The Tutor (House of Lords) Read Online Free Page A

he had paid for her. He had purchased her. Perhaps he did own her.
    Cynthia had sat across the desk from her father thinking back on the years she had spent cowering before him, wondering why he didn’t love her, and imagined ways to bring about his death. She could do it. He had bought her books about plant tinctures and forensic methodology. She could quietly poison him, and no one would ever have to know.
    But there was one thing Cynthia had not learned from her father, but from her girlhood best friend: humanity. It was a terrible inconvenience at that moment, when Cynthia wanted nothing more than to see her father suffer. She could have done it, but it would have cost her the last little piece of her soul, and she refused to give that up, no matter how tarnished it was. So she had sat stoically as her father had explained that she had an opportunity few other young ladies had, now that he had inherited a great fortune from a relative Cynthia had never known he had. She could take the world by storm. She could influence the greatest minds of the day. But in order to do those things, she would have to marry a man with influence. It had not been the original intention of the experiment, which Cynthia surmised had been to create a truly liberated woman. But as with all things, her father had a knack for turning a pure, honest philosophical exercise into a stepping stone to power. When she had turned ten and had begun to develop into a beauty, he had seen a greater possibility.
    “Imagine,” he had said to her, as if it were not her life he was talking about but some theoretical universe far away, “if you were married to the Prime Minister, or the Lord Chancellor. Imagine what we could do.”
    Cynthia noted that he did not say she , but we . And as she watched him ruminate on the possibilities his grand experiment might have created, she made a decision.
    She would never marry. To spite him, of course, but also because she could not imagine deceiving another human being as he had deceived her. She also could not imagine telling another person the story her father had just told her. She felt filthy just listening to it. And what man would marry her, knowing she was the daughter of a whore, nothing more than a plaything for a man who was incapable of seeing human beings as anything but toys?
    Her whole life had been a lie. But Cynthia had refused to break, just as she had always done. Even when she had been a girl and he had stood over her, his face red with screaming, she had always stubbornly refused to break. She would come through this, she had told herself, and when she reached her majority at twenty-five—now she saw why he had made it twenty-five—she would go as soon as she could afford to do so. But if she were truly to be free, and she could not marry to escape him, she would have to find another way.
    At first she had thought of taking work as a governess, but then she would have been answering to another master. So she had come up with a different plan. Carefully, cautiously, she had made friends with some of the silliest women she could find, women whose parents had wanted them taught to sew and sing and sketch and nothing more, women who hungered for something beyond the drawing room skills they had been learned at finishing school. And then she had showed them what they’d been missing. They had been grateful. The day after her first successful soiree, Mariah Maxwell had sent Cynthia a sapphire bracelet that had fetched a tidy sum in a pawnbroker’s shop in Piccadilly. Just a week ago, Lydia Baxter had sent her a small Delacroix study that she had sold to a dealer for twice what the bracelet had fetched. Women wanted what Cynthia could provide, they longed for it, and she would continue to do it until she had saved enough money to get away from Roger Endersby forever.
    She thought of the rewards she might receive from the Duke of Danforth. If she did as he wished, he would certainly feel obliged to