Part 4 (2/2)

”I did not tell them,” she said. ”I packed my bags early this morning and wrote them a letter, and I left early to ask Miss Ford about the empty room. When she agreed to let me rent it, I asked Roger if someone could be sent to fetch my things and deliver the letter. Abby sent a reply with the man who brought my bags, but I have not yet had a chance to read it. I do not need to, however, to guess that she is upset. First our father died. Then our brother left to fight in the Peninsula. Then our mother went away to live with our uncle in Dorsets.h.i.+re. Now I have moved out.”

”She does not feel your compulsion to break away from all that is familiar in order to stand alone, then?” he asked.

”No,” she said. ”But I respect her right to reshape her life as she sees fit. All I ask is that my right to do the same be respected. Perhaps it is selfish of me to abandon and upset her and turn my back upon our grandmother's hospitality. It undoubtedly is, in fact. But sometimes we have no choice but to be selfish if we are to . . . survive. That is too extravagant a word, though I cannot think of a better.”

”You feel threatened by the fact that your father's family has decided to come to Bath to celebrate a birthday?” he asked her.

”Not exactly threatened,” she said, frowning as she gave his question some consideration. ”Just . . . interfered with. As though I am incapable of working all this out on my own. As though I am just a . . .”

”Helpless woman?” he suggested.

”A pampered woman,” she said. ”As I am. Or as I always have been. It is strange how I never realized it until recently. I always thought of myself as strong and forceful.”

”Perhaps you have always been right about yourself,” he said. ”It must have taken great strength to do what you have done this week when you really did not have to.”

”Strength?” she said. ”Or just stupidity? But Abby is beside herself with excitement that everyone is coming here. For her sake I must be glad too that they are determined to gather us back into the fold.”

”Is that why they are coming?” he asked.

But their tea arrived at that moment and prevented her from answering. The teapot was large, the Sally Lunns enormous. Joel hefted the teapot and poured their tea, while Miss Westcott regarded her tea cake in some astonishment. It had been cut in half and toasted, and there were generous portions of b.u.t.ter and jam to spread on it.

”Oh, goodness me,” she said. ”I have just remembered that I missed breakfast as well as luncheon. This is one of the famous Sally Lunns?”

”And I expect you to eat every mouthful.” He grinned at her.

She looked at him with some severity after taking a bite, chewing, and swallowing. ”Do not think, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, ”that I do not know what you are up to and why you have brought me here and plied me with tea and . . . and this. And oh goodness, it is delicious. You think to get me talking about myself and my life so that you can paint me in such a way as to expose me to the world as I do not choose to be exposed.”

”I do not paint nudes,” he could not resist telling her, and her mouth, which had been open to take another bite, snapped shut. ”Perhaps you merely looked weary and a bit lost, Miss Westcott, and I took pity on you and brought you here to revive you. Perhaps, having found myself sitting across the table from you, I make conversation because even a man who is not a gentleman does not invite a lady to tea and then gobble down his food without saying a word to her. He might leave her with the impression that the food was of more importance than she.”

She looked hard at him before disposing of another mouthful. ”The point is,” she said, ”that aristocratic families do not acknowledge their illegitimate offshoots, Mr. Cunningham. The aristocracy is all about the succession and property and position and fortune. Legitimacy is everything. If my father's family had known from the outset that he was not married to my mother and that we were therefore illegitimate, they would have ignored her and pretended we did not exist. It is what my mother did for more than twenty years with Anastasia, though she knew of her existence, and it is what the others would have done too if they had known. It is certainly what I would have done. When she was admitted to the salon at Avery's house, where we were all gathered a few months ago at the request of my brother's solicitor, everyone was outraged, and justifiably so. She was very clearly not one of us. I was more infuriated than anyone else.”

”Why was that?” he asked while she spread b.u.t.ter and jam on the other half of her Sally Lunn. He hoped she would not suddenly realize again that she was doing what she had a.s.sured him she would not do-talking about herself, that was. But it was not just his portrait of her that made him want to hear more. He was fascinated to listen to the story of that day from her point of view. He had heard it from Anna's at the time in the long letter she had written him only hours afterward.

”I was the perfect lady,” she told him. ”By design. I was very conscious of who my father was and what was due to me as his daughter. From early childhood on I made every effort to do and be everything he would expect of Lady Camille Westcott. I was an obedient child and paid every attention to my nurse and my governess. I spoke and thought and behaved as a lady ought. I intended to grow up to be perfect. I intended to leave no room in my life for accident or catastrophe. I think I truly believed that I would never be exposed to trouble of any sort if I kept to the strict code of behavior set down for ladies of my cla.s.s. There was never a rebellious bone in my body or a wayward thought in my mind. My world was narrow but utterly secure. It was a world that did not allow for a cheaply dressed woman of the lower cla.s.ses being admitted into my presence and my family's and actually being invited to sit down in our midst. I was outraged when it happened.”

