Part 12 (2/2)

His fourth reaction was that the painting had not been signed. He had not even realized that he had been hoping for some clue, however small, to his father's ident.i.ty.

He became aware again of Camille standing beside him, looking at the painting with him, but not speaking, for which fact he was grateful.

”c.o.x-Phillips was right about one thing,” he said, surprised to hear his voice sounding quite normal. ”The painter was not particularly talented.” Why had he chosen that of all things to say? The painter was his father-at least, in all probability he was. ”He left the beholder with no clue as to who she was. I do not mean her ident.i.ty. That must be undisputed. I mean her, her character and personality. I see a pretty girl. That is all. I do not feel-”

”The connection of son to mother?” she said softly after he had circled one hand ineffectually in the air without finding the words he needed.

”Did I expect to?” he said. ”Did I expect to know her as soon as I saw her? To recognize her as part of myself? It is not the painter's fault, is it, that she is just a pretty stranger, a decade younger than I. I wonder if the dog was hers or the painter's. Or was it a figment of his imagination? But there is no other evidence that he had an imagination or could paint something that was not before his eyes. He painted her as she sat there before him. She had to sit still for a long time and probably over several sessions.”

His hand reached out to touch the paint, but he rested his fingertips on the top of the frame instead.

”There is no evidence,” he said, ”that he loved her or felt anything for her. Did I expect that there would be? A grand pa.s.sion transmitted onto the canvas by a painter deeply enamored of his subject, to be transmitted to the beholder more than a quarter of a century later?” He closed his eyes and lowered his head. ”It is a pretty picture.”

All his life there had been an emptiness, a blank, where his parents ought to have been. He had never dwelled upon it. He had got on with his life, and he had little of which to complain. On the whole, life had been good to him. But the emptiness had always been there, a sort of hollow at the center of his being. Now there was something to fit into that hollow, and it brought pain with it. So close, he thought. Ah, so close. They were so close to him, those two, painter and painted, father and mother, yet so eternally unattainable.

”Joel.” Her voice was a whisper of sound from beside him.

Why the devil was he going all to pieces over a mere painting, and not a very skilled one at that? He could have lived the whole of the rest of his life knowing no more than he had ever known about himself without feeling any pain greater than that certain emptiness. Why should knowing a little feel worse than knowing nothing? Because knowing a little made him greedy for more when there was no more?

He would find a place to hang the painting, he decided, somewhere prominent, where he would see it every day, where it would no longer be something almost to fear but on the contrary, an everyday part of his surroundings. It must hang somewhere where other people would see it too, and he would point it out to any of his friends who came here-Ah yes, that is my mother when she was very young. Pretty, was she not? The painter was my father. He was Italian. He returned to Italy before he knew I was on the way and she never did let him know. A bit tragic, yes. I suppose there was a reason. A lovers' quarrel, perhaps. She died giving birth to me, you know. Perhaps she intended to write to him afterward. Perhaps he waited to hear from her and a.s.sumed she had forgotten him and was too proud to come back. A comfortable myth would grow around the few facts he knew.

He turned to look at Camille. ”I will not paint you with a contrived smile on your face,” he told her, ”or with a fan in one hand that has no function but to be decorative. I will not set a little toy of a dog on your lap to arouse sentiment in the beholder. I will not paint you with flat eyes and an unnatural perfection of feature and coloring.”

”They would have to be very unnatural,” she said. ”And I do not like little dogs. They yap.”

He smiled at her and then laughed-and then reached for her and drew her against him with such force that he felt the air whoosh out of her lungs. He did not loosen his hold but clasped her as though she were his only anchor in a turbulent sea. She let herself be held and set her arms about him. Her face was turned in against his neck. For long moments he buried his own face against her hair and breathed in the blessed safety of her.

”I am sorry,” he said then. ”I am behaving as though I were the only person ever to suffer. And how can I call this suffering? I ought to be rejoicing.”

”There are some things worse than not knowing your parents,” she said. ”Sometimes knowing them is worse.” She sighed, her breath warm against his throat, and lifted her head. ”But that is not really true, of course. How can I know what it would have been like not to know my father? How can you know what it would have been like to know yours? We cannot choose our lives, can we? We have some freedom in how we live them, but none whatsoever over the circ.u.mstances in which we find ourselves when we are born. And I do not suppose that is a very original observation.”

”Camille,” he said, smiling at her.

”But here we both are,” she said, half smiling back, ”on our feet and somehow living our lives. Why are we so gloomy? Must we wallow in the tragedies of the past? When I stepped out of my grandmother's house just over two weeks ago and set out for the orphanage and Miss Ford's office, I had decided that for me at least the answer was no. Definitely not. Never again.”

”I have ident.i.ty at last,” he said. ”All is well.”

He cupped her face in both hands, and they gazed into each other's eyes, both half smiling, for long moments. She closed her own briefly when he traced the line of her brows with his thumbs and ran one of them along the length of her nose, and opened them again when he feathered both thumbs along her lips, pausing at the outer corners. Her fingertips came to rest lightly against his wrists. He smiled more fully at her, drew breath to speak, changed his mind, and then spoke anyway.

”Come to bed with me,” he said.

He regretted the words immediately, for her hands tightened about his wrists, and he guessed he had ruined the fragile connection he had felt between them. She did not step away from him, however, or pull his hands away from her face. And when she spoke, it was not with either indignation or outrage.

”Yes,” she said.

They left the portrait of his mother on the easel, uncovered, and crossed the hall to enter his bedchamber, not touching each other.

”I am not the tidiest of mortals,” he said as Camille heard the door close behind her.

