Three

On Wednesday of the following week, Joel approached the school with lagging footsteps—like a reluctant schoolboy, he thought in disgust. The new teacher would be there—Anna’s starchy, haughty half sister. He really did not look forward to sharing the schoolroom with her. Any hope that either she or Miss Ford had changed her mind since last week, though, was banished as soon as he opened the schoolroom door and found that she and the children were already in there, though it was surely not yet quite the end of the luncheon hour. He came to an abrupt halt on the threshold, his hand still grasping the doorknob. What the devil?

The easels for his class had already been set up with chairs pushed neatly in front of them. The art supplies were arranged in orderly fashion on the table. The easels took up a good two-thirds of the room. In the other third, the desks had been arranged in two lines and pushed together, nose to nose, to make one long table, which was strewn with a great tumble of . . . stuff. The children were clustered about it, looking flushed and animated and slightly untidy. Miss Westcott—was it really she?—was in their midst, issuing orders like an army sergeant, pointing with a wooden ruler from the stuff to various children and back again. All the pupils seemed to be jumping to her commands like eager recruits, even the older ones, who often liked to behave as though life was just too much of a bore to be bothered with. Two five-year-olds were bouncing up and down with uncontained exuberance.

She was wearing a severe brown dress, which was high to the neck and had long sleeves, though they were currently pushed up to her elbows. Her hair had been dressed with a severity to match the dress, but it had suffered disruption in the course of the day, and one lock hung down unheeded over her neck while other escapees appeared to have been shoved haphazardly back into her bun. Her cheeks and even her nose were a bit on the rosy and shiny side. There was a frown between her brows and her lips were set in a thin line when she was not issuing orders.

She looked up and caught sight of him.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, as though she were issuing a challenge. “I trust everything has been set up to your liking. Children, those budding artists among you may proceed to your class.”

And his group, a few of whose members, he suspected, had opted for painting lessons merely to avoid whatever academic alternative the other side of the room was likely to offer, came meekly enough but surely without their usual enthusiasm.

“We went to the market this morning, Mr. Cunningham,” Winifred Hamlin told him, “and looked at all the wares on all the stalls and we wrote down prices.”

“But it was not as easy as it sounds, sir,” Mary Perkins said, cutting in, “because some things are so much each, and other things are so much an ounce or a pound or half pound, and some things are so much a dozen or half dozen. We had to look carefully to see what the prices meant.”

“The sweets lady gave us a toffee each,” Jimmy Dale added, his voice high pitched with excitement.

Tommy Yarrow cut in. “And she wouldn’t let Miss Westcott pay for them.”

Mary giggled. “Miss Westcott said we had better promise to eat our luncheon when we got back here or she would be in trouble with Cook,” she said.

“One lady give us some ribbon that was a bit frayed,” Richard said, “and a man give us some beads that was cracked. Another lady wanted to give us a rotten cabbage, but Miss Westcott said thank you but no, thank you—because we must always be polite no matter what. The cobbler give us some bits of shoe leather he couldn’t use. Miss Westcott brought some things from her house, and Nurse has let us have some pins and other stuff from her supplies that are a bit too old to use, and Cook give us some bent spoons and forks that she keeps for a rainy day.”

“But she wants them back, Richard,” Winifred reminded him.

“The verb give becomes gave in the past tense, Richard,” Miss Westcott said severely from the other side of the room. “And some beads were cracked—plural.”

“We are going to play shop tomorrow,” Olga screeched above the general clamor.

Joel held up both hands, palms out, but to no avail.

“We are to take turns being shopkeeper,” Winifred said, “two at a time. Everyone else will be a shopper with a list. And the shopkeepers will bring everything on the list and add up the total cost, and the shopper will have to work it out too to see if the two sums agree. And—”

“And the little ones who don’t know their sums well yet will be paired with older ones who do,” Mary added.

“Right,” Joel said firmly. “It sounds as though the vendors at the market will need a quiet afternoon to recover from your visit. And you will need a quiet afternoon if you are not to murder my ears and your teacher’s and if you are to get anything done that will astonish the art world with its brilliance. Sit down and we will discuss what you are going to paint today.”

