Ten

Joel grasped Camille’s hand without conscious thought when they left the building and strode along the street with her. He had only one purpose in mind—to go home. It was only as they crossed the bridge that he wondered at last why he had turned to Camille Westcott of all people. Marvin Silver or Edgar Stephens would surely be home soon, and they were good friends as well as neighbors. Edwina was probably at her house. She was both friend and lover. And failing any of those three, why not Miss Ford?

But it was for the end of the school day and Camille he had waited as he paced the streets of Bath for what must have been hours. She would listen to him. She would understand. She knew what it was like to have one’s life turned upside down. And now he was taking her home with him, even after what had happened there the last time, was he? His pace slackened.

“I ought not to take you to my rooms,” he said. “Would you prefer that we keep walking?”

“No.” She was frowning. “Something has upset you. I will go home with you.”

“Thank you,” he said.

A few minutes later he was leaning against the closed door of his rooms while Camille hung up her bonnet and shawl. It seemed days rather than hours since he had left here this morning. She went ahead of him into the living room and turned to look at him, waiting for him to speak first.

He slumped onto one of the chairs without considering how ill-mannered he was being, set his elbows on his knees, and held his head in both hands.

“Cox-Phillips is my great-uncle,” he said. “It was his sister, my grandmother, who took me to the orphanage after her daughter, my mother, died giving birth to me. She was unmarried, of course—her name was Cunningham. My grandmother was extremely good to me. She paid handsomely for my keep until I was fifteen, and then, when she heard of my longing to go to art school, she paid my fees there. She loved me dearly too. She watched me from afar a number of times down the years and was so deeply affected each time that she suffered low spirits for days afterward.”

“Joel—” she said, but he could not stop now that he had started.

“She could not let me see her, of course,” he said. “She could not call at the orphanage and reveal herself to me. I might have climbed up onto the rooftop and yelled out the information for all of Bath to hear. Or someone might have seen her come and go and asked awkward questions. She could love me from afar and lavish money on me to show how much she cared, but she could not risk contamination by any personal contact. Something might have rubbed off on her and proved fatal to her health or her reputation. I was, after all, the bastard child of a fallen woman who just happened to be her daughter and apparently of an Italian artist of questionable talent who lived in Bath for long enough to turn the daughter’s head and get her with child before fleeing, lest he be forced into doing the honorable thing and marrying her and making me respectable.”

“Joel—” she said.

“Do you know what I was doing today between the time the carriage brought me back and the time I came to the schoolroom?” he asked, looking up at her. He did not wait for her to hazard a guess. “I wandered the streets, mentally squirming and clawing at myself as though to be rid of an itch. I felt—I feel as though I must be covered with lice and fleas and bed bugs and other vermin. Or perhaps the contaminating dirt is all inside me and I can never be rid of it. That must be it, I think, for I will never be anything but a bastard to be shunned by all respectable folk, will I?”

Good God, where was all this coming from?

“Joel,” she said in her sergeant’s voice, “stop it. Right this minute.”

He looked blankly up at her and realized suddenly that he was sitting while she was still standing in the middle of the room. He leapt to his feet. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and made her a mock salute. “I feel as though I am teetering on the edge of a vast universe and am about to tumble off into the endless blackness of empty space. And how is that for hyperbole, madam schoolmistress? I ought not to have brought you here. I ought not to have kept you standing while I have been sitting. You will think I am no gentleman and how very right you will be. And I ought not to be spouting all this pathetic nonsense into your ear. We scarcely know each other, after all. I assure you I am not usually this—”

“Joel,” she said. “Stop.”

And this time he did stop while she frowned at him and then took a few steps toward him. If he had not been fearing that at any moment he might faint, or fall off the edge of the universe, and if his teeth had not been chattering, he might have guessed her intent. But her hands were against his chest and then on his shoulders and then her arms were about his neck before he could do so, and by then it was too late not to take advantage of the comfort she offered. His arms went about her like iron bands and pressed her to him as though only by holding her could he keep himself upright and in one piece. He could feel the heat and the blessed life of her pressed to him from shoulders to knees. Her head was on his shoulder, her face turned in against his neck, her breath warm against his skin. He buried his face in her hair and felt almost safe.

