A Gentleman Tutor by Harper Fox

Author:Harper Fox [Fox, Harper]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FoxTales Publications
Published: 2020-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

I did pardon Manning. I didn’t argue, either. Perhaps it had been the cab journey, or the draining effects of Cyril, but once in my room, I submitted for the first time in many years to a helpless loss of working hours. I didn’t ask Manning to tell me when Gracie finished his conference with Mary and Lady Rose. I didn’t stop him from building up my bedroom fire, from hanging up my jacket and brushing dried slush and mud from the hem of my coat. When he offered me the copper bath, I went and sat passively on the bed until he and the boot boy had carried the tub into my room, and a small detachment of housemaids had helped them to fill it with water.

He would have stayed, I reckoned, and helped scrub me down if I’d asked. He was a good man, and nice-looking too, no more than forty years old. Anyone who stayed the course as an employee in this turbulent household had to be intelligent, and he’d been very kind.

I dismissed him with thanks, stripped out of my street clothes and underwear, and slowly, thoughtfully, lowered myself into the steaming tub, allowing myself a vision of the life I might have had if chance had brought someone like Manning my way. The social gap between butler and poor schoolteacher might not have yawned so wide that we couldn’t bridge it, flesh and spirit being willing, and all conducted anyway in absolute secrecy.

But chance had brought me Gracie instead. There was no harm in looking into the crevasse dividing the Viscount from his tutor. Neither of us would ever be called upon to try to get across. Always more flexible in water, I found I was able to draw one knee up to my chest, and I gathered my bad leg and pulled that one close to my body too.

It felt good to curl up. Better still to lower my head and rest my brow. Some kindly member of the household troops—Manning again, most likely—had put eucalyptus in the water, afraid I’d caught my inconvenient death of cold. I liked the smell of the oil. I liked the tracery of dark hair on my thighs. I knew I sounded like croaking Methuselah when I got onto some favourite academic or moralising point, but my body was only twenty six years old—and, when it wasn’t aching or folding up under me, I liked that too.

I washed, slowly and carefully, for once allowing myself to enjoy my own touch. So what if I couldn’t get a cock-stand? Maybe Cyril was right, and there were other ways. In the warm dark behind my eyes, I saw Gracie once more beside me in the Hansom cab, clumsily asking about my inside equipment. I shivered hotly, from my scalp to my curling toes.

And the truth was that Manning, Cyril, every other man I’d met in my life, could have stripped naked and danced on my bed, and not have roused in me the heat of Gracie’s lightest word.

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