His eyes met Miss Westcott’s as the children settled and a measure of peace and order descended upon the room. She looked thin lipped and belligerent, as though she were daring him to complain about the triviality of the morning’s outing and the organized chaos of the schoolroom. But the thing was that it was organized. There was no question that she was in control of the children, excited as they were. And it struck him, reluctant as he was to admit it, that she had hit upon a brilliant way to conduct a mathematics lesson and a life lesson at the same time. The children thought it was all a game.

He had hoped so much for her to fail early and hard. That was nasty of him now that he came to think about it. And he knew suddenly of what she had been reminding him since last week. An Amazon. A woman warrior, devoid of any soft femininity. And, having thought of that unflattering comparison and convinced himself that it was quite apt, he felt better and turned his mind to his lesson.

Two hours passed, during which he was more or less absorbed in the artistic efforts of his pupils as they took on an imaginative project—the landscape or home of their dreams—after first discussing some possibilities. Reality did not have to prevail, he had assured them. If the grass in their dream landscape was pink, then so be it. He helped a few of them clarify their mental images and helped others mix the color or shade they wanted but could not produce for themselves. Inevitably, the grass outside Winifred’s square box of a gray house was pink—the only concession she appeared to have made to the imagination. He taught Paul how to use brushstrokes to produce rough, cold water rather than the traditional smooth blue on the lake before his onion-shaped mansion.

And he noticed that tomorrow’s shop organized itself on the desktops at the other side of the room and acquired cards in everyone’s boldest and best handwriting announcing prices and the number or quantity of each item that price would buy. He noticed that the “cash” box acquired square cardboard “coins” upon which the value was written large—and neat. Tomorrow, Miss Westcott explained as though she were addressing a recalcitrant regiment, all the shoppers would be issued with a set amount of cardboard money to spend, and the rest of the coins would be left in the cash box so that the shopkeepers could give change. No one would be allowed to spend more money than he or she had. If they had bought too much, they would have to decide what to relinquish.

Joel wondered if any of his group wished they were minting square coins rather than painting their dreams, though none of them complained, and there was no discernible lack of concentration. On the whole their efforts showed greater artistry than usual.

He followed the painting session with the usual discussion after they had looked at one another’s work. Then he supervised as they cleared up. It rather annoyed him that he watched more carefully than usual to make sure they returned the supplies only to the bottom two shelves of the storage cupboard and arranged them there in a neat, orderly fashion. Anna had forever scolded him for encouraging slovenliness in his pupils and for encroaching upon her shelves, and he had forever defended himself for the pleasure of annoying her further by talking of artistic liberty.

As soon as he had dismissed his group, they wandered over to the other third of the room, he noticed, instead of darting out to freedom as they would normally have done. By that time Miss Westcott had all the children sitting in a circle on the floor about her chair, cross-legged except for Monica, whose legs would not cross and lie flat like everyone else’s but remained annoyingly elevated with knees up about her ears while she fought against losing her balance and being tipped backward to the floor. She was sitting on her heels at Miss Westcott’s suggestion—Miss Nunce had insisted, without any success, that Monica persist in the cross-legged stance until she stopped being stubborn and did it properly. Miss Westcott had taken a book from the new bookcase and was reading from it in a strident voice that nevertheless seemed to have captured the attention of her audience.

Joel slipped out unnoticed. There was something he needed to do.

*   *   *

After three days in the schoolroom, Camille had come to the conclusion that she was the world’s worst teacher.

She looked about the now-empty room with a grimace, ignoring the ingrained inner voice of her education, which warned that wrinkles would be the dire and inevitable result of frowns and grimaces and overbright smiles. That inner voice, which for so long had been her daily guide to genteel behavior, now annoyed her considerably. She would frown if she wanted to.

