Seventeen

Aunt Louise had gone with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Thomas to call upon an old acquaintance they had met at church during the morning, Camille was informed when she arrived at the house on the Royal Crescent during the afternoon. Alexander had taken Grandmama and Mama and his own mother for a drive out to Beechen Cliff with the argument that the weather was too fine to be wasted indoors. Elizabeth, Jessica, Anastasia, and Avery were at the house with Abigail.

Avery soon maneuvered Elizabeth over to the drawing room window—by design?—and the two of them stood there, talking and looking out and pointing to various things outside. Abigail and Jessica were seated side by side on the sofa. Camille took a chair close to them and Anastasia joined them. It was brave of her, Camille had to admit silently to herself. She and Abigail were the half sisters who had spurned her advances of sibling affection, and even Jessica, who was her sister-in-law and lived with her and Avery as well as Aunt Louise, had resented her at first and perhaps still did.

It was all unfair, of course. Although Anastasia now dressed expensively, she certainly made no parade of her wealth. She dressed with simple, understated elegance. And she behaved with quiet dignity. She was also looking pretty and happy if a little uncertain at the moment. It was increasingly difficult to dislike her. And a bit impossible not to.

“I hoped I would have the opportunity of a private word with my sisters this afternoon,” she said, first glancing Avery’s way and then looking at them each in turn. “We will be making some sort of announcement to the whole family this week, but I wanted the three of you to be first to know that Avery and I are expecting a child and that we are ecstatically happy about it. We do hope you will be pleased too at the prospect of being aunts.”

They all stared at her as though transfixed by shock. But it was really not so surprising. Anastasia and Avery had been married for a few months, and there was a certain look about Anastasia, a glow of contentment and physical well-being that should have spoken for itself. Such an announcement from one sister to three others should surely be eliciting squeals of excited delight, but Jessica looked rather as though she had been punched on the chin, Camille felt like a mere observer, and Abigail—ah, dear Abby!—was recovering herself. She set her hands prayer fashion against her lips and smiled slowly and radiantly around her fingers until even her eyes sparkled.

“Oh, Anastasia,” she said with quiet warmth, “how absolutely wonderful! I am so pleased for you. And thank you for telling us first. That was terribly sweet of you. Goodness, I am going to be Aunt Abigail. But that makes me sound quite elderly. I shall insist upon Aunt Abby. Oh, do tell us—do you hope for a boy or a girl? But of course you must wish for a boy, an heir to the dukedom.”

“Avery says he does not care which it is provided only that it is,” Anastasia said, and Camille could see now the bubbling excitement she had been keeping at bay. “If it is a girl this time, she will be loved every bit as dearly as an heir would be. And really, you know, Abigail, I would not think of a boy as the heir, but only as my son and Avery’s.”

Jessica had caught some of Abby’s enthusiasm and was leaning forward on the sofa. “Is that why you were being lazy and sleeping late every morning a while ago?” she asked.

“Laziness. Is that how Avery excused my lateness?” Anastasia asked, grimacing and then laughing.

“Oh goodness,” Jessica continued. “I am going to be an aunt too, Abby. Or a half aunt, anyway. Is there such a thing as a half aunt?”

Across the room Camille met Avery’s lazy glance. She looked away before he turned back to the window.

“I am delighted for you, Anastasia,” she said, and she was jolted by the look of naked yearning her half sister cast upon her before masking it with a simple smile.

“Are you, Camille?” she said. “Thank you. After the baby is born, you and Abigail must come and stay for a while at Morland Abbey if Miss Ford can be persuaded to do without you at the school—and if you can be persuaded to do without it. I want my children to know all their relatives and to see them frequently, especially their aunts and their uncle. Family is such a precious thing.”

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 glass 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 Duchess 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 title outranked Riverdale’s and my fortune very far surpassed 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 relationship. “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 embarrassing 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.

He wanted to paint her seated, straight backed but leaning slightly forward, gazing directly out at the viewer as though she were about to speak or laugh at any moment. He wanted her face slightly flushed, her lips slightly parted, her eyes bright with eagerness and . . . Ah, the eyes were to be the key to the whole thing, as they often were in his portraits, but more than ever with her. For everything about her suggested light and cheerfulness and the joyful expectation that life would bring her good things and an eagerness to give happiness in return. Even the eyes must suggest those things, though they must do a great deal more than that. For he must not give the impression that she was just a pretty, basically shallow girl who knew nothing about life and its often harsh realities. In the eyes there must be the vulnerability he had sensed in her, the wistfulness, the bewilderment, even the pain, but the essential strength of hope in the power of goodness to overcome evil—or, if perhaps those words were too strong for what he sensed in so young a girl, then the power of light to overcome darkness.

