The Lady's Tutor (19 page)

Staring over her head at Ramiel, Muhamed inclined his shoulders in
a half-bow.
“Sabah el kheer.”

“Sabah el kheer,
Muhamed,” Elizabeth responded, the wrong response, but her
pronunciation was flawless.

Muhamed was surprised out of his stoicism. He stepped aside to
allow her passage.

“Thank you.” Elizabeth nodded her head, dark red lights gleaming
in the tight, braided bun of her hair.
“Ma’a e-salemma. “

Fierce pride swelled inside Ramiel. Elizabeth was indeed a
meritorious woman.

Ramiel watched Muhamed watch Elizabeth’s retreating back. He knew
the exact moment she exited his home; the Cornishman turned in a swirl of black
wool and the white
thobs
he wore underneath the cloak.

“El Ibn.”

Ramiel was not fooled by Muhamed’s bow. He waited for the Cornishman
to step forward and close the library door.

“Eavesdropping, Muhamed?”

“I do not have to eavesdrop,
El Ibn.
I could smell your
lust through the door.”

Ramiel bit back the lightning-quick retort,
I did not know that
a eunuch had such a keen sense of smell.
He said instead, “I will not
tolerate your interference.”

“The sheikh commands me to watch after you.”

“You are no longer his slave.”
How angry Elizabeth had been
when he had addressed her by name in front of the little housemaid.
“I have
it on the best authority that the English do not condone slavery.”

“A young girl died,
El Ibn,
because you did not resist the
haraam,
that which is forbidden.”

The concubine who had taken Ramiel s virginity when he was twelve.

Hot desire turned to icy anger, English civility to Arab savagery.

Muhamed must be made to understand, once and for all, how
important Elizabeth Petre was to Ramiel. He could think of only one way to
drive home his point.

“You have been with me for twenty-six years, Muhamed. I value your
loyalty and your friendship. But I will kill you if you ever harm Mrs. Petre.
The Arabic way, very, very slowly, an inch at a time.”

“I would not harm a woman,” Muhamed said woodenly. His gaze
glanced off Ramiel and focused on the wall behind him.

Ramiel relaxed. “Good.”

“It is not I who will harm her.”

Fear coursed through Ramiel’s blood.

Edward Petre.

Did he beat her?
Did he know of the lessons?

“Explain.”

“The husband went to the Hundred Guineas Club.”

Ramiel’s nostrils flared in surprise.

The Hundred Guineas Club was a notorious club that obliged its
homosexual members to assume a female persona.

“Is he still there?”

Aversion radiated from Muhamed’s shadowed face. “No. He left the
club with a man dressed as a woman.”

The woman he had allegedly been seen with. Only she was not a
woman.

“You followed them.”

“To an empty shop on Oxford Street.”

“Who was the man?”

“I cannot say.”

Not
I
do not know.

“You did not recognize him?” Ramiel asked sharply.

“You demanded proof,
El Ibn.
I have no proof but my own
eyes.”

“You have not lied to me before, Muhamed. Your word is proof
enough.”

“No,
El Ibn,
it is not. Not in this; you will not listen to
reason. I will take you to the shop and you will see for yourself.”

Ramiel sensed impending danger, senses fine-tuned as they had not
been nine years ago.
Who was Petre’s lover, that the Cornishman feared he
would not be believed?

Nothing would shock Ramiel, not sex, not death. Unless—

“Elizabeth was here, with me.”

Ela’na, damn,
he
sounded defensive. Elizabeth was not responsible for her husband’s actions. Nor
was she knowledgeable about the kinds of sex games that were played in a
hellhole like the Hundred Guineas Club.

Muhamed continued staring at the wall, face stoic.

Ramiel glanced down at his desk, at the gold pen he had earlier
inserted between his fingers as if it were his manhood and the sheath of his
hand Elizabeth’s vagina.

White paper balanced precariously on the edge of the mahogany
wood. Black ink marched across it.

Leaning over, he scooped up the paper.

El kebachi
—
buttocks
raised
—
like beasts in fields,
he read.
Dok el arz
—
belly to
belly
—
mouth to mouth. Rekeud el air
—
riding a stallion.

They were Elizabeth’s notes, the words she had written while he
recited the six main positions for coitus. They were not the words he had used,
nor even the basic positions he had cited. She had listed alternative positions
... and listed them by their Arabic names.

Either she had memorized Chapter Six in its entirety ... or these
were the positions that most excited her. To be taken from behind while she
knelt on her hands and knees; to sit in a man’s lap, her legs around his waist;
to straddle a man’s groin while he lay on his back with his legs raised.

Ramiel’s testicles tightened. He imagined taking Elizabeth while
she knelt; letting her take him while he lay back;
dok el arz,
both
taking, both giving as they sat facing each other,
belly to belly, mouth to
mouth.

He would lay odds that her only experience was the first position,
one that she had not bothered recording, that of a woman passively lying on her
back in an act of duty.

The last scrawled sentence grabbed his thoughts. Ramiel stared,
transfixed. The pulse in his fingertips hammered against the paper.

Forty ways to love
—
lebeuss el djoureb
—
please, God, let me love just once.

Jagged pain ripped through his chest. He had fucked in all forty
positions, and not once had a woman called it an act of love.

He licked his lips, tasting her, Elizabeth Petre, a thirty-three-year-old
woman who had borne two children yet had never been kissed in passion.

She had touched him. She had licked her finger and explored his
lips with the innocent wonder of a woman bent on sexual discovery.

Lebeuss el djoureb.