Will you hold me, please? I need someone to hold me, she had said to him here on almost this very spot a few days ago. Now it was he making the same wordless plea.

Why exactly was he feeling so upset? He had always known that someone had handed him over to the orphanage, that whoever it was had chosen not to keep him, that in all probability that meant he was illegitimate, the unwanted product of an illicit union, something shameful that must be hidden away and denied for the rest of a lifetime. Yes, something—almost as though he were inanimate and therefore without real identity or feelings. A bastard. He had always known, but he had never given it a great deal of thought. It was just the way things were and would always be. There was no point in brooding about it. Having learned now, though, the name and identity of the woman who had abandoned him and her relationship to him—she had been his grandmother—and knowing how she had gazed on him in secret and been upset for days afterward without ever being upset enough to come and hug him, everything in him had erupted in pain. For now it was all real. And that man, his great-uncle, had insulted what little dignity he had, wanting to use him in order to wreak vengeance upon legitimate relatives who he believed had neglected him.

Joel knew all about neglect. He did not necessarily approve of vengeance, however, especially when he had been appointed as the avenging agent. Just like an inanimate thing again.

She used a sweet-smelling soap, something subtly but not overpoweringly floral. He could smell it in her hair. She was not slender, as her sister was and as Edwina was—and as Anna was. But her body was beautifully proportioned and voluptuously endowed. She was warm and nurturing and very feminine—despite the fact that on first acquaintance she had made him think of warrior Amazons, and despite the fact that she had just spoken to him in a voice of which an army sergeant might be proud.

They could not stand clasped thus together forever, he realized after a while, more was the pity. He sighed and moved his head as she raised her own, and they gazed at each other without speaking. She kept her femininity very well hidden most of the time, but her defenses were down at the moment. She was warm and yielding in his arms, and her eyes were smoky beneath slightly drooped eyelids.

He kissed her, openmouthed and needy, and tightened his hold on her again. He pressed his tongue to her closed lips and they parted to allow him to stroke the warm, moist flesh behind them. She shivered and opened her mouth and his tongue plunged into the heat within. He felt himself harden into the beginnings of arousal as his hands moved over her with a need that was somehow turning sexual. But . . . she was offering comfort because he was bewildered and suffering. How could be take advantage of that generosity of spirit? He could not, of course. Reluctantly he loosened his hold on her and took a step back.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “That was inappropriate. Forgive me, please. And I have not even invited you to sit down.”

“I am sorry too,” she said as she moved away from him to sit on the sofa. “I am sorry it has been so upsetting to you to have learned that your grandmother supported you but did not openly acknowledge you. It is the way the world works, though. It would have been stranger if she had made herself known to you. She had feelings for you despite everything, however, and she did do her best for you.”

“Much good her tender sensibilities did me,” he said. “And her best.”

“Well, they did.” She had herself firmly in hand again and looked like the stern, proper lady with whom he was more familiar. She sat with rigidly correct posture and a frown between her brows—she frowned rather often. “The orphanage is a good one. So, I assume, was the art school. You are a talented artist, but would you be doing as well as you are now if you had not gone there? She paid your fees. Could you have gone otherwise? Or would you have spent your life chopping meat at a butcher’s shop while your talent withered away undeveloped and unused? She could not show her affection openly. It is just not done in polite society for bastards to be openly acknowledged. And that is exactly what you are, Joel. Just as it is exactly what I am. Neither of us is to blame. It just is. Your grandmother did what she could regardless to see that you had all the necessities of life in a good home as you grew up and to help make your dream come true when you were old enough to leave.”

