The Tutor (15 page)

“That was perfect,” I commended my pupil. “You did it just right.”

I drew my nightshirt back down my legs, thinking surely now would be the end.

Richard’s haze from all that liquor had begun to subside. His desires had been fulfilled.

Now he would seek an escape.

But again he surprised me. He sat back on the floor, drew his knees up and

wrapped his arms around them, as if he wanted to chat awhile.

I was up for talking any time anywhere. “Tell me about this man you were with

before.”

He rested his chin on his knees, appearing more boyish than ever. “Not only one. I dallied with a few fellows at boarding school, mutual rub offs in the study rooms, no more than that. After I married Lavinia, I vowed to put such youthful nonsense behind me. But then sometimes, when I did business in another city, I would go to certain places and came very close to falling. I began to understand the schoolboy ‘nonsense’ wasn’t anything I’d outgrow. That desire would be a part of me forever. I couldn’t fight it or change it, and no matter how much I cared for my wife, I never felt true passion for her.”

I nodded. I’d come to that understanding much earlier in my life, but it had still been something of a revelation.

“Each time I made eye contact with some stranger and almost went off with him,

I’d stopped myself from following through. And every near encounter only stoked my craving, and my private fantasies. But my respect for Lavinia was too great to treat her that way. I decided it would be better to remain celibate than indulge in vice.”

“And you succeeded for a long time, until…”

He exhaled softly. “Until…”

I leaned forward to rest my arms against my knees and studied the emotions

passing over Richard’s expressive face, each telling part of the story: desire, guilt, passion, shame, sorrow. “My special man was named Sylvester Leighton. Who was yours?”

He remained silent for so long I thought he might not answer, but finally he

spoke. “Jerry Eccleston, the former groom. I’d already pared the stable down to a few mounts, mostly manageable by a single head groom. But I enjoyed helping him exercise the horses, taking long rides across the countryside. We talked a bit and then a little more, at first about horses or the weather, but later about life, our thoughts about the world…

and other things. With every conversation I grew more…”

This time Richard didn’t resume his train of thought. He didn’t need to say he’d

fallen in love. I could see that plainly on his face, and I felt a mad stab of jealousy for the horseman who’d ridden off with Richard’s heart. I’d never felt anything close to what I’d call love, not even with my dear Sylvester. I’d cared for the man, yes, admired, respected, and learned from him. I wouldn’t have become who I was without his kindness and generosity. But
love
? That was something else entirely.

Richard rubbed a hand over his face. “Liquor loosens my tongue. I’ve spoken too

much.” He climbed to his feet, signaling our time was over.

Disappointment sheared through me. Why didn’t
I
have a say as to when we were finished talking? But I rose also, prepared to follow him from the room.

He picked up the candle from the altar, the only light he’d brought with him, then paused. “I thank you for tonight, but it mustn’t happen again.”

“Yes, sir. I understand.” Though I didn’t really. His wife was dead now. Why did

he continue to hold back from what he craved? Was it some form of self-punishment? No one but he and I would be any the wiser.

But it wasn’t my place to bring up such thoughts. By the time we walked from the

room, we’d resumed our proper roles as master and servant.

One breathtaking, unbelievable night with Richard wasn’t nearly enough. I

suspected he felt the same. Despite what he’d said, I felt fairly confident we would come together again. Meanwhile, that passionate event didn’t change the routine of my days, though I approached my duties with renewed purpose. If I couldn’t influence the stubborn Sir Richard to believe he wasn’t responsible for his wife’s suicide, I might at least reach his sons. I was determined to make some impact on this family and help them heal.

Whitney and Clive as a single unit were impossible to breach. The boys would

confide in no one but each other. However, I perceived Whit was the weaker link. He was the first to soften toward me, and I believed he liked me. If I could get him away from Clive’s influence for a time, he might crack and release the infection of blame that tormented both him and his brother.

