At that, the tutor turned. And for the first time, the silver in his eyes seemed to burn.
“Your name,” the boy pressed. “Raul. Korso. Leo. Domenico. It is not one man’s name. It is a regiment.”
One night, Leo—the younger, the more volatile—burst into the tutor’s chambers. “They are coming,” he whispered, his face pale. “The men from Firenze. The Cardinal’s men. We heard them in the village. They say you are not a tutor. They say you are a… a resurrection.” The English Tutor - Raul Korso Leo Domenico -...
English Tutor. Smuggler of fire.
The Cardinal’s men found nothing. The tutor was a ghost. But the grandsons? They kept his books hidden beneath the floorboards. And years later, when they themselves became outlaws, printing seditious pamphlets in a mountain press, they signed each one the same way: At that, the tutor turned
“Correct,” he said. “Raul was a printer in Lyon who refused to recant. Burned in ’53. Korso was a ship captain who smuggled banned books into Venice. Drowned in chains. Leo was a poet who wrote one sonnet against a pope. Stabbed in a Roman alley. And Domenico was a priest who taught peasants to read the Bible in their own tongue. They hanged him from a fig tree.”
The first knock came not at dawn, but at the third hour of night, during a thunderstorm that turned the gravel of the villa’s driveway into a river of shattered moonlight. “Raul
The four names sat at the top of the parchment, inked in a trembling, aristocratic hand. Lady Vittoria stared at them, her wine glass leaving a faint crimson ring on the ancient oak of her desk. The tutor was to arrive at dawn. She had hired him sight unseen—a scholar from London, recommended by a cardinal no less, to undo the damage of a decade of insular, Tuscan rusticity on her two grandsons.
But the name. No Englishman was named Raul Korso Leo Domenico.
“No,” Domenico whispered. “Worse. You would have remained safe .”
She opened the door herself, the servants having fled to the kitchens at the first crack of thunder. The man on the step was not what she expected. He was tall, lean as a rapier, with eyes the color of tarnished silver. His coat was soaked through, but he wore it like a military uniform.