Taming the Wilde Read Online Free PDF Page B

he was not a monster at all. He was tall and perhaps a little more slim than was the ideal, but the way he moved suggested strength, and I already knew the mighty power his limbs were capable of. I felt my face growing warm as I sat in the rear row of the school room, the sight of the man reminding me of what had passed between us in such clarity that I almost felt as if I was back in that cabin with him about to unleash his ire upon me.
    He was dressed in a white shirt, black trousers and a long black overcoat that seemed perhaps a little too formal for the setting. But Roake was deeply interested in formality and propriety. He reminded me in some ways of old tutors employed in the years prior to and directly following my father's death. I had never taken to any of them, though I had taken to the materials they brought into my life, so we had existed in an uneasy truce. Unlike those tutors, who would have been horsewhipped had they dared lay a hand on me, Roake carried a great bristling birch rod which he placed conspicuously in a corner at the front of the room so we might all look upon it.
    “Wilde, up the front.” I thought that he had not noticed me, but the first words out of his mouth were directed towards my person, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the others. I was compelled to move to the front row, every step an embarrassment as I moved toward him against my will. He glanced towards me as I took a seat at the furthest end of the row and that solitary look was enough to make my innards tremble.
    To my relief, he said no more and a stack of primers was passed amongst us. I opened mine and glanced through it to find that it was the sort of book more suited to a nursery than a schoolroom. My first impulse was to feel superior, but that soon gave way to the realization that I could make far more hay out of not revealing my education. There was, after all, no real way for him to know that I could read. Plenty of women had pretty speech and not a brain in their heads.
    “We will begin with an assessment of your abilities,” Roake declared, his dark eye roving over the assembled women. “Each of you will read a line from the fourth page. You will make your best effort to read, and each one of you shall make an attempt aloud. There is no shame in failing, but there is great shame in failing to try.”
    As we all leafed through to the fourth page, skipping past the basic alphabet and the Lord's Prayer, I was impressed by his opening, which contained more compassion than I had given him credit for, but it did not change my mind. He elected to begin with me naturally enough. “Stand up, Wilde,” he said, “and begin with the first line.”
    Our reading opened with a rather trite little tale about a cat and a kitten that lived in a kitchen. Hardly relevant to the interests of women being shipped across the open ocean, but there were very few publications taking interest in the sort of matters of interest to our kind.
    “ Th... e … c. a. t,” I drew out the sentence, pretending not to be able to read. I admit I felt a great satisfaction, perhaps even some smugness as I play acted my way through a sentence that even a small child should have been able to dispatch forwards and back. “I...s... o...n...” I trailed off, feigning confusion. “I do not know the rest,” I said, glancing up from the tome, but not up to Roake's gaze for I was sure he would see the deception in my eyes if I looked at that moment.
    There were a few muffled noises of merriment from those I had both written and read letters for during our incarceration together, but by and large they let me have my play. There was not a single woman who denied that Roake's treatment of me was outrageous in the extreme and I fancied that they enjoyed seeing me take my revenge almost much as I enjoyed taking it.
    “It seems you are missing the letter 'm' from your repertoire, for the second part of the sentence is the same as the first aside from that