by Mary Balogh
He nodded and went to fetch her pelisse and bonnet, which were still a bit damp. She was half splashing along the street a few minutes later, the umbrella he had insisted she bring with her keeping her dry, though she could hear the rain drumming upon it. She had been kissed and she had been hugged this afternoon, both new experiences. She had also begged to be held and had surrendered to the comfort another human being had offered, even if only for a minute or so. Now she felt a bit like crying—yet again.
She would not do it, of course. She had cried last night, and that had been more than enough to last her for another fifteen years or so at least. But she must not put herself again in the position of needing to be held by Mr. Joel Cunningham, who believed that the disaster she had met with earlier this year was the best thing that could have happened to her. She certainly would give him no further opportunity to kiss her—or herself further opportunity to invite his kiss. For she would certainly not put all the blame, or even most of it, upon his shoulders.
She wished she did not have to encounter him again next week in the schoolroom, where she would have to behave as though nothing had happened between them. Not that much had. Oh, somehow, sometime she was going to get through all this, this . . . whatever it was and come out on the other side. But what would that other side look like?
She tilted the umbrella to shield her face from the driving rain and hurried onward.
Nine
Joel kept himself busy on Sunday and Monday. He finished one of his portraits on Sunday and went up to the Royal Crescent on Monday to begin sketching and talking to Abigail Westcott. Her portrait was going to be a pleasure to work on and a bit of a challenge too, for almost as soon as she started to talk he could sense a vulnerability behind her prettiness and sweetness and a carefully guarded sadness. It would take him some time and skill to know her thoroughly.
But while he kept himself occupied, his mind was in turmoil. Why in thunder had he kissed Camille? She had asked him how one achieved happiness, and like a gauche boy with only one thing on his mind, he had acted as though there could be only one possible answer. The thing was, he had taken himself as much by surprise as he had her. And then, as though that were not bad enough, he had proceeded to hurt her horribly with that ill-advised remark about the great disaster of her life having been the best thing that could possibly have happened to her.
He had not even enjoyed his evening with Edwina on Sunday. Indeed, he had returned home early without even having gone to bed with her.
He spent Monday afternoon and evening sketching Camille from memory—laughing in the rain, sitting at his kitchen table looking just kissed, standing at his living room window, arms wrapped defensively about herself, gazing sightlessly down at the street. He did not want to be obsessed with painting her yet. He wanted to be able to focus upon her sister. But perhaps it was not painting her that was obsessing him.
He was actually glad on Tuesday to have something to distract him. He hired a carriage and went to call upon Mr. Cox-Phillips. The house was somewhere between a manor and a mansion in size, stately in design, and set within spacious and well-tended gardens, commanding a wide and panoramic view over the city below and the surrounding country for miles around. Joel, having instructed the coachman to wait for him, hoping he would not be too long, as the bill would be running ever higher, nevertheless took a few moments to admire the house and the garden and view before knocking upon the door.
He was kept waiting for all of ten minutes in the entry hall, being stared at by a collection of stern marble busts with sightless eyes while the elderly butler inevitably went to see if his master was at home. Joel was admitted eventually to a high-ceilinged library. Every wall was filled with books from floor to ceiling wherever there was not either a window or a door or fireplace. A large oak desk dominated one corner of the room. On the other side an imposing leather sofa faced a marble fireplace in which a fire burned despite the summer heat outdoors. Matching leather wing chairs flanked it.
In one of the chairs and almost swallowed up by it, his knees covered by a woolen blanket, a silver-knobbed cane grasped in one of his gnarled hands, sat a fierce-eyed, beetle-browed gentleman who looked to be at least a hundred years old. His eyes watched Joel cross the room until he came to a stop beside the sofa. Another man, almost equally ancient and presumably some sort of valet, stood behind the gentleman’s chair and also watched Joel’s approach.
“Mr. Cox-Phillips?” Joel said.
“And who else am I likely to be?” the gentleman asked, the beetle brows snapping together in a frown. “Come and stand here, young man.” He thumped his cane on the carpet before his feet. “Orville, open the damned curtains. I can hardly see my hand in front of my face.”
Both Joel and the valet did as they were told. Joel found himself standing in a shaft of sunlight a few feet from the old man’s chair, while its occupant took his time looking him up and down and studying his face. The lengthy inspection made Joel wonder, with an inward chuckle, who was going to be painting whom.
“It was the Italian after all, then, was it?” the old man said abruptly. It did not sound like the sort of question that demanded an answer.
“I beg your pardon, sir?” Joel regarded him politely.
“The Italian,” the old man said impatiently. “The painter who thought his swarthy looks and accent that charmed the ladies and foreign names all ending in vowels would hide the fact that what talent he had would not have filled a thimble.”
“I am afraid,” Joel said, “I am not understanding you, sir. I do not know the man to whom you refer.”
“I refer, young man,” the old gent told him, “to your father.”
Joel stood rooted to the spot.
“I suppose,” the old man said, “they did not tell you a thing.”
“They?” Joel felt a little as though he were looking through a dark tunnel, which was strange when he was standing in sunlight.
