
Elizabeth would have that, too, to bear.

He walked
around the couch, positioned himself to protect her if need be.

Elizabeth
visibly struggled to understand her mother’s rationality, her face stark white
underneath the brim of her black bonnet. “You would kill me because I have
auburn hair?”

Rebecca’s
green eyes glittered. “I would kill you for the sins of your father, that they
not be passed on through his bloodline,” she said frigidly. “I would kill you
because I have faithfully loved Andrew, whereas you would ruin his career and
my good name,” she added bitterly. “I would kill you because you would not
endure what I and my mother endured. By seeking a divorce, you belittle the
suffering of all Christian wives and mothers,” she concluded venomously.

Rebecca’s
rigid posture did not invite pity. Nor would Ramiel grant it to her.

He held
out the framed photograph. “Did you try to poison your grandsons ... because of
the sins of their grandfather... or because they would not endure either?”

Elizabeth
sprang up from the sofa in a flurry of black wool. “Edward did that. This has
gone far enough. It is time to leave.”

Elizabeth
was running, but it was too late to run.

Turquoise
eyes locked with emerald-green eyes. “It was not Edward who tried to kill your
sons, Elizabeth; it was your mother. She accompanied him that day. Heavily
veiled. Perhaps she hoped Edward would be content to take the blame.”

“No.
Mother would not know of a poison that. . .”
Turned flesh into liquid
desire.
“She would not know of...”
A need that killed.

“Spanish
fly, Elizabeth. It has a name. A name that you are familiar with, are you not,
Mrs. Walters?”

Rebecca
let her silence speak for itself.

Elizabeth
stared at her mother in growing horror. “
D
o
you know how Spanish fly
kills?”

“Yes.”
Rebecca transferred her glittering green gaze to Elizabeth. A cold smile
touched her lips. “Andrew took too much when he tried to get me pregnant with
another child. He almost died. That is why I did not have any more children.”
The smile abruptly faded. “Whereas you, you had two sons. You should have been
content. I had intended to give the drug to you in a cup of tea, but you hid in
the Bastard Sheikh’s bed. You always spoiled the boys; I knew that the basket
in the foyer was intended for them.”

“Did you
never love me, Mother?” Ramiel winced at the raw pain of Elizabeth’s plea. “Did
you never love your grandsons?”

“No, I
never loved you, Elizabeth. I always knew that whatever boy Andrew loved would
one day be your husband and I would have to accept him in my home. That is the
way of the Uranian fellowship. As for loving my grandsons . . . Phillip has
auburn hair. And Richard refused to follow in my father’s footsteps. Would you
care for tea?”

Ramiel
felt the impact of Rebecca’s admission all through his body. Elizabeth’s rage,
that a woman would knowingly support the abuse of her grandchildren. Her pain,
at all the years of lies.

Lies which
Ramiel had perpetrated.

He had
told her that the Uranians were a fellowship of minor poets. He had not told
her that the so-called poets were a group of educated men who in the Greek
fashion took boys underneath their protection for the purpose of guiding their
lives, advancing their careers, and sodomizing their bodies.

“No,
Mother, I do not want tea.”

Elizabeth
allowed Ramiel to take her arm. Rebecca stepped aside so that they could exit.
She took the photograph of her grandchildren from his hand. Lowering her head,
she ran her fingers over the glass front of the silver frame as if gathering
strength from the photograph inside. “My father, being a literate man, allowed
me to study classical Greek. Arabian philosophies, I believe, are also based on
Greek traditions.”

Ramiel
stiffened.

Rebecca
raised her head. Malevolence shone in the depths of her emerald-green eyes. She
would do anything to destroy her daughter’s chance of happiness. And she was
about to do just that.
And there was nothing that Ramiel could do to stop
it.

“You are
disgusted by what you have discovered today, Elizabeth. But pederasty is an
ancient tradition. This bastard you rut with has lived in Arabia, where such
things are looked upon differently than we do in England. Perhaps you should
ask him about his preferences before you judge your father.”

Ramiel had
never hit a woman. It took all his strength now not to strike the smug
righteousness off Rebecca’s face.

He gripped
Elizabeth’s arm and forced her out of the drawing room, out of the house that
had never been a home. Grimly, he lifted her inside the carriage and sat
opposite her.

“Have you
been with a man?”

Her
question was so predictable that it brought tears to his eyes.

He had
wanted more from her.

He had
wanted her trust.

He had
wanted her to accept him as he accepted her.

He had
wanted her to accept what he had been unable to accept these past nine years.

“Yes.”

Ramiel
closed his eyes on a wave of remembered pain. He tried to cling to that. The
pain was good; the pain was natural. But the memory of pleasure seeped through
the crack of time as it always did. Along with self-doubt.

He had
been asleep.
Hadn’t he?

He had not
known who fondled him.
Had he?

All he
knew for certain is that he woke on a surge of pleasure that erupted into
blinding, stabbing pain. Jamel rode Ramiel like he was a woman while eunuchs
held him down for his brother’s enjoyment. Afterward, Jamel had wiped himself
onto Ramiel and jeered, “Not such a man now, are you,
brother?”

When
Ramiel had been thirteen, Jamel had taught him how to fight with a knife. Jamel
had not lived long enough to brag about Ramiel’s “deflowerment.”

There was
an Arabic word for what had been done to him, the rape of a man who has been rendered
helpless by sleep or by drugs. Ramiel had not been able to tell his father that
he had killed his heir because of
dabid.

Elizabeth’s
voice snapped him back to the present.

“. . .
Then you are no better than my husband or my father.”

Ramiel had
thought he was, buried deep inside her body. Now he did not.

Ela’na.
He would not be
blackmailed by a woman into having sex. Nor would he be reduced to tears by
one. He had control of that, at least.

“Will you
come home with me?” The question was dragged from the very dregs of his soul—if
he still possessed one. It was the closest he had ever come to begging anyone
for anything.

He
needed her.
He needed her
to make him whole.

“No.”

Expectation
did not cushion the pain of rejection.

“I will
take you to the countess.”

Elizabeth
looked like a statue. No, she looked like her mother. A woman who had lost all
vestiges of innocence and joy.

“Very
well.”

Lifting
up, Ramiel held open the trapdoor in the roof of the carriage and shouted for
Muhamed to drive to the countess’s house.

The
remainder of the journey passed in stony silence. When the carriage pulled up
in front of the countess’s white brick mansion, Elizabeth wrenched open the
door on her side of the coach.

Rebecca
Walters had succeeded in her purpose. Elizabeth would not even accept his touch
in the simple courtesy of helping her out of the carriage.

Elizabeth
stuck one foot out, turned her head, and met Ramiel’s gaze with flat, lifeless
eyes. “I wish I had never heard of you.”

Awkwardly
jumping down, she slammed the carriage door shut behind her. The coach
immediately jerked into motion.

Ramiel
leaned forward and ran his hand over the place where she had sat. The leather
was still warm. As he was not.