Someone to Hold

“It is not just that the painting is of my mother,” he said. “It is also that it was painted by my father. Or by the man who was supposedly my father.”

“They must have been in company together a good deal when he was painting her portrait,” she said. “She would have been gazing at him and he at her for hours on end. It is perfectly understandable that they fell in love.”

“He did not love her, though, did he?” he said, and closed his eyes for a few moments. “There is no point in trying to romanticize what happened between them. He ran away as soon as he learned their affair had had consequences—me. I am not the product of a grand passion between ill-fated lovers who died of broken hearts after being plucked asunder. It was all far more mundane. Lust pure and simple, I would guess. And cowardice.”

“You do not know all the facts,” she said.

“No, I do not,” he admitted. Would he know better when he saw the painting? Would he sense whether there had been love—in the eyes of his mother, in the brushstrokes of his father? Probably not. What had happened between those two had died with them, and that was the way it ought to be. Perhaps. Except that he was left to wonder. “I do know something about the son they produced, however. I would never abandon a woman I had impregnated. Or our child.”

They traveled the rest of the way in silence, their hands still joined, their shoulders touching as the carriage swayed and bounced over the road. When they arrived back at the orphanage, he opened the door and jumped down to the pavement before turning to help her alight.

“Thank you for coming,” he said again.

“Go back again,” she told him, but she did not offer to accompany him this time or press the point. She hurried inside and closed the door.

* * *

After school one day earlier in the week, when the children were all outside playing or otherwise occupied elsewhere and the playroom was empty, Camille had sat down at the old neglected pianoforte, which had been pushed off into one corner, and played softly to herself. She had never been more than a tolerably skilled musician, but playing the pianoforte was a necessary accomplishment for a properly brought-up young lady and she had persevered. She had been missing playing as well as embroidering and watercolor painting—all strictly according to the rules set down by her governess. Sometimes she wished she could go back and relive her girlhood with more of a questioning, even rebellious spirit, but it could not be done. Going back was never possible, and there was no point in wallowing in regrets for what might have been.

When she had looked up from the pianoforte after a few minutes, it was to the discovery that three children had crept into the room unnoticed and were standing perfectly still, watching her. They would go about their play soon enough, she had thought after smiling vaguely at them and turning her attention to another remembered piece, but after that there were two more children watching her, as well as the original three and one of the housemothers. The next time she looked up, she was forced to the startled conclusion that there must surely not be a child left in the garden or any other part of the building. The playroom was as full as she had ever seen it.

She had switched to playing some folk songs that everyone knew—everyone in her old world, anyway, but apparently not in the new. She had picked out a few of the simplest tunes and taught the melody and the words of the first verses. The girls had soon been singing along with her while the boys looked warily at one another and held their peace while at the same time holding their ground.

Music in the form of folk songs and simple hymns and a few rounds had become a part of the school curriculum from that day, and Camille had soon been scheming for a way to bring in the boys. She had done it by brushing up on her knowledge of sailors’ working chants and explaining them as exclusively male music. Indeed, for a while she banned the girls from singing them, something that proved highly successful when the girls burned with resentment and the boys preened themselves and sang loudly and lustily and not necessarily musically.

It was not singing she was teaching early on the Friday afternoon after the visit to Mr. Cox-Phillips’s house, however. It was dancing. It had all started during the morning, when Camille had unveiled the purple knitted rope, whose various parts she had stayed up late the night before weaving together into one. It could not be unveiled, of course, without being put to immediate use. They had gone out as far as Bath Abbey, where Camille had given a brief lecture on the architecture of the church before leading the way to the Roman baths just a few yards from the abbey and below the Pump Room. Both the expedition and the rope had been an enormous success, the latter having drawn amused attention from several passersby. Not one child had either lagged behind or surged ahead without the others, and an occasional head count had satisfied Camille each time that she still had the correct number of children.

Their return to the school had been delayed by the presence in the abbey yard of some musicians—first a flautist, whom the children found enthralling mainly, Camille suspected, because watching and listening to him shortened the school day, and then by a troop of energetic dancers, who performed the steps of several vigorous and intricate country dances to the accompaniment of the flute and a violin. The children had been genuinely enchanted by them, and it would have been nothing short of cruel to drag them away before the performance came to an end.

On the way back to school a few of the older children had recalled the time when a former teacher had taught dancing. Miss Snow had not continued the lessons—the Duchess of Netherby, Winifred Hamlin had interrupted the speaker to remind him—because she could not sing the music and teach the steps at the same time. And Miss Nunce had not because . . . well, because.