Had he sensed correctly? Were there the depths of character in her that he thought there were? Or was she just a sweet girl who had suffered some sadness in the past few months? He had talked with her for a number of hours. He had made numerous sketches. He had observed her last evening at dinner. He knew a lot of facts. But ultimately, as always, he must sketch and paint from intuition and trust that it was more true than all the facts he had amassed. Facts missed a great deal. Facts missed what lay beneath the facts. Facts missed spirit.

He felt a great tenderness for Abigail Westcott—as he did for all his subjects. For there was nothing like the process of painting someone’s portrait to help one know the person from the inside, and knowing, one could not help but feel empathy.

He had just finished the sketch and taken a step back from his easel in order to look upon it with a little more objectivity when a knock sounded upon the door and startled him back to reality. He had no idea what time it was, but he did know that when he became immersed in his work, hours disappeared without a trace and left him feeling that surely he had started only minutes ago. His stomach felt hollow, a sure sign that he must have missed a meal by more than an hour or two. Perhaps it was Marvin or Edgar, come to rescue him and drag him off to eat somewhere.

It was neither. The man who was standing outside his door was a stranger, an older man of firm, upright bearing and severe, handsome countenance. He carried his hat in his hand. His dark hair was silvered at the temples.

“Mr. Joel Cunningham?” he asked.

“Yes.” Joel raised his eyebrows.

“Your neighbor below answered the door to my knock,” the man explained, “and suggested that I come up.”

What Edgar ought to have done, Joel thought, was call him down. Obviously he had judged the man to be respectable enough to let in.

“I explained,” the man said as though reading his thoughts, “that I am a solicitor and have personal business of some importance with you.”

“On a Sunday?” Joel said.

“The matter is something of a delicate one,” the man said. “May I come in? I am Lowell Crabtree of the legal firm of Henley, Parsons, and Crabtree.”

Joel stood to one side and gestured the man in. He led the way to the living room and offered him a seat. He began to have a horrible premonition.

“I am the solicitor in charge of the estate of the late Mr. Adrian Cox-Phillips,” Crabtree said. “I understand that you have already been apprised of his sad passing yesterday morning.”

“I have,” Joel said, sitting opposite him.

“It is my usual practice,” the solicitor said, “to read a will to the family after the deceased person has been laid to rest—on Tuesday in this particular case.”

So soon? Joel frowned. He had decided last night that he would try to find out when the funeral was to be and attend, though he would not make himself known to any other mourners. He did not imagine that Viscount Uxbury would take any notice of him.

“It was Mr. Cox-Phillips’s wish,” Crabtree explained, “that he be laid to rest as quickly as possible and with as little fuss as possible. He has . . . three surviving relatives, all of whom are currently staying at his house. Two of them have been particularly insistent that I not wait until after the funeral to read the will. They need to return to their busy lives as soon as they have paid homage to their relative.”

Joel read some disapproval into the stiffness of the man’s manner.

“They have insisted that I read the will tomorrow morning,” Crabtree said. “My senior partners have seen fit to persuade me to agree, though Monday—especially Monday morning—is an inconvenient time, coming as it does after Sunday, which I have always observed quite strictly as the Sabbath with Mrs. Crabtree and our children. However, Monday morning it is to be. Mr. Cox-Phillips extracted a promise from me when I conducted business with him a few days ago. He instructed me to find and speak to you privately before I read the will to his relatives.”

Joel’s sense of foreboding grew stronger. “To what end?” he asked, though the question was doubtless unnecessary. Having said so much, the solicitor was hardly about to stop right there and take his leave. “Although related to Mr. Cox-Phillips, I am merely the bastard son of his niece.”

Crabtree drew some papers out of a leather case he had with him, rustled them in his hands, and looked with solemn severity at Joel. “According to his will,” he said, “generous pensions are to be paid to certain of his servants who have been with him for many years, and similarly generous payments are to be made to the others. A sizable sum has been left to an orphanage on Northumberland Place to which he has made large annual donations for almost thirty years past. The rest of his property and fortune, Mr. Cunningham, including his home in the hills above Bath and another in London, which is currently leased out, has been left to you.”