“Those people at that institution where you grew up,” the old man said. “It would be a wonder if they did not. Very few people can hold their tongues, even when they have been sworn to secrecy. Especially then.”
Joel wished he had been invited to sit down or at least to stand in shadow. There was a dull buzzing in his ears. “Do you mean, sir,” he asked, “that you know who my father was—or is? And my mother?”
“It would be strange if I did not know her,” Cox-Phillips said, “when she was my own niece, my only sister’s girl, and more trouble to her mother than she was worth. Dead the lot of them are now. Never hope to live to be eighty-five, young man. Everybody who has ever meant a thing to you ends up dying, and the only ones left are the sycophants and vultures who think that because they share a few drops of your blood they are therefore entitled to your money when you die. Well, they are not going to have mine, not while I am alive to have a say in the matter, which I will have this afternoon when my lawyer arrives here.”
Most of what he said passed Joel by. His mind was grappling with only one thing. “My mother was your niece?” he asked. “She is dead? And my father?”
“She would never tell her mother who he was,” the old man said. “Stubborn as a mule, that girl was. She would only tell who he was not—and that was every likely and unlikely male her mother could think of, including the Italian, though how she ever got her tongue around his name to say it aloud I do not know. My sister sent the girl away for her confinement and paid a pretty penny for her care for six months too, but the girl died anyway in childbed. The baby—you—survived, more was the pity. It would have been better for all concerned, you included, if you had died with her. Nothing would do for it but my sister had to bring you back here despite everything I had to say to the contrary. Her daughter got her stubbornness from her. She knew she could not bring you to this house to live and explain away to all who would have been sure to ask, and strange if they had not. She ought to have lef
t you where you were. She took you instead to that orphanage and paid for your keep there. She even paid for that art school you wanted to go to, even though I told her she had feathers for a brain. I guessed then, though, that it must have been the Italian. Where else would you have got the cork-brained notion that you could make a decent living painting? They probably tried to make you see better sense at the orphanage.”
“My . . . grandmother lives here with you?” Joel asked.
“Are you not listening, young man?” Cox-Phillips said sharply. “She died seven, eight years ago. How long has it been, Orville?”
“Mrs. Cunningham passed eight years ago, sir,” the valet said.
“Passed,” the old man said in some disgust. “She died. Caught a chill, developed a fever, and was dead within a week. I expected that she would leave what she had to you, but she left it to me instead.” He peered up at Joel and suddenly looked even more irritated. “Why the devil are you standing there, young man, forcing me to look up at you? Sit, sit.”
Joel seated himself on the edge of the sofa and drew a few deep breaths. “And my father?” he asked. “The Italian artist?”
“Artist.” The old man snorted contemptuously. “In his own imagination only. He disappeared in a hurry. I daresay my niece told him her glad tidings and he took fright and flight in quick succession, never to be heard from again, and good riddance. I daresay he is dead too. I cannot say I care one way or the other.”
“You are my great-uncle, then,” Joel said rather obviously. His ears were still buzzing—so, it seemed, was the whole of his head. His grandmother had been Mrs. Cunningham. That had presumably been his mother’s name too.
“You are doing well enough for yourself, or so I hear,” the old man said. “A fool and his money can always be parted when someone offers to immortalize him in paint, of course. I suppose you flatter those who pay you well enough and make them appear twenty years younger than they are and many times better-looking than they have ever been.”
“I study my subjects with great care and sketch them in numerous ways before I paint them,” Joel told him. “I aim for accuracy of looks and a revelation of character in the finished portrait. It is a long, painstaking process and one I do with integrity.”
“Touched you on the raw, have I?” the old man asked.
“You have,” Joel admitted. He was not going to deny the fact. It seemed incredible to him that after twenty-seven years he had just been told who he was by his own great-uncle, yet the conversation had moved on to his art as though such a sudden, earth-shattering revelation could be of no importance whatsoever to him. Why had he been summoned here?
It was as though Cox-Phillips read his thought. “You expected, I suppose, that I was bringing you here to have you paint me,” he said.
“I did, sir,” Joel said, though his great-uncle had not brought him here, had he? The hired carriage was presumably still waiting outside, the bill growing higher with every passing minute. “I certainly did not expect that I was coming here to discover my identity. My grandmother never came to see me.”
“Oh, she contrived numerous times to see you,” the old man said with a dismissive wave of his free hand. “I told her she was a fool every time she went. She was always upset for days afterward.”
But she had never made herself known to him. She upset herself by seeing him from afar, but never considered how a child who grew up knowing nothing about his birth or his family might feel. The loneliness, the sense of abandonment, the feeling of worthlessness, the total absence of roots . . . But it was not the time to think about any of that. It was never time. Such thoughts only spiraled downward into darkness. One had to deal with reality in one’s everyday life and find daily blessings for which to be thankful.
But if he could have had just one hug from his grandmother . . . It would not have been enough, though, would it? It was better that she had never revealed herself. Perhaps.