When she had arrived on Monday morning, the schoolroom had been neat and orderly, with straight rows of desks, a bare teacher’s desk, neatly aligned books in the bookcase Grandmama had donated, easels stacked neatly at the far side of the room next to the window, and supplies arranged with almost military precision on the five deep, wide shelves of the storage cupboard. Yet now . . .

And there were no servants here to run about after her, picking up what she dropped, straightening what she had not bothered to tidy for herself. She was it. Actually, on this particular occasion, she and that man were it, but he had gone merrily on his way as soon as he had dismissed his class, leaving the easels where she had set them earlier out of the goodness of her heart. He had not even uttered any word of farewell. She almost wished he had not cleared away everything except the paintings and the easels. Then she would have had even more to complain of and might have thought the absolute worst of him, as he no doubt was thinking of her.

She had hated having him here, listening to everything she said, a witness to the chaos of the afternoon, to the untidiness, the lack of discipline, her appearance . . .

Her appearance.

Camille looked down at herself and would have grimaced again if she had not still been doing it. She had worn the most conservative of her dresses, as she had yesterday and Monday, but . . . her sleeves were still pushed up in a most unladylike fashion. She rolled them down to her wrists a few hours too late. The wrinkles from elbows to wrists might never iron out. And what on earth must her hair look like? The bun she had so ruthlessly fashioned this morning had been disintegrating ever since, and she had been impatiently shoving escaped strands of hair into it. She felt it now with both hands and realized that it must resemble a bundle of hay after a hurricane had blown across the field. And how long had that one strand been dangling down her neck?

And why did she care? He was only a man, after all, and recent experience had taught her that men were sorry, despicable creatures at best. He was also a rather shabby man—that coat and those boots! She did not care a fig what such a man thought of her. Or any man. She felt aggrieved, though, that he had left her alone to deal with the paintings and to put away the easels, though the disorder he had left behind was nothing compared to what she had created in her third of the room. The desktops were covered with . . . things ready for tomorrow’s shop.

She had conceived the idea with the hope that the children would learn something practical they could apply to their future lives after they had left here and must provide for their own needs on what would probably be very little income—unless by some miracle they should discover themselves to be heirs or heiresses to a vast fortune, as their former teacher had done. Since that was as unlikely as their being hit by a shooting star, they needed to learn something about prices and quantities and choices and making money stretch. They needed to learn the difference between necessities and luxuries. They needed—

Oh dear, and she needed to learn it all too. She had been terrified and astonished at the market this morning. She had learned on her feet, only one step ahead of the children—in more ways than one. Tomorrow . . . Oh, she dreaded to think of tomorrow. Just look at all this mess. Perhaps she would not even come back tomorrow. Perhaps she would remain at Grandmama’s for the rest of her natural life, buried beneath the covers of her bed.

But it was a thought unworthy of her new self. She squared her shoulders and strode over to the art side of the room to stand gazing at one of the paintings. This was where Paul Hubbard had been sitting. Paul’s dream house, it seemed, was a purple onion overlooking a stormy lake with slate-gray water and whitecaps—it made Camille shiver. The landscape about it was bleak and gray, though the windows of the onion were bright with color and light and—surely—warmth. How had he created that impression? There was a strange sun or moon hanging in the black sky. Or was it a sun or moon? It was a colored orb, startlingly different from the landscape below, just as the windows and presumably the interior of the onion house were. It was . . . Was it by any chance meant to be Earth? Wherever were the onion and the stormy lake, then? She was frowning over the rather surreal painting and its meaning when the door opened abruptly behind her.

Mr. Cunningham had come back, clutching a bulging paper bag in one hand. Camille found herself wishing she had spent her time doing something about her hair and despised herself for thinking of her appearance before all else. He looked windblown and out of breath and . . . virile. What a horrid, shocking word. Where had that thought come from?

He held the bag aloft. “For your shop,” he said. “I would suggest a ha’penny each but not three for a penny or fifteen for sixpence. I would limit each shopper to one item. Give them a brief lesson on scarcity and on supply and demand and anything else that seems appropriate. Nutrition, perhaps. If one shopper were to buy the lot, he—or she—would probably be spending the afternoon groaning in Nurse’s room and being dosed with the unspeakable concoction she keeps on hand for stomach ailments.”