There was a buzzing in Joel’s ears. It had never occurred to him . . . Good God.

“But I refused,” he said. “When he offered to change his will in my favor, I refused.”

“But he changed it anyway,” Crabtree said. “I cannot put an exact monetary value on your inheritance at the moment, Mr. Cunningham. This has all been rather sudden and I will need to work upon the matter. I suggest you come into my office one day this week and I can at least give you some idea of where your investments lie and what their approximate worth is likely to be. But it is a sizable fortune, sir.”

“But my great-uncle’s relatives?” Joel asked, his eyebrows raised.

“I believe,” the solicitor said, a certain note of satisfaction in his voice, “that Viscount Uxbury, Mr. Martin Cox-Phillips, and Mr. Blake Norton will be disappointed. It is altogether possible that one or more of them will contest the will. However, they will be further disappointed if they do. Mr. Cox-Phillips was careful to choose six highly respectable men to witness the signing of his new will. They included his physician, the vicar of his parish church, and two of his closest neighbors, one of whom is a prominent Member of Parliament, while the other is a baronet, the sixth of his line. Yet another is a judge whose word not even the boldest of lawyers would dream of questioning.”

Mr. Crabtree did not linger. Having delivered his message, he rose, shook Joel by the hand, expressed the hope of seeing him soon at his office, wished him a good day, and was gone.

Joel locked the door behind him, went back into the living room, and stood at the window looking out but seeing nothing, not even the departure of the solicitor along the street. No, it had not once occurred to him that his great-uncle would go ahead with his plan to cut his legitimate relatives out of his will even after he, Joel, had told him in no uncertain terms that he had no wish to be used as a pawn in a game of spite.

He had done it anyway.

His great-uncle had been contributing to the orphanage for almost thirty years. Twenty-seven to be exact? That was Joel’s age. Why? His grandmother had always supported him there.

Was it just spite against those other three that had determined him to change his will in Joel’s favor?

Why had he not made himself known a long time ago?

Shame?

Why had he summoned Joel to tell him about the planned change? And had he just made up that story of wanting to thumb his nose so to speak to three men who had never shown any affection for him apart from his money? Had his real reason been a wish to leave everything to a closer relative, grandson, albeit an illegitimate one, of his sister, of whom he had clearly been fond? At the very end had he not been able to resist taking a look at Joel just once before he died? Joel remembered standing for what had seemed a long time in that shaft of sunlight while the old man’s eyes moved over him from head to foot, perhaps looking for some likeness to his sister or his niece.

It was too late to ask the questions. There was the soreness of unshed tears in Joel’s throat.

His first instinct had been to repudiate the will, to tell Crabtree that he still did not want anything, that he would not accept what he had been left. Would it have been possible? The answer did not matter, though, for he had found on more honest reflection that after all he did not want to refuse.

That house was his. Apparently there was another in London. He did not know the extent of the fortune he had inherited, but the solicitor had said it was sizable. Joel had no idea what sort of amount comprised a sizable fortune, but even a few hundred pounds would seem vast to him. He suspected there would be more than that. Thousands, perhaps?

He was rich.

And who did not, in his heart of hearts, wish for a windfall to come his way just once in his lifetime? Who did not secretly dream of all he could have and all he could do with an unexpected fortune?

He and Anna—and the other children too—had played the game numerous times during their growing years. What would you do if someone gave you ten pounds, a hundred pounds, a thousand pounds, a million pounds . . .

And thinking of Anna led him to thinking of Camille. And suddenly he felt the overwhelming, almost panicked need to see her, to tell her, to . . . He did not stop to analyze. He grabbed his hat and his key and left his rooms without looking back. He remembered when he was crossing the bridge that she had been going up to the Royal Crescent this afternoon to visit her mother. Would she be back yet? Would she stay there for dinner? Perhaps for the night?

She was nowhere in the orphanage, and no one knew with any certainty when she would be back, though she had said nothing about not returning tonight. He paced the pavement outside for a few minutes, wondering if he should go up to the Crescent to speak with her there or just go home. It would be thought most peculiar if he went up there, and he might miss her if she came home by a different route from the one he took. He was still undecided when she turned onto the street. Joel hurried toward her, not even noticing that she was not alone.

“There you are,” he said, his whole being flooded with relief. “At last.”