While I waited for the right opportunity to arise, I often thought about Lavinia

Allinson, wife, mother, ghostly spirit. I considered what I’d learned of her death, but also recalled the dark entity in Clive’s drawings and Tom’s depictions of evil. Those artistic renderings suggested a malevolent presence, perhaps the ghost of a long-dead killer, if Tom’s recent drawing was to be believed. Some sinister being bided its time like a spider in a web, waiting to trap its victim. I felt this in my very bones.

I recalled what my friend Madame Alijeva, aka Mrs. Glass, a spiritualist medium,

had once told me. The tiny wren of a woman’s ability to channel the dead was as false as the color of her red hair. She affected the style of a mystic, wearing embroidered robes and a feathered turban, arms jangling with bracelets, loops of glass beads around her neck. Her Russian accent added an air of gravity and believability to her pronouncements, though I knew she was a second-generation Londoner and the widow of a middle-class merchant rather than Russian nobility as she claimed for her customers.

“Don’t you feel bad, taking their money?” I’d once asked after helping her with

one of her séances.

“Not at all.” Madame dabbed at her teary eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief.

“They got what they wanted…piz.”

I smiled at her pronunciation of
peace
, which came out sounding like
piss
, a much better description of her charade.

“Piz of mind I give them. It is worth the price, you see?”

I sat back in my chair in her stuffy parlor, resting a hand on the table between us that had been rocking and floating not too long before. “I see it’s a pack of lies, all this talk about the other side and piercing the veil.”

“No, no, no.” She waved her beringed hands. “Not lies.” She clapped a hand to

her chest. “
I
may not be condueet to spirits, but they exeest. I know thees. I have seen with my own two eyes.” She pointed at her vivid blue orbs.

“What have you seen?”

“You listen. When I was girl in St. Petersburg…”

“Madame, you never lived in St. Petersburg.”

She shrugged. “All right, Bethnal Green at home of my aunt. She would tell me

stories from the Motherland. Aunt Sonia had visions, could see and talk to spirits. She told me some are lost, wandering, not able to…to…” She clutched her hands and shook them. “Let go,
da
?”

I nodded. “Unfinished business. Others linger because their lives were ended

violently and abruptly. I’ve heard the pitch.”

“Mr. Knows-it-all,” Alijeva scoffed. “You know about demons? Dark, evil spirits

that feed off emotions of the living? You know
that
?”

“I don’t believe in hauntings
or
demons.” I lied a bit, because a superstitious streak made the hair on my neck prickle at the mere mention of demonic forces.

“Beliv. Not beliv. Don’t matter. This things exeest. My aunt experience many

times both in Russia and here.”

I sat forward on my chair, elbows on the table. “What about you? You said you

had an eyewitness account?”

“Ah, yes.” Tears shone again, making her eyes two watery pools. The ease with

which she conjured tears for her clients made me generally doubt her emotions. Yet this time she appeared sincere.

“I sat at my mama’s kitchen table, cutting paper doilies to sell at market. I look up, and there she is. My Aunt Sonia.” Madame waved her hands. “I ask why she come.

To see Mama? She look at me with eyes like burning coal.” Another dramatic pointing gesture at her eyes. “Then she walk out of room. I get up to follow her and she is—
poof
—gone.”

Despite my professed disbelief, a shiver tickled my spine. “Let me guess. You

learned your aunt had died that day.”

Alijeva stabbed the air with her finger. “Not only that day but that. Very.

Minute!”

“A compelling story.”
If it was true
, I’d thought at the time.

Looking back at the conversation with Madame Alijeva, I believed there was a

core of truth in what she said. If the odd occurrences I’d experienced at Allinson Hall—

the wisp of blue, the sobbing and whispers, the sorrow infiltrating my spirit—weren’t signs of dead Lavinia’s energy haunting the place, I didn’t know what else they could be.

Might the disturbingly malicious other presence I’d felt be one of Madame Alijeva’s purported demons? If it was, what did it want, and could I expel it?

I recalled another friend’s tale about a lighthouse keeper who’d killed his entire family and whose evil still supposedly haunted the lighthouse. A family later tried to live there and nearly came to the same fate when the father was possessed by the evil spirit.

Or so the story went.