He could give her that. He could spread her legs and tease her
vulva and her clitoris until each glide, each slight notching of his penis
inside her, produced so much moisture that she would open up and take it all,
his tongue and his verge, his past, her ecstasy, English pride and Arabic
sexuality.

Reaching down, Ramiel opened the top drawer in his desk and
carefully laid the paper inside, anchored it with the gold pen.

She had not understood when he had twirled her on the dance floor
and recalled the story of Dorerame and the king. He had told her that he would
free her from her husband. Now it was time to act.

“Yalla nimshee,”
he said harshly to Muhamed.
Let’s go.

A gig waited outside in the gray dawn; hot steam rose from the
horse, a pale, silvery mist. The small, lightweight carriage groaned, once when
Ramiel climbed up, a second time when Muhamed followed, gracefully maneuvering
in his flowing black cloak and Arab garb.

Without comment Ramiel allowed Muhamed to take the reins. The Cornishman
whistled once, a low, shrill command for the horse to go. Ramiel braced himself
against the resulting jolt of the carriage.

Cold, damp air moistened his face. The rhythmical clip-clop of the
horse’s hooves and the grind of the carriage wheels filled the street. Above
the tall rooftops, pink light tinted the sky.

He did not question Muhamed further. There was no need to. Ramiel
would soon see who had inadvertently sent Elizabeth to him.

There had been dark circles underneath her eyes.

What had kept her awake? Her social life? Her marriage?
The
Perfumed Garden?

Whom had she thought of as she rubbed her pelvis against the
mattress—Edward Petre ... or him?

The carriage swayed, turned a corner.

Oxford Street this far from Regent Street was no longer reputable.
Both the narrow streets and the buildings were falling into disrepair. Ramiel
glimpsed the dark shadow of a man tupping a whore in a doorway—down the street
a vendor’s cart ambled along, making its way to a richer neighborhood.

“El Ibn.
We
are approaching the shop.”

Ramiel pulled his hat down low over his ears and wound a dark wool
scarf around his neck.

Muhamed softly clicked and pulled the horse to a halt. He pointed.
“There.”

Upon first glimpse the building looked like the rest of the small
brick shops. Gradually, he could see that the front was darker than those
surrounding it—the windows had been boarded over. Above the shop shone a pale
sliver of light—there was a room above the store. And someone was in it.

Ramiel lightly jumped down from the gig onto the cobblestone
street; wood creaked; the horse nervously stepped backward. Ramiel absently
soothed it, then continued on his mission, steps echoing in the early dawn
light.

The door to the shop was boarded up, the wood pasted over with
bills—no entrance there. Another door off to the side no doubt led up to the
room. It was locked.

Frustrated, he stared up at that pale sliver of light only
fourteen feet away. He would have to wait until Petre and his lover came down.

He looked around for a spot to hide and stepped into the recessed
doorway. He pulled the wool scarf over his nose to filter out the odors of
urine, gin, and rotted refuse.

The rhythmic clip-clop of a lone horse and the grind of wheels
heralded the arrival of a light carriage. A hack pulled to a stop in front of
the boarded-over shop, a mere twenty feet from where Ramiel stood. A side
lantern on the carriage shed a yellow circle of light, revealing the drooping
withers of a black and white nag. The cabbie, perched on his seat at the rear
of the hack with a bowler hat pulled low over his eyes, looked neither left nor
right.

The locked door leading to the room over the shop swung open. A
man stepped out, profile unrecognizable, a typical gentleman dressed in a
conservative overcoat and top hat. His breath misted the cold gray air.

Unaware that he was being watched, the man leisurely turned and
closed the door. Ramiel ducked back into the doorway, body tense, waiting,
waiting,
ela’na, damn,
he could not have gotten this close and be unable
to identify anyone—was he Edward Petre or the man Muhamed had refused to name?

A man and a boy, both bundled against the cold, hurried past
Ramiel, heads bowed to keep out the cold and perhaps to prevent themselves from
becoming unwitting witnesses. The muted click of footsteps warned Ramiel that
his quarry was walking toward the hack. He leaned forward, peered around the
brick.

The lantern on the side of the cab aureoled the man in yellow
light. He opened the carriage door, then took off his tall hat before stepping
inside.

The color of his hair was vaguely familiar, but it was not
black—it must be Petre’s lover.

As if sensing that he was being scrutinized, the man turned, a
gold-handled cane clenched in his hand. Light from the carriage lamp clearly
delineated his features.

Elizabeth’s
hand hovered over the knob to the door connecting her and Edward’s bedrooms.

Was he home?

No. She could feel the emptiness seeping underneath the door, as
if loneliness were ether, invisible but no less tangible for its invisibility.

A woman’s tongue is like a nipple, to be nibbled and suckled. Her
mouth is like a vulva, to be licked and probed. Have you ever had a man’s
tongue in your mouth?

Did Edward put his tongue in his mistress’s mouth? Was he even now
doing so?

Would he put his tongue inside her mouth when she seduced him?

She closed her eyes and sagged against the door, overcome with an
inexplicable wave of revulsion. The blackness behind her lids grew brown,
bulging leather tightly stretched over masculine flesh.

Dear Lord, she
did not
know herself. What would she have
done if the Bastard Sheikh had unfastened the front of his trousers?

And then, contrarily, she wondered if he was bigger than the gold
pen. Longer? Thicker?

He had said that a woman who was new to the ways of love or one
who had been abstinent for some time would require shallow penetration. Whereas
a woman who had borne two children would need the full length of a man inside
her to achieve her satisfaction.

The muscles in Elizabeth’s stomach clenched at the thought of her
pale legs thrown over the Bastard Sheikh’s brown, muscular shoulders.