The Tutor by Bonnie

Author:Bonnie [Bonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

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.

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