The bed had been made up, but the blankets hung lower on one side than on the other, and one pillow still bore the imprint of his head, presumably from last night. A book lay open and facedown on a table beside the bed. Camille itched to mark the page, close the book, and check to see that the spine had not been damaged. A few other books were strewn on the floor with a scrunched-up garment, probably his nights.h.i.+rt. But at least there was no noticeable sign of dust.

”I never had to be tidy until recently,” she said. ”I always had servants to do everything for me except breathe.” Her hair had given her particular trouble in the last couple of weeks. She was unaccustomed to brus.h.i.+ng and styling it herself. And why did dresses almost invariably have to open and close down the back, when one's elbows did not bend that way and one had no eyes in the back of one's head?

But why were they talking and thinking of such things, allowing awkwardness and self-consciousness to enter the room with them? She had made a decision, a very spur-of-the-moment one, it was true, for his suggestion had been totally unexpected, but she had no wish to go back on it. She had come to believe that for twenty-two years she had been only half alive, perhaps not even that much, that she had deliberately suppressed everything in herself that made her human. Now suddenly she wanted to live. And she wanted to love, even if that word was a mere euphemism for desire. She would live, then, and she would enjoy. She would not stop to think, to doubt, to feel awkward.

She turned toward him. He was looking steadily back as though giving her the chance to change her mind if she so wished. How could she ever have thought him anything less than gorgeous? His hair, very dark, like his eyes, had surely grown in just the two weeks since she had known him. His facial features were all suggestive of firmness and strength. His Italian lineage was very obvious in his looks, but so was his English lineage, though he looked nothing like the young woman in the portrait. It was not just his looks, though. Mild-mannered and soft-spoken though he was, and seemingly uninterested in male pursuits and vices, there was nevertheless something very solid about him and very male. She could not quite explain to herself what it was exactly and did not even try. She just felt it.

He was gorgeous and she wanted him. It was really as simple-and as shocking-as that. She did not care about the shocking part. She wanted to be free. She wanted to experience life.

”Camille,” he said, ”if you are having second thoughts . . .”

”I am not,” she a.s.sured him, and took one step closer to him even as he took one toward her. ”I want to go to bed with you.”

He set his hands lightly on her shoulders and moved them down her arms. For a moment she regretted not being as slender and delicately feminine as Abby was-and as Anastasia was. But she brushed aside such foolish, self-doubting thoughts. She was a woman no matter what she looked like, and it was she he had asked to go to bed with him, not either of the other two. She slid her hands beneath his coat to rest on either side of his waist. His body was firm and warm.

He began to remove her hairpins, slowly and methodically, setting them down on the table beside the open book. She could have done it faster herself. So, probably, could he. But this was not about speed, she realized, or efficiency. This was about enjoying desire and building it-her first lesson in sensuality. Oh, she knew nothing about sensuality, and she wanted to know everything. All of it. She leaned into him, setting her bosom to the firm muscles of his chest, and holding his eyes with her own while his hands worked. She half smiled at him. Tension built in the room almost like a tangible thing.

”I am guessing,” she said, ”that you have some experience in all this. I hope so, because one of us needs to know what to do.”

His hands stilled in her hair, and his eyes smiled back into hers while the rest of his face did not. It was a quite devastating expression, one that surely would only ever be appropriate in the bedchamber. It made her knees feel weak and the room seem a bit deficient in breathable air.

”I am not a virgin, Camille,” he told her, and as he removed one more pin her hair came cascading down her back and over her shoulders. ”My G.o.d. Your hair is beautiful.”

She had not worn it down outside of her dressing room since she was twelve, but sometimes, in rare moments of vanity, she had thought that a pity. She had always thought her hair was her finest feature. It was thick and heavy and slightly wavy.

”You are beautiful,” he said, his fingers playing through her hair, his eyes on hers.

She did not contradict him. She said something foolish instead, though she meant it and would not unsay it even if she could. ”So are you,” she said.

He cupped her face with his hands while she grasped his elbows, and he kissed her, his lips parted, his mouth lingering on hers, his tongue probing her lips and the flesh behind, entering her mouth, circling her own tongue, feathering over the roof of her mouth so that she felt a raw, purely physical ache of desire between her thighs and up inside her. He moved his hands behind her waist, pressed them lower to cup her b.u.t.tocks, and drew her hard against him so that she could feel the shocking maleness of him, the physical evidence of his desire for her. Her own hands flailed to the sides for a moment and then settled on his upper arms.

”Mmm.” He drew back a little and leaned beyond her to draw back the bedcovers. ”Let me unclothe you.”

She let him do it, did not try to help him, and did not allow herself to feel embarra.s.sed as garments were peeled away one by one with tantalizing slowness. He was looking at her, drinking her in with eyes that grew heavier with desire. He had called her beautiful when all her clothes were on. She felt beautiful as they came off-beautiful in his eyes, anyway, and for now that was all that mattered. Her heart hammered in her chest and her body hummed with antic.i.p.ation and her blood pulsed with desire.

Who would have thought it? Oh, who would? Not her, certainly. Not until . . . when? A few hours ago when she waltzed with him? A few days ago when she dashed laughing through the rain with him? A short while ago when she watched him look on his mother's face for the first time?

”Lie down,” he said when she was wearing nothing at all and he was turning his attention to removing his own clothes.

She did not offer to unclothe him. She would not have known how to go about it. She lay on the bed instead, one knee bent, her foot flat on the mattress, one arm beneath her head. It did not even occur to her to pull the bedcovers over herself to hide her nakedness. He watched her as he undressed, his eyes roving over her, and she watched him.

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