“I do not want myself painted,” his great-uncle told him, “especially if you could not be persuaded to flatter me. There would not be enough time anyway if you do all that studying and sketching before you even lay paint to canvas. In a week or two’s time I expect to be dead.”
The valet made an involuntary motion with one hand, a wordless protest on his lips.
“You need not worry, Orville,” his master said. “You will be well enough set up for the rest of your life, as you know, and you will not have me to bother about any longer. I am dying, young man. My physician is a fool. All physicians are in my experience, but this time he has got it right. I am not quite at my last gasp, but I am not far off it, and if you think I am looking for sympathy, you are a fool too. When you are eighty-five and every last morsel of your health has deserted you and almost everyone you have ever known is dead, then it is time to be done with the whole business.”
“I am sorry you are unwell, sir,” Joel said.
“What difference does it make to you?” Cox-Phillips asked, and then he alarmed both Joel and his valet by cackling with laughter and then coughing until it seemed doubtful he was going to be able to draw his next breath. He did, however. “Actually, young man, it will make a great deal of difference to you.”
Joel gazed at him with a frown. He was not a likable old fellow and perhaps never had been, but he was, it seemed, the only surviving link with Joel’s mother and grandmother, whose name he bore. This man was his great-uncle. It was too dizzying a truth to be digested fully. Yet it seemed there was very little time in which to digest it at all. He was about to lose the only living relative he would probably ever know, yet he had found him just minutes ago.
“I have four surviving relatives,” the old man said, “of whom you are one even though you are a bastard. The other three never showed the slightest interest in me until I turned eighty. A man of eighty with no wife or children or grandchildren or brothers and sisters of his own becomes a person of great interest to those clinging to the outer branches of his family tree. Such people begin to wonder what will happen to his belongings and his money when he dies, which is almost bound to be soon or sooner. And with interest comes a deep fondness for the old relative and an anxious concern for his health. It is all balderdash, of course. They can go hang for all I care.”
Was one of the three relatives to whom the old man referred Viscount Uxbury?
“I am going to leave everything to you, young man,” Cox-Phillips said. “It will be written into my new will this afternoon, and I shall have enough people to attest to the soundness of my mind and the absence of coercion that even the cleverest solicitor will find it impossible to overturn my final wishes.”
Joel was on his feet then without any consciousness of having stood up. “Oh no, sir,” he said. “That is preposterous. I do not even know you. You do not know me. I have no claim upon you and have no wish for any. You have shown no interest in me for twenty-seven years. Why should you show some now?”
The old man clasped both hands over the head of his stick and lowered his chin onto them. “By God, Orville,” he said, “I think he means it. What do you think?”
“I believe he does, sir,” the valet agreed.
“Of course I mean it,” Joel said. “I have no wish whatsoever, sir, to cut out your legitimate relatives from a share in whatever you have to leave them. If you intend to ignore them out of spite, I will not have you use me as your instrument. I want no part of your fortune.”
“You think it is a fortune?” Cox-Phillips asked.
“I neither know nor care,” Joel assured him. “What I do know is that I have had no part of you or of my grandmother all the years of my life and that I want no part of your possessions now. Do you believe that would be compensation enough? Do you believe that I will remember you more kindly if you buy my gratitude and affection? I detect no sort of fond sentiment in you at coming face-to-face with me at last, only a confirmation of what you hav
e suspected all these years, that my father was—or is—an Italian painter whom you despised. You would not have brought me here at all today, I now realize, if you had not conceived this devilish idea of using me to play a trick on your relatives. I will have no part of it. Good day to you, sir.”
He turned and strode from the room. With every step across the carpet he expected to be called back, but he was not. He found his way downstairs and across the hall past the blindly staring busts and out onto the terrace, where the hired carriage awaited him.
“Back to Bath,” he said curtly as he pulled open the door and seated himself inside.
Fury gave place to a racing mental confusion that could not be brought into any semblance of order as the carriage conveyed him back down to the city. His mother had died giving birth to him in secret. Good God, he did not even know her first name or anything about her except that she had conceived him outside wedlock and had stubbornly and steadfastly refused to name his father. His grandmother had taken him to the orphanage and made sure he had everything he needed, even an art education after he was fifteen, but had withheld herself. She had looked at him from afar but had given him no opportunity to look upon her and know that there was someone in this world to whom he belonged. His father was, presumably, an artist of Italian nationality who had been in Bath painting. It seemed to have been his own looks, Joel thought, that had convinced Cox-Phillips—his great-uncle—that it was so. He did not know the man’s name, however, or whether he was alive or dead.
He paid off the carriage outside his rooms but did not go inside. There would not be enough space in there or enough air. He struck off on foot along the street with no particular destination in mind.
* * *
Caroline Williams had been attending school for a year and had somehow got away with pretending she could read. She liked to choose books Camille had read to the class and recite them from memory, but sometimes her memory was defective. Somehow or other the teaching methods that had worked with other children had not worked for her. Camille had pondered the problem until something that might help had suggested itself on Sunday when she was in the playroom holding Sarah again. Caroline had been reading a story to her doll—not the one written in the book, however, but one she was making up with considerable imagination and coherence as she went.