Camille eyed the bag suspiciously, walked toward him, and took it. It contained brightly colored boiled sweets, one each for the children, she guessed.

“Who paid for these?” she asked. She could not have sounded less gracious if she had tried.

He grinned at her—and of course he had perfect teeth, which happened also to be white. Oh goodness, she thought crossly, she was going to have to revise her opinion of him and admit that Abby had been right in thinking him handsome.

“I swear they were not pinched,” he said, raising his right hand, palm out, as though taking an oath. “A constable will not come bursting in here in the next couple of minutes to haul me off to jail and you too for being in possession of stolen goods.”

“Every child will of course use one precious ha’penny to buy one of these tomorrow,” she said, still cross. “How am I to teach them that the little money they have ought to be spent upon necessities?”

“Beads and ribbons and shoe leather?” He raised his eyebrows.

“Beans and carrots and beef,” she said. “You are not the only one who teaches them to use their imagination, Mr. Cunningham.”

“But how dull a life it would be,” he said, “if there were never the occasional luxury or treat or extravagance.”

“That is easy for you to say,” she said. “You are a fashionable portrait painter, I have heard. You probably have pots of money and come from a moneyed background.” Despite his shabby appearance. She had heard all about eccentric artists. “As do I. But I at least am trying to behave responsibly toward these children, who have nothing, not even, in many cases, an identity.”

She turned rather jerkily to make space for the sweets on the desktops and found a square of paper upon which to write the price as well as the information that shoppers were limited to the purchase of one item apiece. She thought he had gone away until he spoke again and she realized that he was perched on one corner of the teacher’s desk close by, one booted foot braced on the floor while the other swung idly. His arms were crossed over his chest.

“This was my home,” he said quietly, “and the people here are my family. I grew up here, Miss Westcott, after being dropped off as a baby like so much unwanted rubbish. I have a name, which may or may not be my father’s or my mother’s. I had a decent upbringing here and never lacked for the necessities of life or for companionship and even affection. I was supported until I was fifteen by an anonymous benefactor, as most of the children here are. I left then, after employment and accommodation had been found for me. I also went to art school, since my benefactor was generous enough to pay the fees. The door here was not locked against me. Quite the contrary, in fact. But to all intents and purposes I was on my own to make my own way in life—with the full knowledge that though I will always call this place my home and the people here my family, in reality I am without home or family.

“We orphans, Miss Westcott, know all about necessities and the fine line between surviving and starving. We are not likely to spend the little money we can earn upon nothing but ribbons and beads and sweets. But we know too the value, the necessity of the occasional treat. We know that life is not all or always gray, that there is color too. And we know that we are as much entitled to some color in our lives as the wealthiest of the more privileged elements of society. We are people. Persons.”

Camille set the card down against the bag of sweets. “You are angry,” she said unnecessarily. And now she felt foolish. But she had had no way of knowing, had she? And she felt accused, despised, as though she had been looking down upon these children as inferiors and of no account. She had been trying to do just the opposite. She might have been one of them, instead of Anastasia.

“Yes,” he said.

“I am not one of the wealthy and privileged,” she told him.

“Neither,” he said, “are you an orphan, Miss Westcott.”

No. Only a bastard. She almost said it aloud. But he probably was one too. So surely were most of the children here—the offspring of two people who had not been married to each other. Why else would most of them have been brought here and supported in secret? He was telling her she could never understand. And perhaps he was right.

“You knew Anastasia not just as a fellow teacher, then,” she said.

“We grew up together,” he told her.

Somehow his words depressed her and made her feel even more of an outsider. But an outsider to what? “You were friends?”

“The best,” he said. She had the feeling he was going to say more, but he did not continue.

