by Mary Balogh
“Joel, you are speaking absolute nonsense.” The grim schoolmistress had returned to confront him from the sofa. “You are going to have to go back. You must realize that.”
“Back?” he said. “Up there? To Cox-Phillips’s, do you mean? Absolutely not. For what purpose? I have nothing more to say to him and I am of no further use as far as he is concerned. He will have to find someone else to whom to leave his money if he really hates his relatives so much. That is his concern, not mine. Let me walk you home.” Edgar and Marvin would be back from work soon and it might be more difficult then to smuggle her out unseen.
She did not move, and now she was the Amazon as well as the schoolmistress. She really was a disconcerting female. “He is your last surviving link with your mother,” she said. “While he is alive he can tell you more, but it does not sound as if he will be alive for long. Did he tell you her name?”
He looked at her with open hostility before turning away to stare out through the window. She was not going to let this thing go, was she? He might have known it. “Cunningham,” he said.
He heard her cluck her tongue. “Her first name,” she said.
“What does it matter?” he asked her. “A boy does not call his mother by her first name anyway.”
“But he knows it,” she said. “And you have never called her anything else either, have you? There was never anyone to call Mama.”
No. He was surprised by the shaft of pain that knifed through him. There never had been. Perhaps that was one of the worst things about growing up an orphan. There was no Mama—or Papa either. And by God, there was going to be no self-pity. No more of it, anyway. Already, after a few hours of wallowing in it, he was sick of it.
“Was she dark haired and dark eyed like you?” she asked. “Or was she blond and blue eyed, perhaps? Or—”
“If she had had dark coloring,” he said, “Cox-Phillips would not have been so sure that it was the Italian who fathered me.”
“What was his name?” she asked.
“Something long and unpronounceable that ended in vowels,” he said. “He does not remember it. He probably never tried to learn it. To a man like Cox-Phillips all foreigners are inferior beings to be despised.”
“Did your mother see you before she died?” she asked. “Was she the one who named you Joel? Why that particular name?”
He turned on her, angry now, even though he owed her everything but anger. “Do you imagine,” he asked her, “that that crusty old man in his mansion up on the hill would know the answers to such questions? Do you imagine he cares? Do you imagine I care?”
“Yes to the last question,” she said. “I think you do care or that you will care—perhaps when it is too late to get any answers at all. Just a couple of weeks ago I believe I would have said that nothing could be worse than what had happened to me—and to Abigail and Harry. But something could, I realize now. If our mother had known early on that she was not legally married, she might have left my father, and it is altogether possible we might have ended up at an orphanage, perhaps even three separate ones, and been told nothing about ourselves except our names. Perhaps not even those. Our father was not a good man. I understand now that he was incapable of loving me no matter how hard I tried. He loved only himself. But at least I know who he was. I knew and I know my mother and my brother and sister. I know who I am. I do not yet know who I will become because my circumstances have changed so drastically, but I know where I came from, and I think I realize now fully for the first time how important that is.” She paused. “I am sorry your suffering has made this clear to me.”
He gazed at her for a few moments, realizing that she had just come to a sort of epiphany of her own. She was all haughty aristocrat and stern schoolmistress and stubborn Amazon and . . . Camille. He went striding off without a word to his studio, where he grabbed a sketchbook and a piece of charcoal and went back into the living room to sit on the chair from which he had risen a few minutes ago. Without looking at her he drew the swift, rough outline of a woman with slightly untidy hair and a look of passionate intensity on her face. It was what he thought of as the Camille part of her.
“Is this always your answer to something you do not wish to talk about?” she asked. “Is this your escape from reality?”
He kept on sketching for a while. “Perhaps,” he said, “it is my way of marshaling my thoughts. Perhaps it is my escape into reality. Or perhaps it is my way of filling in time until you allow me to walk you home.”
“You think you want to be rid of me,” she said, seemingly uncowed by the petty insult. “But it is your own troubling thoughts of which you want to be rid. You know you will forever regret it if you do not go back.”
“Do you realize how incredibly fascinating you are, Camille?” he asked. And how irritating?
“Nonsense,” she said. “I have never cultivated either beauty or charm, much less womanly wiles. I have cultivated only the will to do what I believe to be right in all circumstances.”
He glanced up at her and smiled. She was looking prunish. “You will realize your own fascination,” he said, “after I have painted you.”
“Then your painting will be worthless,” she told him. “I thought you refused to flatter your subjects. Why would you make an exception of me?”
He continued looking at her for a few moments so that he would get her eyebrows right. They would look rather too heavy on most women, but they were actually just right with her dark hair and strong features. He had not noticed that before. Strangely, he was not always an observant person when he looked merely with his eyes. He often did not see people clearly unless and until he started to sketch and paint them and draw upon what his intuition had sensed about them.
