Part 7 (2/2)

She hugged herself more tightly. ”Yet you still think I deserve what happened to me,” she said.

He frowned. ”That,” he said, ”is not what I said. It is certainly not what I meant. Sometimes good can come out of disaster. You had schooled yourself all your life not to feel emotion. You believed that that is what perfect ladies do. Perhaps you were right. But if it is indeed so, then perfect ladies are surely to be pitied.”

”My mother is a perfect lady,” she said. And because he did not immediately answer, the words echoed in her head. Was that all her mother had ever been? The empty sh.e.l.l of a perfect lady? Camille had always wanted to emulate her unshakable poise and dignity. Her mother had never been at the mercy of emotion. She was never vividly happy or wretchedly unhappy. She had been a model of perfection to her elder daughter. Only now did Camille ask herself what had lain beneath that disciplined exterior. Only now did she wonder if it had been a misery bordering upon despair, for Mama had been married to Papa for almost a quarter of a century before she knew that she had never been married at all, and Papa must have been wretchedly hard to live with as a husband.

”Do you miss her?” he asked softly.

Abby did. She had said so a few days ago. Did she, Camille, miss her too? ”I am not sure I know who she is any more than I know who I am,” she said, and felt dizzy at the truth of the words she spoke. Oh, how could what was happening to her be the best thing that could possibly have happened? She reached out one hand to pat his shabby jacket, just below the shoulder. ”Will you hold me, please? I need someone to hold me.” She would have been appalled, surely, if she had stopped to listen to her own words of weakness. They went against everything she had always been and everything she was trying to be now.

He took a hasty step forward, wrapped his arms tightly about her, and drew her hard against him. She turned her head to rest her cheek on his shoulder and leaned on him-in every way it was possible to lean. And it seemed to her that he was all solid strength and dependability and the perfect height-taller than she but not towering over her. He was warm and he smelled good, not of an expensive cologne, but of basic cleanliness and masculinity. He rested his head against hers and held her as she needed to be held. He did not try to kiss her again, and she did not feel any of the desire she had felt in the kitchen a short while ago. Instead she felt comforted from the topmost hair on her head to her toenails. And gradually she felt a nameless yearning, something with which she had no previous experience, though not the physical one she had felt earlier.

”Why did Anastasia not fall in love with you?” she asked into his shoulder.

He took his time about answering. ”Foolish of her, was it not?” he said.

”Yes,” she said, and thought about the man Anastasia had married. She could not imagine asking Avery to hold her. And she certainly could not imagine his doing so like this. For one thing, he was small and slight of build and would not feel so comforting. For another, there was no discernible warmth in him. Some things really were a mystery. Why had Anastasia fallen in love with him rather than with Joel? It had nothing to do with the fact that Avery was wealthy, for so had Anastasia been when she married him. Avery was a duke, of course, whereas Joel was a portrait painter who wore shabby coats and felt affluent because he could afford to rent the whole of the top floor of a house in Bath. But it was not that either. Camille was convinced of it. Much as she would like to think ill of Anastasia, she could not deny that it was very clear her half sister loved Avery with all her being.

She drew reluctantly free of his arms. ”I am sorry,” she said. ”No, I mean, thank you. I was experiencing a moment of weakness. It will not happen again.”

”I thought perhaps it was only orphans who sometimes long to be held,” he said. ”It had not occurred to me that people who grew up with both parents might sometimes feel a similar craving.”

”That baby I was holding earlier-Sarah,” she said. ”Before I picked her up, she was crying with the hopeless conviction that no one was ever going to hold her again. She hurt my heart.”

”But you held her,” he said.

”What was I to do?” she asked rhetorically. ”What was I to do, Joel?”

He did not answer her because of course there was no answer. ”Our tea will be getting cold,” he said.

”I think I had better go home,” she said. ”You were quite right earlier. This was a mistake, and I apologize for forcing you into accompanying me on my walk and then leaving you with little option but to bring me here.”

”The rain is heavier than it was when we arrived,” he said. But he did not try to dissuade her from leaving. ”I have an umbrella, a large man-sized one. We can huddle under it together.”

”I would rather go alone,” she said.

He nodded and went to fetch her pelisse and bonnet, which were still a bit damp. She was half splas.h.i.+ng along the street a few minutes later, the umbrella he had insisted she bring with her keeping her dry, though she could hear the rain drumming upon it. She had been kissed and she had been hugged this afternoon, both new experiences. She had also begged to be held and had surrendered to the comfort another human being had offered, even if only for a minute or so. Now she felt a bit like crying-yet again.

She would not do it, of course. She had cried last night, and that had been more than enough to last her for another fifteen years or so at least. But she must not put herself again in the position of needing to be held by Mr. Joel Cunningham, who believed that the disaster she had met with earlier this year was the best thing that could have happened to her. She certainly would give him no further opportunity to kiss her-or herself further opportunity to invite his kiss. For she would certainly not put all the blame, or even most of it, upon his shoulders.

She wished she did not have to encounter him again next week in the schoolroom, where she would have to behave as though nothing had happened between them. Not that much had. Oh, somehow, sometime she was going to get through all this, this . . . whatever it was and come out on the other side. But what would that other side look like?

She tilted the umbrella to s.h.i.+eld her face from the driving rain and hurried onward.

Nine.

Joel kept himself busy on Sunday and Monday. He finished one of his portraits on Sunday and went up to the Royal Crescent on Monday to begin sketching and talking to Abigail Westcott. Her portrait was going to be a pleasure to work on and a bit of a challenge too, for almost as soon as she started to talk he could sense a vulnerability behind her prettiness and sweetness and a carefully guarded sadness. It would take him some time and skill to know her thoroughly.