“All the necessities.” He stood with his hands at his back, looking down at her. He did not want to hear excuses for his grandmother. He wanted to feel angry and aggrieved, and he wanted someone to feel aggrieved for him. “Everything except love.”

“So, would you rather not know what you learned today?” she asked him, her expression stern. “Would you prefer to have gone through life not even sure that your name was rightfully your own? Do you wish you had not gone to that house today?”

He thought about it. “I suppose not,” he said grudgingly. “But what have I learned, Camille, beyond the very barest facts? My mother would never say who my father was. Cox-Phillips concluded he was the Italian painter solely on the evidence of my looks and the fact that I paint. I do not know anything about my mother and next to nothing about my grandmother. My great-uncle is the curmudgeon you said he used to be. I have no wish to know anything about his other three relatives, who are presumably mine too. And I do not imagine they would be delighted to know anything about their long-lost relative, an orphanage bastard, either.”

“Mr. Cox-Phillips invited you to call on him, then, just in order to tell you the truth about yourself before he dies?” she asked him.

He stared at her. Had he not told her? No, he supposed he had not. “He wanted to write me into his will this afternoon,” he said. “He wanted to leave me everything. Just to spite those other three. I said no, absolutely not. I was not going to have him use me in such a way.”

She stared back at him.

“I suppose I am glad to have learned something of my identity at last,” he said. “But my mother and grandmother are dead, and if my father is still living I have no way of tracing him. As for my mother’s uncle, he has apparently known for twenty-seven years where I am and has shown no interest in making himself known to me. I have done very well without him and can continue to do so for a week or two longer until he dies.”

“Oh, Joel.” She sighed and relaxed into a woman again. She leaned back on the sofa. “You are hurting very badly. And you are trying to harden yourself against the pain and even deny it is there. You will feel a great deal better if you admit it.”

“And this is a pearl of wisdom from someone who knows?” he said.

Color flooded her cheeks and he was immediately contrite. Was he now going to lash out at the very person he had sought out for comfort? She had given it with unstinting generosity. “Yes, that is exactly right,” she said. “It feels a bit shameful to be suffering, does it not? As though one must have done something to deserve it. Or as if one were admitting to some weakness of character at being unable to shake off the hurt. But hiding it can turn one to marble with nothing but hollowness inside—and an unacknowledged pain. Do you believe Mr. Cox-Phillips was exaggerating when he told you he had only a week or two left to live?”

“No,” he said. “It was clearly what his physician had told him and what he believed. And he looks far from well. He is eighty-five years old and looks a hundred. He is tired of living. He has outlasted everyone who has ever meant anything to him and probably everything too.”

“Did he try to persuade you not to leave?” she asked. “Did he ask you to visit again?”

“No to both questions,” he said. “He invited me out there purely on a rather malicious whim, Camille. I refused to play a part in his game when he had probably expected that I would leap at the chance of inheriting whatever fortune he has. That was the end of the matter. There was no grand sentiment on either side when he told me who I was. He did not clasp me to his bosom as his long-lost grand-nephew. But then, I was never lost, was I? Only unclaimed, unwanted baggage. He made not the smallest pretense of feeling for me any of the sentiment he claimed his sister felt. Yes, it was a bit upsetting to learn the truth about myself so abruptly and unexpectedly and dispassionately. I cannot deny it. My head and every emotion were in a whirl after I had left him. I know I wandered the streets here for hours, though I would not be able to tell you exactly where I went. When I burst in upon you, I behaved like a madman and dragged you here when it was probably the last thing you wanted to do after a day of teaching. But you are wrong when you say I am still hurting. I am not, and I have you to thank for that. You have been kindness itself. I will not keep you any longer, though. I will walk you back home.”

“Joel, you are speaking absolute nonsense.” The grim schoolmistress had returned to confront him from the sofa. “You are going to have to go back. You must realize that.”