Whether the entity was a killer’s ghost or demonic force, I needed to learn more

about the history of the Hall, a daunting task, for generations had lived there and any horrific act would have been hushed up much like Lavinia Allinson’s suicide. I could hardly expect to find a volume of family history to spell things out for me. And did it matter? Maybe instead I should search for a book about expelling ghosts and demons.

Either way, I needed to make another trip to the library.

I came to this conclusion one afternoon when the boys and I were on break from

lessons. I’d left the twins playing a game of cards while I used the water closet and sat there musing possible outcomes if I should happen to meet Richard in the library.

When I returned to the schoolroom, Clive played solitaire at the table and Whit

was gone.

“Where’s your brother?” I asked. It was rare to see one without the other, and

since I’d just come from the WC, I knew Whit wasn’t there.

Clive stopped flipping cards long enough to nod toward the door. I was left to

figure out what that meant. Irritation sizzled through me. I wondered if it might prove useful to simply demand Clive stop being a little jackass and use words. Perhaps coddling his muteness was the wrong thing to do.

But I wasn’t quite ready to get stern with him, so I left the room and went to the boys’ bedroom. There I found Whit stretched out on his bed on top of the covers, a shaft of sunlight from the window making his blond hair glow. He quickly snatched his thumb from his mouth when I entered.

“Not feeling well?” I leaned over to touch his forehead, which was warm.

He nodded.

I sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s wrong?”

“My stomach.” He rested a hand on it.

“Sorry to hear it. Maybe something you ate at lunch. Cook’s awful soup,

perhaps.” I smiled. “Get some rest. If you don’t feel better in a bit, I’ll see about sending for the doctor.”

He shook his head. “No! Not the doctor.”

I thought of the last time he’d probably seen the man, on the occasion of his

mother’s death. “He might prescribe a tonic to help you feel better,” I pointed out.

“I’m not sick,” Whit protested.

“Tell you what. I’ll have Cook make you custard. That’s the thing for a bad

stomach. My mum used to treat us to custard when we were sick—if there were eggs or sugar to be had.”

Whit rubbed his flushed cheek. I rose and pulled the curtain to shelter him from

the bright sunbeam.

“I miss my mum.” His whisper might’ve been meant for himself.

I returned to sit beside him again and hold his small hand. “You’ve had a great

loss. After my pa and sisters and brother died, nothing felt right for a very long time.” No point in telling him they’d never been right again, not for my grieving mother or Cynthia or me. “Tell me about your mum. I’ve seen her portrait in your father’s study. She was a beautiful lady.”

Whit remained quiet for a moment, then confided, “She told us stories and

sometimes played Pachisi with us, when she wasn’t busy resting.” He thought a moment.

“And when we were sick, she’d sing a special song to make us feel better.”

I smiled. “What song is that?”

“Lullay, my liking, my dear one…” Whit frowned. “I don’t know the words

anymore.”

“I know it.” I recalled the tune if not the lyrics of the medieval Christmas song, and I began to sing. “Lullay, mine liking, my dear son, mine sweeting. Lullay, my dear heart, mine own dear darling.”

Whit’s eyes brightened. “Yes! Like that.”

And then, although I hadn’t heard my own mum sing it in years, it was as if she

whispered the words straight into my ear.

“I saw a fair maiden, sittin’ and singin’. She lulled a little child, a sweet lording.

The eternal lord is that, who maketh all things. Of all lords he is Lord. Of all kings, he is King.”

I sang straight through several verses, and when I was finished, Whit rewarded

me with one of his rare smiles.

I smiled back, thinking how much sweeter children were when sickness laid them

low. He was such a pathetic little thing that I leaned in and gave him a kiss on the forehead before I rose to leave. “Sleep now. I’ll be back later with custard as I promised.”

Before I made it to the door, Whit called after me. “Mr. Cowrie.”

I turned. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry for playing tricks on you before.”

I grinned. “That’s all right. I played many a prank myself as a lad. I’ll tell you about them sometime, so long as you promise not to use them on anyone else.”