But while he kept himself occupied, his mind was in turmoil. Why in thunder had he kissed Camille? She had asked him how one achieved happiness, and like a gauche boy with only one thing on his mind, he had acted as though there could be only one possible answer. The thing was, he had taken himself as much by surprise as he had her. And then, as though that were not bad enough, he had proceeded to hurt her horribly with that ill-advised remark about the great disaster of her life having been the best thing that could possibly have happened to her.

He had not even enjoyed his evening with Edwina on Sunday. Indeed, he had returned home early without even having gone to bed with her.

He spent Monday afternoon and evening sketching Camille from memory-laughing in the rain, sitting at his kitchen table looking just kissed, standing at his living room window, arms wrapped defensively about herself, gazing sightlessly down at the street. He did not want to be obsessed with painting her yet. He wanted to be able to focus upon her sister. But perhaps it was not painting her that was obsessing him.

He was actually glad on Tuesday to have something to distract him. He hired a carriage and went to call upon Mr. c.o.x-Phillips. The house was somewhere between a manor and a mansion in size, stately in design, and set within s.p.a.cious and well-tended gardens, commanding a wide and panoramic view over the city below and the surrounding country for miles around. Joel, having instructed the coachman to wait for him, hoping he would not be too long, as the bill would be running ever higher, nevertheless took a few moments to admire the house and the garden and view before knocking upon the door.

He was kept waiting for all of ten minutes in the entry hall, being stared at by a collection of stern marble busts with sightless eyes while the elderly butler inevitably went to see if his master was at home. Joel was admitted eventually to a high-ceilinged library. Every wall was filled with books from floor to ceiling wherever there was not either a window or a door or fireplace. A large oak desk dominated one corner of the room. On the other side an imposing leather sofa faced a marble fireplace in which a fire burned despite the summer heat outdoors. Matching leather wing chairs flanked it.

In one of the chairs and almost swallowed up by it, his knees covered by a woolen blanket, a silver-k.n.o.bbed cane grasped in one of his gnarled hands, sat a fierce-eyed, beetle-browed gentleman who looked to be at least a hundred years old. His eyes watched Joel cross the room until he came to a stop beside the sofa. Another man, almost equally ancient and presumably some sort of valet, stood behind the gentleman's chair and also watched Joel's approach.

”Mr. c.o.x-Phillips?” Joel said.

”And who else am I likely to be?” the gentleman asked, the beetle brows snapping together in a frown. ”Come and stand here, young man.” He thumped his cane on the carpet before his feet. ”Orville, open the d.a.m.ned curtains. I can hardly see my hand in front of my face.”

Both Joel and the valet did as they were told. Joel found himself standing in a shaft of sunlight a few feet from the old man's chair, while its occupant took his time looking him up and down and studying his face. The lengthy inspection made Joel wonder, with an inward chuckle, who was going to be painting whom.

”It was the Italian after all, then, was it?” the old man said abruptly. It did not sound like the sort of question that demanded an answer.

”I beg your pardon, sir?” Joel regarded him politely.

”The Italian,” the old man said impatiently. ”The painter who thought his swarthy looks and accent that charmed the ladies and foreign names all ending in vowels would hide the fact that what talent he had would not have filled a thimble.”

”I am afraid,” Joel said, ”I am not understanding you, sir. I do not know the man to whom you refer.”

”I refer, young man,” the old gent told him, ”to your father.”

Joel stood rooted to the spot.

”I suppose,” the old man said, ”they did not tell you a thing.”

”They?” Joel felt a little as though he were looking through a dark tunnel, which was strange when he was standing in sunlight.

”Those people at that inst.i.tution where you grew up,” the old man said. ”It would be a wonder if they did not. Very few people can hold their tongues, even when they have been sworn to secrecy. Especially then.”

Joel wished he had been invited to sit down or at least to stand in shadow. There was a dull buzzing in his ears. ”Do you mean, sir,” he asked, ”that you know who my father was-or is? And my mother?”

”It would be strange if I did not know her,” c.o.x-Phillips said, ”when she was my own niece, my only sister's girl, and more trouble to her mother than she was worth. Dead the lot of them are now. Never hope to live to be eighty-five, young man. Everybody who has ever meant a thing to you ends up dying, and the only ones left are the sycophants and vultures who think that because they share a few drops of your blood they are therefore ent.i.tled to your money when you die. Well, they are not going to have mine, not while I am alive to have a say in the matter, which I will have this afternoon when my lawyer arrives here.”

Most of what he said pa.s.sed Joel by. His mind was grappling with only one thing. ”My mother was your niece?” he asked. ”She is dead? And my father?”

”She would never tell her mother who he was,” the old man said. ”Stubborn as a mule, that girl was. She would only tell who he was not-and that was every likely and unlikely male her mother could think of, including the Italian, though how she ever got her tongue around his name to say it aloud I do not know. My sister sent the girl away for her confinement and paid a pretty penny for her care for six months too, but the girl died anyway in childbed. The baby-you-survived, more was the pity. It would have been better for all concerned, you included, if you had died with her. Nothing would do for it but my sister had to bring you back here despite everything I had to say to the contrary. Her daughter got her stubbornness from her. She knew she could not bring you to this house to live and explain away to all who would have been sure to ask, and strange if they had not. She ought to have left you where you were. She took you instead to that orphanage and paid for your keep there. She even paid for that art school you wanted to go to, even though I told her she had feathers for a brain. I guessed then, though, that it must have been the Italian. Where else would you have got the cork-brained notion that you could make a decent living painting? They probably tried to make you see better sense at the orphanage.”

”My . . . grandmother lives here with you?” Joel asked.

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