She turned to look at him and thought unexpectedly of how different he was from Viscount Uxbury, to whom she would have been married by now if her father had not died when he had. Lord Uxbury was undeniably handsome, immaculately groomed, dignified, the epitome of gentility. No one would ever catch him perching on the edge of a desk, one foot swinging, his arms crossed, hands tucked under his armpits. No one would catch him with boots in which he could not see his own reflection. And no one would catch him with closely cropped hair that had not been styled in the newest fashion. It was strange, given the fact of his looks, that she had never really thought of Lord Uxbury as a man, only as the ideal husband for a lady of her rank and fortune. He had never kissed her, nor had she expected him to. She had never thought of the marriage bed except in the vaguest of ways as a duty that would be fulfilled when the time came. Yet she had thought of him as perfection itself, her perfect mate.

She looked at Mr. Cunningham’s firm lips and chin and found herself thinking about kisses. Specifically his kisses. It was really quite alarming. His appearance offended her, yet it was perhaps the very absence of the veneer of gentility that made her so aware of his maleness. She was offended by that too, for there was something raw about it. A gentleman ought not to make a lady aware of his masculinity.

He was not a gentleman, though, was he? And she was not a lady. She looked into his eyes and found them gazing directly back into her own. They were very dark eyes, as were his eyebrows and his hair. Even his complexion had a slightly olive hue, suggestive of some foreign blood in his ancestry. Italian? Spanish? Greek? Mediterranean men were said to be passionate, were they not? And wherever had she heard such a shocking thing?

Passion was vulgar.

He had known Anastasia, had grown up here with her, had been her friend—her best friend. He had taught in this schoolroom with her. Had he perhaps loved her? How had he felt when she went away, when the great dream had become reality for her while he had remained behind—with the full knowledge that though I will always call this place home and the people here my family, in reality I am without home or family.

It disturbed her that he might have loved Anastasia. It almost hurt her. It reminded her of her own terrible loss.

“Why are you here?” he asked abruptly, breaking a rather lengthy silence. He sounded as though he was feeling offended about something too.

“Here at the orphanage school, do you mean?” she asked. He did not answer and she shrugged. “Why not here? I live in Bath with my grandmother, and I must do something. An idle existence is no longer appropriate to my station. And the salary, though a mere pittance, is at least all mine.”

Her grandmother, true to her word, had insisted upon issuing a generous monthly allowance to both her and Abigail. It was larger than their father had given them. Camille had stuffed the money for this month into a little cubbyhole in the escritoire in her room, where she was determined it would remain. She had not accepted the quarter of a fortune Anastasia had offered, and she would not use what her grandmother gave, though of course she was accepting Grandmama’s hospitality every day she stayed at the house in the Royal Crescent. She did not know quite why she would not accept the money, just as she did not quite know why she had come here as soon as she heard of an opening at the school. But at least the salary she earned by her own efforts would give her some money to spend.

It would give her some self-respect too, some sense of being in charge of her own life.

“If you object to my being here,” she said, “you ought to have spoken up after I left last week. Perhaps Miss Ford would have written to cancel our agreement to a two-week trial.”

He had been examining the boot on his swinging foot, perhaps noticing how disgracefully worn it was. But his eyes came snapping back to hers at her words.

“Why would I have an objection?” he asked her.

“Perhaps because I am not Anna Snow,” she said.

She did not know where those words had come from. She was not . . . jealous, was she? How absurd. But the words had a noticeable effect. His foot was suddenly still, and they gazed steadily at each other for several uncomfortable moments.

“Do you hate her?” he asked.

“Do you love her?”

His eyes turned hard. “I could tell you to mind your own business,” he said. “Instead, I will remind you that she is married and that it would be wrong of me to covet another man’s wife.”

But he had not denied it, she noticed.

“She married Avery, yes.” She watched him closely. “Does her choice of husband rankle? He is so very . . . elegant. Almost effete. And oh so indolent.” And somehow a bit dangerous, though she had never quite understood that impression she had always had of him. “And very rich. Have you met him?”

