Part 15 (2/2)

Camille did not think she was being preached at. Anastasia was merely speaking from the heart and from the lonely experience of having grown up in an orphanage unaware that she had any family at all. Camille's own heart was heavy. She knew how precious a baby felt in her arms even when it was not her own. Sarah was not her own, and Anastasia's would not be. Oh, how wonderful it must be . . . But the force of her maternal longing startled her.

Abigail and Jessica were laughing merrily-quite like old times. They were suggesting names for the baby and getting more outrageous by the moment. Anastasia was laughing with them. Avery was saying something to Elizabeth and pointing off to the west. The splendor of his appearance contrasted markedly with the simplicity of Anastasia's. He was wearing a ring on almost every finger, while her only jewelry was her wedding ring. Wise Anastasia. She had chosen not to compete with him. Or perhaps it had been an unconscious choice.

Camille decided to leave before her mother and grandmother returned from their excursion. If she stayed, there would be tea and at least an hour of conversation, and then like as not either Alexander or Avery would insist upon conveying her home. She had made the decision to spend some of her time with her family in the coming week, but she did not wish to be sucked back into the fold at the expense of her newly won independence. She was not to escape entirely, however. Avery turned away from his conversation with Elizabeth when Camille got to her feet.

”I shall do myself the honor of escorting you, Camille,” he announced in the languid manner that characterized him. ”I shall leave the carriage for you and Jessica, Anna.”

”There is really no need,” Camille said sharply. ”I am quite accustomed to walking about Bath unaccompanied. I have not yet encountered even one wolf.”

”Ah,” he said, raising his quizzing gla.s.s halfway to his eye, ”but it was not a question, Camille. And in my experience there is very little one needs to do. One shudders at the thought of ordering one's life about such a notion of duty.”

She knew Avery well enough to realize that there was never any point in arguing with him. She took her leave of everyone else.

”I wonder,” she said tartly when they were on the pavement outside the house and the door had closed behind them, ”if you told Anastasia that she was going to marry you and, when she refused, informed her that you had not been asking.”

”I am wounded to the heart,” he said, offering her his arm, ”that you would think me so lacking in charm and personal appeal that Anna would not have said yes on the instant when I told her she was to marry me.”

She took his arm and looked at him, quelling the urge to laugh. ”How did you persuade her?” she asked.

”Well, it was like this, you see,” he said, leading her toward Brock Street and, presumably, toward the steepness of Gay Street down into the town, a route she normally avoided. ”The dowager countess and the aunts and the cousins, with one or two exceptions, were trying to convince her that the most sensible thing she could do was marry Riverdale.”

”Alexander?” she said, astonished. But it would indeed have made sense. A marriage between the two of them would have reunited the entailed property and the fortune to sustain it.

”I offered her an alternative,” Avery said. ”I informed her that she could be the d.u.c.h.ess of Netherby instead if she wished.”

”Just like that?” she asked him. ”In front of everyone?”

”I did not drop to one knee or otherwise make a spectacle of myself,” he said. ”But now that you have put a dent in my self-esteem, Camille, I must consider the fact that my t.i.tle outranked Riverdale's and my fortune very far surpa.s.sed his. Do you suppose those facts weighed heavily with Anna?” He was looking sideways at her with lazy eyes.

”Not for a moment,” she said.

”You do not consider her mercenary or calculating, then?” he asked her.

”No,” she said.

”Ah,” he said. ”You know, Camille, it is just as well that Bath boasts hot springs that are said to effect miracle cures whether the waters are imbibed or immersed in. Otherwise it would surely be a ghost of a city or would never have existed at all. These hills are an abomination, are they not? I am not even sure it is safe for you to hold my arm. I fear that at any moment I will lose control and hurtle downward in a desperate attempt to keep my boots moving at the same pace as the rest of my person.”

”Sometimes you are very absurd, Avery,” she said.

He turned his head toward her again. ”You are in agreement with your sister upon that subject,” he said. ”It is what she frequently says of me.”

”Half sister,” she said sharply.

He did not reply as they made their way down Gay Street. Camille had to admit in the privacy of her own mind that it felt good to have the support of a man's arm again. And Avery's felt surprisingly firm and strong when she considered the fact that he was scarcely an inch taller than she and was slight and graceful of build. But . . . he had felled Viscount Uxbury with his bare feet.

”Avery,” she asked him, ”why did you insist upon coming with me?”

”The fact that I am your brother-in-law is not reason enough?” he asked. Strangely, she never thought of him in terms of that relations.h.i.+p. ”Ah, I beg your pardon-half brother-in-law. But that makes me sound smaller than I am, and I really am quite sensitive about my height, you know.”

She smiled but did not turn her face his way or answer his question. They were almost down the steepest part of the descent.

”The thing is, you see, Camille,” he said, his voice softer than it had been, ”that though my father married your aunt years ago and so made us into sort-of cousins, and I have felt a certain cousinly affection ever since for you and Abigail and Harry; and although I have known Anna for only a few months and it may seem unfair that I do not feel less for her accordingly, in reality, my dear, I am quite desperately fond of her. If you will forgive the vulgarity-the former Lady Camille Westcott might not have done so, but the present Camille possibly might-I would even go further and say that I am quite head-over-heels besotted with her. But that is only if you will indeed forgive the vulgarity. If you will not, then I will keep such an embarra.s.sing admission to myself.”