“You of all people will not be painted with flattery,” he assured her before looking back down at his sketch. “You will be painted as who you are when all the poses and defenses and masks have been stripped away.”
But would he ever know her completely? Or understand her fully? One never did, did one? One never knew even oneself to the deepest depths. How could one be expected to know another human being, then? It was an uncomfortable realization when he prided himself upon understanding the subjects of his portraits.
“I am horribly alarmed,” she told him curtly without looking alarmed at all. “You are very adroit at changing a subject.”
“Was there one to change?” he asked, smiling at her again.
“You have to go back,” she said. “You have to talk to Mr. Cox-Phillips and find out all you can about yourself. You will forever regret it if you do not. It is true that your grandmother treated you badly, Joel, but it is equally true that she treated you very well. It is all a matter of perspective. You must find out more so that you can understand better. You must find out all you can about your mother. Had she lived, everything might have been different. Perhaps she is someone you need to love even though you will never know her in person. At least you can find out all you can.”
“Sentimental drivel,” he said. “He would conclude I had changed my mind about being in his will and had come crawling back there to ingratiate myself with him. He would assume avarice had caught up with me.”
“Then tell him he is wrong,” she said. “You must go. I shall go with you.”
Joel set aside his sketch pad—he could not get her stubborn chin right anyway without making her look like a caricature—and leaned back in the chair. He crossed his arms over his chest and rested one booted ankle across the other knee. He ought to have gone to Edwina. Or to Miss Ford. Or come back here to brood alone. His first impression of Miss Camille Westcott had been the right one. She was overbearing and obnoxious.
“To hold my hand, I suppose,” he said. “To prod me forward with a sharp finger at my back. To prompt me with the questions I need to ask. To scold the old man if he makes me cry.”
Her lips virtually disap
peared. She sat up straight and was doing the perfect-posture thing again. Her spine presumably did not need the support of the back of the sofa. It was made of steel.
“I thought to offer moral support,” she said. “You clearly do not need it. Just as I do not need your escort back to the orphanage, Mr. Cunningham. I daresay I will not be accosted more than four or five times as I walk alone, and doubtless my screams will bring gentlemen running to my rescue. You will do as you please with regards to Mr. Cox-Phillips. I have learned that you are stubborn to a fault. It does not matter to me the snap of my fingers what you do.”
She got to her feet and Joel jumped to his. He was between her and the hallway, so she stood where she was, holding his gaze, her jaw like granite. The Amazon in a belligerent mood. If she had had a spear in her hand . . .
“I made some soup yesterday,” he said. “I ate some last night and did not poison myself. Let me warm it up. I bought some bread at the bakery early this morning too. Stay and eat with me.”
“To hold your hand?” she asked.
“I need one hand to hold the bowl and the other to spoon up the soup,” he told her. “I apologize for what I said. You have been remarkably kind in coming here and listening to my ravings. Alas, I have repaid your goodness with bad temper. Stay? Please?”
It had been a purely impulsive invitation. Whatever would they talk about if she agreed? And what were the chances that Edgar or Marvin would knock on his door for some reason or other? Or that one or both of them would see or hear her leave later? But he did not want to be alone yet.
What if the soup had thickened to such a degree that it would need to be chiseled with a sharp-edged knife? He was not the world’s best cook.
“What kind of soup?” she asked.
Eleven
A hired carriage was awaiting Camille when school was dismissed for the day on Thursday. Joel jumped out when she appeared and handed her inside. She raised her eyebrows at the chipped, faded exterior, the shabby, slightly ripped seats inside, and the somewhat stale smell, which even the open windows could not quite dispel. But she did not say anything. At least it appeared reasonably clean. She had not looked too closely at the horses.
“You did not change your mind, then?” she asked as he seated himself beside her.
“Oh, I did,” he said. “An hour ago. And two hours before that, and half an hour before that, and so on back to the night before last. This time I changed my mind in favor of going.”
He both looked and sounded cheerful, but she was not deceived. He had agreed before she left his rooms two days ago that he would go back to Mr. Cox-Phillips’s house and had told her with grudging good grace that she might accompany him if she wished. He had suggested that they go today after school.
“And did you write to inform him you were coming?” she asked as the carriage jerked into motion and gave Camille a foretaste of how ineffective the springs were going to be.
“No,” he said. “Why should I give him advance warning? And it is not as though he is going anywhere, is it? Except to his grave.”
She turned her head to glance reproachfully at him. He was looking suddenly grim and a bit pale, his head half turned toward the window next to him. She drew breath to speak, but he looked as if he wished to be left alone with his thoughts, and she had no wish to turn into a scold.
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.
“I never saw you,” he said. “I saw your sister a few times and was introduced to her at Mrs. Dance’s soiree. The first time I saw you was in the schoolroom when Miss Ford brought you there. Would your mother’s staying have made life more difficult for you?”