Someone to Love

“Exactly so,” she said, beaming at him. “But I do not mean to contradict what Miss Nunce has taught you. I believe she does not want any of you to be disappointed if the grandest of your dreams never come true. She does not want to see you hurt. She wants you to see that there are success and fulfillment and happiness to be found in all sorts of surprising places. Life often moves us in unexpected directions. But goodness me, most of you have already spent much of the day in the schoolroom here learning your lessons. I will not keep you longer. I will allow Miss Ford to dismiss you. But I think of you all every day, you know. I was happy here. It is a happy place.”

The children cheered again but showed no reluctance to be set free. Anna bit her lip, on the verge of tears. She loved them all so dearly. It was not a sentimental or a pitying love, though. They all had a path in life to forge and follow, and really they had as much chance of a good life as most children who grew up in a home with their parents. Even those children’s lives were not without challenges.

“I am not at all sure I spoke the truth about Miss Nunce,” she said to Avery as they made their way back to the hotel, still on foot. “If she kills those children’s dreams, she will take away from them something that is infinitely precious. What would they be, what would any of us be, without dreams?”

“You must not distress yourself,” he said. “The woman sounds like a killjoy to me and ought not to be allowed within two miles of a schoolroom. She opposed the idea of books for the children, did she not? But she does not have the power to kill dreams, Anna. Dreams are as natural and as essential to us as breathing. Those children will dream on. The boys will want to be another Lord Nelson, though presumably without his death. The girls will want to marry a prince or be another Joan of Arc without the martyrdom.”

“Do even dukes dream?” she asked him.

“I was not a duke as a child,” he said, “merely a marquess.”

“And do marquesses dream?”

“Of course,” he said.

“What?” she asked. “What did you dream of? What do you dream of?”

He was silent for so long that she thought he was not going to answer her. They were almost up to the doors of the hotel before he spoke.

“Someone to love,” he said softly when it was just too late for her to make any reply.

* * *

Anna’s friend Joel Cunningham joined them for dinner that evening in a private dining room at the Royal York. He came striding into the room, three minutes early, dressed unexceptionably but unimaginatively for evening. He was tall—though not particularly so—and broad of girth though not by any means fat. He had a round, open countenance, very short, dark hair and dark eyes. He had good teeth—he was smiling.

Avery hated him on sight. His hand itched to grasp his quizzing glass, but he resisted.

“Anna.” Both his hands were outstretched toward her. Avery might have been part of the furniture. “Just look at you. You look . . . elegant.”

“Joel.” She was looking at him with a smile to match his own and both hands outstretched to his grasp. “I am so glad you could come. And that is a new coat. It is very smart.”

They joined hands and both bent their elbows as though they were about to embrace. Perhaps they did not, Avery thought, because he was not part of the furniture. Anna turned her still-beaming face toward him while still grasping the man’s hands.

“Avery,” she said, “this is my dear friend Joel Cunningham.”

“I rather thought it was,” Avery said on a sigh, and despite himself his fingers curled about the handle of his glass. “How do you do?”

“Avery, my husband,” Anna said, “the Duke of Netherby.”

Cunningham released her hands and turned to make his bow, and Avery was interested to note that the man looked at him with the same sort of critical appraisal and veiled hostility as he had just looked at Cunningham. Like two dogs coveting the same bone? What an alarmingly lowering thought.

“Delighted,” Cunningham said.

Anna was looking from one to the other of them, and Avery could see that she had sized up the situation quite accurately and was amused.

It was not an auspicious start to the evening, but Avery certainly did not like the image of himself as a jealous husband—it was enough to give him the shudders. And Cunningham swallowed whatever hostility he might have brought with him or conceived at his first sight of the man his friend had married. They settled into a three-way conversation that was really rather pleasant, and the food was certainly superior.

Cunningham was an intelligent, well-read man. He was making what Avery understood to be an increasingly lucrative income as a portrait painter, though he dreamed of making a name for himself as a landscape artist, and he had a vague dream too of becoming a writer. “Though people with some talent in the visual arts are not always similarly talented with words,” he said.

“Are those who sit for your portraits still mostly older people?” Anna asked him. “I know you always longed to paint younger persons.”

He thought about it. “Yes, I enjoy painting youth and beauty,” he said, “but older people tend to have more character to be captured on canvas. They present a more interesting challenge. It is only recently that I have realized that. Perhaps it is a sign that my own character is maturing.”

He had not made much if any progress in keeping an eye on the Misses Westcott, he reported to Anna. Cunningham had seen who he assumed to be the younger sister enter the Pump Room with her grandmother on a couple of occasions, but he had not set eyes at all upon the elder.