“Yes,” he said. “I dined with them at the Royal York Hotel when they came through Bath shortly after their marriage. I believe Anna is happy. I believe the Duke of Netherby is too. Did you come here specifically to teach rather than to another school because of Anna? Out of curiosity perhaps to discover something about the sister you did not know you had until recently?”

“Half sister,” she said. “I could tell you to mind your own business. Instead I will say that if I were curious about her, I would speak with her.”

He got abruptly to his feet, crossed the room to remove the paintings from the easels and stand them against the wall, and began to fold and put away the easels while Camille watched him.

“But you have not done so, have you?” he said after a minute or two of more silence.

How did he know that? Did they communicate, he and Anastasia? Or had she told him when she was in Bath with Avery? “She is a duchess,” she said, “and I am nobody. It would not be appropriate for me to speak with her.” Her words sounded ridiculous as soon as she had spoken them, but they could not be recalled.

He set one folded easel against another and turned his head to look at her over his shoulder. “Self-pity is not an attractive trait, Miss Westcott,” he said.

“Self-pity?” She lifted her chin and glared back at him. “I thought it was a case of facing reality, Mr. Cunningham.”

“Then you thought wrong,” he said. “It is self-pity, pure and simple. Anna would have opened her arms—would still do so—to welcome you as a sister, and never mind the half relationship. She would share her fortune with you and your brother and sister with the greatest gladness. But you would not condescend to have any dealings with someone who grew up in an orphanage, would you? And you would not be condescended to either. You would rather starve. Yet you seem to feel this need to step into her shoes to discover whether they will fit or pinch your toes.”

She glared at him in shock and dislike, nostrils flared. “You presume to know a great deal about me, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, “and about my dealings with Anastasia— or lack of dealings. She has obviously been remarkably loose-lipped.” It was mortifying, to say the least, that he knew so much.

“I am her family,” he said. He grabbed another easel and folded it none too gently. “Family members confide in one another, especially when they are hurt or rejected by those to whom they have reached out in friendship. But I apologize for poking my nose in where it does not belong. You have every right to be annoyed. I will finish putting things away here. You must be wishing to be on your way home.”

She was sorry he had apologized. The hurt remained and she did not want to forgive. Self-pity is not an attractive trait.

“What makes you think, Mr. Cunningham,” she said to his back, “that I want to be attractive to you?”

He paused, the easel still in his hands, and turned his head again. At first he looked blank, and then he grinned slowly and something uncomfortable happened to her knees.

“I am quite sure it is the very last thing you wish to be,” he said.

Or can be, his words seemed to imply. But he was perfectly correct. She did not want to be attractive to any man. The very idea! Least of all did she want to attract the art teacher with his slovenly appearance and wicked, insolent grin and his dark, bold eyes, which seemed to see through to the back of her skull and the depths of her soul. He somehow represented chaos, and her life had always been characterized by order.

And where had that got her, pray?

She turned, drew on her bonnet and gloves, took up her reticule, and cast one last despairing look at the mess she was leaving behind in the form of a pretend shop. He did not rush to open the door for her—but why should he? When she had opened it herself and was passing through it, however, his voice detained her.

“For what it is worth,” he said, “I believe it was maybe a fortunate day for the children when you decided to come here, Miss Westcott. You are a gifted teacher. Your ideas for today and tomorrow are little short of brilliant. They teach a number of skills at a number of levels, yet the children believe they are having nothing but fun.”

Camille did not look back. She did not thank him either—she was not even sure for a moment that he was not making fun of her. She closed the door quietly behind her and set off on the long, steep trek up to her grandmother’s house. She felt a bit like weeping. But there were so many possible causes of such a strange feeling—she never wept, just as she never fainted—that she merely shrugged the whole thing off, pressed her lips together, and lengthened her stride.

She just hoped the predominant cause of the tears she was holding back was not self-pity. How dared he accuse her of that—just when she had stepped out of her misery to do something?

Had he loved Anastasia? Did he still?

It was absolutely none of her business. Or of any interest to her.

The very idea.

And so she thought of little else all the way home.