“Back?” he said. “Up there? To Cox-Phillips’s, do you mean? Absolutely not. For what purpose? I have nothing more to say to him and I am of no further use as far as he is concerned. He will have to find someone else to whom to leave his money if he really hates his relatives so much. That is his concern, not mine. Let me walk you home.” Edgar and Marvin would be back from work soon and it might be more difficult then to smuggle her out unseen.

She did not move, and now she was the Amazon as well as the schoolmistress. She really was a disconcerting female. “He is your last surviving link with your mother,” she said. “While he is alive he can tell you more, but it does not sound as if he will be alive for long. Did he tell you her name?”

He looked at her with open hostility before turning away to stare out through the window. She was not going to let this thing go, was she? He might have known it. “Cunningham,” he said.

He heard her cluck her tongue. “Her first name,” she said.

“What does it matter?” he asked her. “A boy does not call his mother by her first name anyway.”

“But he knows it,” she said. “And you have never called her anything else either, have you? There was never anyone to call Mama.”

No. He was surprised by the shaft of pain that knifed through him. There never had been. Perhaps that was one of the worst things about growing up an orphan. There was no Mama—or Papa either. And by God, there was going to be no self-pity. No more of it, anyway. Already, after a few hours of wallowing in it, he was sick of it.

“Was she dark haired and dark eyed like you?” she asked. “Or was she blond and blue eyed, perhaps? Or—”

“If she had had dark coloring,” he said, “Cox-Phillips would not have been so sure that it was the Italian who fathered me.”

“What was his name?” she asked.

“Something long and unpronounceable that ended in vowels,” he said. “He does not remember it. He probably never tried to learn it. To a man like Cox-Phillips all foreigners are inferior beings to be despised.”

“Did your mother see you before she died?” she asked. “Was she the one who named you Joel? Why that particular name?”

He turned on her, angry now, even though he owed her everything but anger. “Do you imagine,” he asked her, “that that crusty old man in his mansion up on the hill would know the answers to such questions? Do you imagine he cares? Do you imagine I care?”

“Yes to the last question,” she said. “I think you do care or that you will care—perhaps when it is too late to get any answers at all. Just a couple of weeks ago I believe I would have said that nothing could be worse than what had happened to me—and to Abigail and Harry. But something could, I realize now. If our mother had known early on that she was not legally married, she might have left my father, and it is altogether possible we might have ended up at an orphanage, perhaps even three separate ones, and been told nothing about ourselves except our names. Perhaps not even those. Our father was not a good man. I understand now that he was incapable of loving me no matter how hard I tried. He loved only himself. But at least I know who he was. I knew and I know my mother and my brother and sister. I know who I am. I do not yet know who I will become because my circumstances have changed so drastically, but I know where I came from, and I think I realize now fully for the first time how important that is.” She paused. “I am sorry your suffering has made this clear to me.”

He gazed at her for a few moments, realizing that she had just come to a sort of epiphany of her own. She was all haughty aristocrat and stern schoolmistress and stubborn Amazon and . . . Camille. He went striding off without a word to his studio, where he grabbed a sketchbook and a piece of charcoal and went back into the living room to sit on the chair from which he had risen a few minutes ago. Without looking at her he drew the swift, rough outline of a woman with slightly untidy hair and a look of passionate intensity on her face. It was what he thought of as the Camille part of her.

“Is this always your answer to something you do not wish to talk about?” she asked. “Is this your escape from reality?”

He kept on sketching for a while. “Perhaps,” he said, “it is my way of marshaling my thoughts. Perhaps it is my escape into reality. Or perhaps it is my way of filling in time until you allow me to walk you home.”

“You think you want to be rid of me,” she said, seemingly uncowed by the petty insult. “But it is your own troubling thoughts of which you want to be rid. You know you will forever regret it if you do not go back.”

“Do you realize how incredibly fascinating you are, Camille?” he asked. And how irritating?

“Nonsense,” she said. “I have never cultivated either beauty or charm, much less womanly wiles. I have cultivated only the will to do what I believe to be right in all circumstances.”