Camille smiled again, though she felt a bit shaken. It made a certain sense, however, she thought, that the cool, aloof, cynical, inscrutable, totally self-sufficient Duke of Netherby would fall as hard as a ton of bricks if ever he did fall. Who, though, could have predicted that it would happen with someone like Anastasia-who had looked as shabby as Joel did now when she first appeared in London. That last thought left her feeling even more shaken.

”What are you trying to say, Avery?” she asked him.

”Dear me,” he said, ”I hope I am doing more than trying, Camille, when I have braved the perils of such a suicidal hill. What I am saying is that Anna understands. I believe her understanding and patience and love will be endless if they must be, just as her heartache will be. She loves me as dearly as I love her-of that I have no doubt. She is as exuberantly happy about the impending birth of our child as I am terrified. She loves and is loved by a largish circle of family members on both her mother's side and her father's. Her maternal grandparents adore her and are adored in return. She has everything that only her wildest dreams were able to deliver through most of her life. No, correction. Almost everything.”

”Avery,” she said as they reached flat land. ”I was courteous when you and she called at my grandmother's house on your return from your wedding journey. I was courteous last evening. I wished her well this afternoon. I told her I was delighted for her, and I meant it. Why would I not? How could I wish her ill? It would be monstrous of me. And why single out me? Will Abby and Jessica and Harry be recipients of this admonition?”

He winced theatrically. ”My dear Camille,” he said, ”I hope I never admonish anyone. It sounds as if it would require a great expenditure of energy. Anna craves the love-the full, unconditional love-of all four of you, but yours in particular. You are stronger, more forceful than the others. She admires you more and loves you more-though she scolds me when I say such a thing and reminds me that love cannot be measured by degree. One might have expected that she would be chagrined or contemptuous or any number of other negative things when she heard that you were teaching where she had taught and then that you were living where she had lived. Instead she wept, Camille-not with vexation, but with pride and admiration and love and a conviction that you would succeed and prove all your critics wrong.”

Camille could not recall any other occasion when Avery had said so much, and most of it without his customary bored affectation.

”Avery,” she said, ”there is a difference between what one knows and determines with one's head and what one feels with one's heart. I was taught and have always endeavored to live according to the former. I have always believed that the heart is wild and untrustworthy, that emotion is best quelled in the name of sense and dignity. I am as new to my present life as Anastasia is to hers. And I am not at all sure that the first twenty-two years of my life were worth anything at all. In many ways I feel like a helpless infant. But while infants are discovering fingers and toes and mouths, I am discovering heart and feelings. Give me time.”

What on earth was she saying? And to whom was she saying it? Avery of all people? She had always despised his indolent splendor.

”Time is not mine to give, Camille,” he said as they turned onto Northumberland Place. ”Or to take. But I wonder if the advent of Anna into your life was in its way as much of a blessing as her advent into mine has been. It is enough to make one almost believe in fate, is it not? And if that is not a wild, chaotic thought, I shudder to think what is.”

Camille, what happened to you must surely have been the very best thing that could possibly have happened.

. . . I wonder if the advent of Anna into your life was in its way as much of a blessing as her advent into mine has been.

Two very different men, saying essentially the same thing-that the greatest catastrophe of her life was perhaps also its greatest blessing.

”Ah,” Avery said, ”the lovelorn swain if I am not mistaken.”

She glanced up at him inquiringly and then ahead to where he was looking. Joel was outside the orphanage.

”The what?” she said, frowning.

But Joel had spotted her and was striding toward her along the pavement. He looked a bit disheveled as well as shabby.

”There you are,” he said when he was still some distance away. ”At last.”

Joel had been to an early church service but had decided to spend the rest of the day at home. He felt the urge to work despite the fact that it was Sunday. He was ready to paint Abigail Westcott. He could not literally do that, of course, because first he would have to pose her in the right clothes and with the right hairstyle and in the right light and setting. He would do that one day in the coming week if her time was not too much taken up with the visit of her family. But he could and would work on a preliminary sketch.

This was different from all the other sketches he did of his subjects. They were fleeting impressions, often capturing only one facet of character or mood that had struck him. In them he made no attempt to achieve a comprehensive impression of who that person was. The preliminary sketch was far closer to what the final sketch and then the portrait would be. In it he attempted to put those fleeting, myriad impressions together to form something that captured the whole person. Before he could do it, however, he had to decide what the predominating character trait was and how much of each of the others would be included-and, more significantly, how. He had to decide too how best to pose his subject in order to capture character. It was a tricky and crucial stage of the process and needed a fine balance of rational thought and intuition-and total concentration.

He started it on Sunday morning rather than observe the day of rest because he was sick of the fractured, tumbling thoughts brought on by the various events in the last couple of weeks and wanted to recapture his familiar quiet routine. And soon enough he was absorbed in the sketch.

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