Someone to Hold

by Mary Balogh

  “Oh, I have met Mr. Cunningham,” Abigail said, coming to sit down again. “He was at Mrs. Dance’s the evening I went there with Grandmama. Remember? I believe he was painting Mrs. Dance’s portrait. Perhaps he still is. He had brought a couple of completed portraits with him to show her guests, and they were exquisite. He has real talent. He was rather handsome too.”

  Camille was not sure she would say quite that of him. He was on the tall side—taller than she, anyway—and solidly built, though he had a decent, manly figure. His face was more pleasant than ravishingly good-looking, she had thought. His dark hair was cropped but not in any of the fashionable short styles, like the Brutus, for example. His eyes were dark and intelligent and he had a firm mouth and chin, all suggestive of a certain strength of character and will. His coat, she had noticed, though not ill fitting, was not fashionably formfitting either and had looked slightly shabby. His boots did not shine, not from lack of polish, she guessed, but from being scuffed with age. He was a man who seemed careless of his appearance, very different from the gentlemen with whom she had consorted until a few months ago. She would not have afforded him a second glance if she had passed him on the street—or even a first glance for that matter. But during the few minutes she had been forced into his company, she had been aware of a sort of restless energy and raw masculinity about him, and she had been slightly shocked at herself for noticing. It was not like her at all.

  “I suppose,” she said, arrested by a sudden thought, “if he has been teaching there awhile, he must know Anastasia.”

  Was that why she had sensed some hostility in his manner? Did he resent the fact that she was about to take Anastasia’s place in the schoolroom? But of course he knew Anastasia—Miss Ford had introduced her to him as her sister, had she not? And she had corrected Miss Ford by saying she was Anastasia’s half sister.

  “Can I talk you out of going back there, Cam?” Abigail said. “Grandmama is going to take me to a concert at the Upper Assembly Rooms tomorrow evening. There are likely to be people there who do not attend the Pump Room in the early mornings. Come with us. Most people are polite to me. No one recoils in horror when they discover who I am. No one treats me like a leper. And not everyone in Bath is elderly. We will surely make a few friends close to us in age, given time and a little bit of effort. Perhaps even . . . Well . . .” She smiled and looked away.

  But only Mrs. Dance of all Grandmama’s supposed friends had invited Abby to her home. And there had been no sign yet of any younger ladies making friendly overtures to her. And no sign whatsoever of any prospective beaux. Oh, poor Abby.

  “You will not talk me out of going to school on Monday and every day thereafter, Abby,” Camille said. “I want to go. I really do.”

  Abigail’s eyes filled with tears. “Cam,” she half whispered, “do you find yourself sometimes expecting to wake up to find this is all a horrid dream? Or at least hoping to wake up?”

  “No longer.” Camille got to her feet and sat beside her sister, gathering her into her arms as she did so. “Life has kicked us in the teeth, Abby, and I am about to kick back. Hard. I am going to teach at an orphanage school. That will show everyone.”

  Abigail almost choked over a sob that had turned to laughter. Camille laughed with her and felt cheerful for the first time in . . . how long? It felt like forever.

  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 t
hough 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.”