Read Online The Lady's Tutor by Robin Schone - Free Book Online Page B

a house servant.
    Elizabeth smiled. “Thank you, Johnny.”
    Inside the drawing room, Edward and Rebecca leaned close together
on the stuffed, floral upholstered divan. Their heads, he with his
midnight-black hair rigidly controlled with an application of macassar oil and
hers capped in black silk, nearly touched. They stopped talking at the sight of
Elizabeth.
    Edward stood, as a matter of courtesy rather than welcome. “Hello,
Elizabeth. I was just telling Rebecca that the House is going to repeal the
Contagious Disease Acts.”
    Elizabeth searched her husband’s face, the dark, olive-shaped
brown eyes, the neatly trimmed side whiskers and mustache, the generous lips
that always curved in a smile.
    He had not come home Sunday night. He had come home at two-thirty
in the morning last night—she had heard the grandfather clock chime the time— and
all he had to tell her was that the Contagious Diseases Acts were being
repealed?
    “Mrs. Butler must be pleased,” she said neutrally.
    Mrs. Josephine Butler, the wife of a clergyman and the secretary
of the Ladies National Association, had devoted sixteen years of her life
persuading Parliament to repeal the Contagious Disease Acts.
    “It is a victory for all women,” Rebecca pointed out, smoothing
out a wrinkle in her dove-gray wool gown.
    Both Elizabeth and Rebecca visited charity hospital wards as part
of their “political” duties. Perhaps she could forget the women who came there
diseased and starving, but Elizabeth could not.
    “Not all, Mother.”
    Rebecca turned frosty green eyes onto Elizabeth. “Whatever are you
talking about?”
    Edward silently watched Elizabeth, brown eyes oddly calculating.
For once that supercilious smile did not curve his lips.
    It suddenly dawned on her that Rebecca attended the same routs and
rallies and dinners as did Elizabeth. She, too, must have heard that Edward
kept a mistress.
    Why had she not said anything?
    Why did she stand beside her son-in-law, defending his politics,
while he made a mockery of his marriage vows?
    “The women on the streets will receive no medical care now,”
Elizabeth explained woodenly. “They will die of disease, they and their
children, and they will pass it on so that others will die.”
    “The Acts demean these women, Elizabeth,” Rebecca sharply
admonished. “Prostitutes must endure routine medical examinations. A woman’s
modesty cannot survive the indignity of a vaginal inspection.”
    Elizabeth stared at her mother in shocked disbelief.
    Shocked, because she had never heard Rebecca use anything other than
the most euphemistic terms for the human body, “limbs” for “legs,” “bosom” for “breasts,”
“privates” for “genitals.” Disbelieving, because a prostitute daily endured
more than one vaginal inspection—and not by a physician.
    Incongruously, she thought of The Perfumed Garden.
    The sheikh reverently described a woman’s vulva as a thing of
wonder and beauty. Her mother spoke of a woman’s “vagina” with her mouth
primped, as if the female body were a thing of shame. And her husband—
    She scrutinized his familiar face.
    Edward’s brown eyes revealed neither disgust at Rebecca’s
vulgarity nor dismay at her priggishness. He looked, Elizabeth thought, as it
he had no interest... in any woman.
    She suddenly felt if she did not engage his attention that very
moment, it would be too late and his mistress would have won before Elizabeth
even attempted to seduce him.
    “Mother and I can stay home and lunch with you, Edward,” she
compulsively offered.
    Edward’s lips curved in his politician’s smile, a smile of
impersonal warmth and uncommitted caring. “I know how you look forward to
spending time with your mother, Elizabeth. There is no need to forgo your lunch
on my account.”
    “I want to, Edward,” she quietly, desperately, insisted.
    “I have papers to go over, Elizabeth.”
    And no doubt a mistress to go over after the House meeting
tonight.
    Her