Joel finished his tea cake and drank the rest of his tea without immediately responding. Good G.o.d, she must have been detestable, yet all in the name of what she had been brought up to consider right. But having aimed for perfection in the narrow world into which she had been born, she was finding the plight in which she now found herself bewildering, to say the least. He sat back in his chair and looked at her with renewed interest. Such a woman might be expected to be bitter and brittle. She, on the contrary, had neither crumbled nor raged against the injustice of it all-or, if she had, she was over it now. She had not wrapped herself in self-pity, despite the accusation he had made a couple of days ago. She was not interested in taking advantage of the imminent arrival of her family to try to claw her way back into some semblance of her old life.

Though maybe those words some semblance were the key. Perfection as she had known it was no longer possible for Camille Westcott, and she was not willing to settle for anything less. She must search for something wholly new instead. It was not easy to like the woman, but he felt a grudging sort of respect for her.

He amended his thought immediately, however, for when she was in the schoolroom, flushed and animated and in full military-sergeant mode and surrounded by organized chaos, he almost did like her. Indeed, he was almost attracted to that teacher self of hers. Perhaps because that self suggested some underlying pa.s.sion. Now, that was a startling thought.

”You have a disconcerting way of looking at me so directly that I feel as though you could see right through into my soul, Mr. Cunningham,” she said. ”I suppose it is the artist in you. I would be obliged to you if you would stop.”

He picked up the teapot and refilled both their cups. ”Why do you think you were so single-mindedly devoted to duty and perfection?” he asked. ”More than your sister, for example.”

She hesitated as she stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea. ”I was my father's eldest child,” she said. ”I was not a son and was therefore not his heir. I suppose my birth was a disappointment to him. But I always thought that if I was the perfect lady he might at least be proud of me. I thought he might love me.”

Good G.o.d. She did not seem the sort of woman who had ever in her life craved love. How shortsighted of him.

”And was he?” he asked. ”And did he?”

She lifted her gaze to his and held it. In her eyes, easily her loveliest feature, he detected some pain very deeply hidden behind a stern demeanor.

”He only ever loved himself,” she said. ”Everyone was aware of that. He was generally despised, even hated by people who were the victims of his selfishness. I longed to love him. I longed to be the one who would find the way to his heart and be his favorite. How foolish I was. I was not even his eldest child, was I? And Harry, his only son, was not his heir. Everything about my life was a lie and remained so until after his death. What I set as my primary goal in life was all a mirage in a vast, empty desert.”

Impulsively, Joel reached a hand across the table to cover the back of hers as it rested on the tablecloth. He knew instantly that he had made a mistake, for he felt an instant connection with the woman who was Camille Westcott, and he really did not want any such thing. And he heard her suck in a sharp breath and felt her hand twitch, though she did not s.n.a.t.c.h it away. He did not withdraw his own immediately either.

”You must have been expecting that everything would change for the better after you married Viscount Uxbury,” he said. ”Did you love him?”

She drew her hand sharply away from his then. ”Of course I did not love him,” she said scornfully. ”People of my cla.s.s . . . People of the aristocracy do not marry for love, Mr. Cunningham, or even believe in such a vulgar concept as romantic pa.s.sion. We . . . They marry for position and prestige and a continuation of bloodlines and security and the joining of fortunes and property. Viscount Uxbury was the perfect match for Lady Camille Westcott, for he was a perfect gentleman just as she was a perfect lady. They matched in birth and fortune.”

She was speaking of herself in the third person and in the past tense, he noticed.

”And he jilted you,” he said, ”when suddenly you and the match with you were no longer perfect.”

”Of course,” she said. ”But he did not jilt me. He was the consummate gentleman to the end. He gave me a chance to jilt him.”

”And so you did,” he said.

”Yes,” she said. ”Of course.”

He wondered if she believed it all-that she had not loved the man she was to marry, that what Uxbury had done was the understandable, correct thing, that even in breaking with her he had been the perfect gentleman. He wondered if she bore no grudge. He wondered how badly she had been hurt.

”I would wager you hate him,” he said.

She stared at him tight lipped for several moments. ”I would gladly string him up by his thumbs if I had the opportunity,” she said.

He sat back in his chair and laughed at the unexpectedness of her reply. She frowned and her lips tightened further, if that was possible.

”You must have been quite delighted, then, with what happened to him,” he said, ”unless you would have preferred to mete out your own punishment.”

There was another moment of silence, during which her expression did not change. ”What happened to him?” she asked, and Joel realized that she did not know. No one had written to tell her. But then, who would have done so? He wondered if he ought to keep his mouth shut, but it was too late now.

”The Duke of Netherby knocked him senseless,” he said.

”Avery?” She frowned. ”You must be mistaken.”

”I am not,” he said. ”Anna wrote to tell me about it.”

She set her cup down on the saucer with a bit of a clatter, her hand not quite steady. ”What was she told?” she asked. ”I daresay she got it all wrong.”

”Viscount Uxbury showed up at a ball to which he had not been invited,” Joel said. ”It was in Anna's honor and was being held at Netherby's home in London. Uxbury insulted Anna when she discovered who he was and refused to dance with him, and then he made some rude remarks about you, and Netherby and the new earl-Alexander, I believe his name is?-had him thrown out. The next day he challenged Netherby.”

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