Someone to Hold

Something had happened to her on Tuesday. She would not go so far as to say she had fallen in love. She did not believe in such a thing. But she had gone to his rooms of her own free will, and she had listened to him and moved into his arms to comfort him. And she had kissed him. Yes, she had. It had been an active thing on her part, not just something she had allowed. And she had felt his man’s hard body and his arms and his lips and mouth and tongue, and she had been . . . Yes, she had. There was no point in denying it. She had been disappointed when he had stopped abruptly and apologized. She would have liked to explore the experience a little more deeply.

She was not in love, but she had felt more like a woman since Tuesday. Which begged the question—what had she felt like before? He was extremely good-looking, she had decided, and powerfully attractive, whatever that meant, and she had responded to him as a woman. She still did, though she was puzzled too. She had neither the language nor the experience to explain to herself just what she meant. Perhaps it was merely that she cared.

It had been the middle of the evening and growing dusk by the time she returned home, and he had insisted upon accompanying her. The soup, thick with vegetables and a little beef, had been very good, the bread crisp and fresh. After eating they had taken their tea back into the living room, where they had talked and talked until the fading light beyond the window had caught their attention. He had been sketching her much of the time, though he had not shown her anything.

Afterward she had not even remembered everything they had talked about. She did know they had spoken of their childhoods, of books they had both read, of Sarah, with whom Camille spent some time each day. He had told her of his love for landscape painting, even though he believed his real talent was for painting portraits, and she had watched his face as he spoke of gazing at a scene, not sketching it as he would with a human subject, but somehow becoming a part of it until he felt it from the inside and could finally paint it. Painting for him, she had realized then, was neither a hobby nor just a way of earning a living. It was a passion and a compulsion. In a certain sense it was who he was. She envied him. She had never been passionate about anything in her life. She had never allowed herself to be. She had deliberately shunned any excess of feeling as ungenteel. It was almost as though she had feared passion and where it might lead her.

He did not like life to be too easy, Camille concluded. He liked the challenge of living it and pushing its boundaries instead of just existing and surviving. Perhaps that was one reason why he had not shown the smallest interest in the fortune he might have inherited from his great-uncle. Money would make his life a great deal easier—money always did—but he was not interested. How many people would voluntarily refuse a fortune, and have absolutely no hesitation about doing it?

Her own question arrested her. She would and had indeed done so. Anna had offered a quarter of all their father had left her, a vast fortune, and Camille had refused.

The carriage left Bath and struggled up the hill beyond. She turned her head toward Joel. “I had a letter this morning,” she told him. “Well, two actually, but Abby writes every day.”

“Yes, she told me that just this morning. I was there, working on her portrait,” he said, turning away from the window to look back at her. “It is astonishing. Whatever does she find to write about? Do you reply?”

“Ladies are brought up to write letters,” she told him. “She tells me everything about her day. Today her letter was full of her session with you yesterday, among other things. And yes, I answer. Of course I do. She is my sister. I write every evening and tell her about my day.”

“And tomorrow,” he said, “your letter will be full of this journey with me?”

“Yes,” she said, “and of the progress of the purple rope and of the noticeable improvement in Caroline’s reading skills and of the ten minutes I was able to spend with Sarah before luncheon, counting her toes and kissing each of them in turn and drawing two whole smiles from her.”

He gazed at her to the point of discomfort. Not that the carriage ride was comfortable even without that gaze. She would not be surprised if it jarred all her teeth loose.

“You had two letters today?” he finally asked.

“The other one was from my mother,” she told him. “She wrote directly to me at the school. She has only ever written to both Abby and me in the past, but Abby had told her I was living at the orphanage. She is concerned about me. But she did not write to scold me or tell me how foolish I have been or how unkind to Abby and Grandmama. She understands and she honors my decision.”

Camille had been surprised about that and more than a little touched. She had not expected it—or the letter. She had not even wanted a letter of her very own from her mother—until she had seen it. And ever since reading it she had felt, oh, a jumble of emotions. Resentment was still one of them. Mama had gone away to the comfort of Uncle Michael, but also away from her own daughters.

“Why did she not stay here with you and her mother?” Joel asked.

“It was at least partly for our sakes,” she told him. “She thought life here would be intolerable for us, or more so than it was going to be anyway, if everywhere we went we had to be introduced as the daughters of Miss Viola Kingsley.”

“Everywhere you went,” he said. “But you did not go anywhere, did you? You were a recluse until you went to the orphanage to teach.”

“How do you know that?” she asked, frowning at him.