He glanced up at her and smiled. She was looking prunish. “You will realize your own fascination,” he said, “after I have painted you.”

“Then your painting will be worthless,” she told him. “I thought you refused to flatter your subjects. Why would you make an exception of me?”

He continued looking at her for a few moments so that he would get her eyebrows right. They would look rather too heavy on most women, but they were actually just right with her dark hair and strong features. He had not noticed that before. Strangely, he was not always an observant person when he looked merely with his eyes. He often did not see people clearly unless and until he started to sketch and paint them and draw upon what his intuition had sensed about them.

“You of all people will not be painted with flattery,” he assured her before looking back down at his sketch. “You will be painted as who you are when all the poses and defenses and masks have been stripped away.”

But would he ever know her completely? Or understand her fully? One never did, did one? One never knew even oneself to the deepest depths. How could one be expected to know another human being, then? It was an uncomfortable realization when he prided himself upon understanding the subjects of his portraits.

“I am horribly alarmed,” she told him curtly without looking alarmed at all. “You are very adroit at changing a subject.”

“Was there one to change?” he asked, smiling at her again.

“You have to go back,” she said. “You have to talk to Mr. Cox-Phillips and find out all you can about yourself. You will forever regret it if you do not. It is true that your grandmother treated you badly, Joel, but it is equally true that she treated you very well. It is all a matter of perspective. You must find out more so that you can understand better. You must find out all you can about your mother. Had she lived, everything might have been different. Perhaps she is someone you need to love even though you will never know her in person. At least you can find out all you can.”

“Sentimental drivel,” he said. “He would conclude I had changed my mind about being in his will and had come crawling back there to ingratiate myself with him. He would assume avarice had caught up with me.”

“Then tell him he is wrong,” she said. “You must go. I shall go with you.”

Joel set aside his sketch pad—he could not get her stubborn chin right anyway without making her look like a caricature—and leaned back in the chair. He crossed his arms over his chest and rested one booted ankle across the other knee. He ought to have gone to Edwina. Or to Miss Ford. Or come back here to brood alone. His first impression of Miss Camille Westcott had been the right one. She was overbearing and obnoxious.

“To hold my hand, I suppose,” he said. “To prod me forward with a sharp finger at my back. To prompt me with the questions I need to ask. To scold the old man if he makes me cry.”

Her lips virtually disappeared. She sat up straight and was doing the perfect-posture thing again. Her spine presumably did not need the support of the back of the sofa. It was made of steel.

“I thought to offer moral support,” she said. “You clearly do not need it. Just as I do not need your escort back to the orphanage, Mr. Cunningham. I daresay I will not be accosted more than four or five times as I walk alone, and doubtless my screams will bring gentlemen running to my rescue. You will do as you please with regards to Mr. Cox-Phillips. I have learned that you are stubborn to a fault. It does not matter to me the snap of my fingers what you do.”

She got to her feet and Joel jumped to his. He was between her and the hallway, so she stood where she was, holding his gaze, her jaw like granite. The Amazon in a belligerent mood. If she had had a spear in her hand . . .

“I made some soup yesterday,” he said. “I ate some last night and did not poison myself. Let me warm it up. I bought some bread at the bakery early this morning too. Stay and eat with me.”

“To hold your hand?” she asked.

“I need one hand to hold the bowl and the other to spoon up the soup,” he told her. “I apologize for what I said. You have been remarkably kind in coming here and listening to my ravings. Alas, I have repaid your goodness with bad temper. Stay? Please?”

It had been a purely impulsive invitation. Whatever would they talk about if she agreed? And what were the chances that Edgar or Marvin would knock on his door for some reason or other? Or that one or both of them would see or hear her leave later? But he did not want to be alone yet.

What if the soup had thickened to such a degree that it would need to be chiseled with a sharp-edged knife? He was not the world’s best cook.

“What kind of soup?” she asked.