Someone to Hold

by Mary Balogh

  They became the focus of everyone’s admiring attention, though good manners prompted most people to keep their distance and content themselves with deferential bows and deep curtsies and warm smiles.

  “How he does it, I do not know,” the dowager countess said, nodding in Avery’s direction, “since he makes no attempt to win the adulation of all around him but indeed looks as though he is almost too bored to live. Yet he has that incredible presence.”

  “He does,” Viola agreed. “But I will always love him, Mother. He saved Harry from a dreadful fate after the poor boy rushed out to enlist as a private soldier. And he purchased Harry’s commission for him. I think it was the best solution for my boy under the circumstances even though I suffer daily anxiety for his safety, as I daresay thousands of other mothers throughout the land do. Is he happy? Avery, I mean.”

  The dowager looked sharply her way. “I believe he is, Viola,” she said. “He annoyed us all considerably, of course, when we were in the midst of making elaborate plans for their wedding and he simply bore her off one morning without a word to any of us and married her by special license in an insignificant church no one had ever heard of with only Elizabeth and his secretary for witnesses. But . . . well, if Louise is to be believed, and I daresay she is since she lives with them, they adore each other. Yes, he is happy, Viola, and so is she.”

  Viola nodded, and they proceeded on the their slow course about the room, nodding to people as they went, occasionally stopping to exchange a few words. When they had completed the circuit once, however, they came face-to-face with Avery and his bride, and Anastasia surprised Viola.

  “Will you take a turn about the room with me . . . Aunt Viola?” she asked.

  Aunt Viola. Viola was no such thing, but Matilda and Mildred and Louise, her former sisters-in-law, certainly were Anastasia’s aunts. The young woman had chosen to call her that, Viola supposed, albeit hesitantly, rather than address her by the only alternative, Miss Kingsley.

  “Of course,” Viola said, and they set off side by side. It was hard, so very hard, not to resent the girl, of whose existence Viola had been aware for years when she had assumed the girl was a by-blow of her husband’s. She had even arranged for a generous settlement to be made on her after her husband’s death, a gesture that had probably precipitated the discovery of the truth.

  “I believe,” she said stiffly, beginning the conversation, “I have you to thank, Anastasia, for the fact that my dowry has been returned with interest, enabling me to set up a home for myself and my daughters where we may live independently.”

  “You must know,” Anastasia said, “that you are entitled to at least that much. What happened to you was insufferable.”

  “I will accept,” Viola said, “because I agree that the dowry money ought to be mine. However, I doubt Mr. Brumford was the one to think of it. I believe that was you, and I thank you.”

  They were interrupted by two ladies who wished to pay their respects to the Duchess of Netherby . . . and of course to Miss Kingsley. The Duchess of Netherby returned their greetings amiably but showed no inclination to engage the two ladies in conversation. They moved on.

  “I live at Morland Abbey with Avery,” Anastasia said. “I will continue do so for the rest of my life, or at one of his other numerous homes, including Archer House in London. Yet I am the owner of Hinsford Manor and of Westcott House in London. I believe I have persuaded Alex that it would be appropriate for him to stay at Westcott House whenever he is in town since he is the holder of the title. But Hinsford, which is extremely pretty, is uninhabited, and the people who live in the neighborhood are unhappy about it. They look back with nostalgia to the years when you and your family lived there.”

  Viola stiffened. “They would hardly be delighted to see the return there of Miss Kingsley and the Misses Westcott,” she said.

  “I do believe you are wrong,” Anastasia said, nodding to a couple who would have detained them with the smallest encouragement. “Forgive me, but I understood from my one visit there that my father was never well liked. I equally understood that you were. Sympathy and understanding are very heavily on your side. Some of those I spoke with were cool toward me, a fact from which I took comfort rather than offense. Their loyalty lies with you, regardless of the change in your status, which they quite firmly attribute to my father.”

  “They are kind,” Viola said, almost overcome with a great surge of nostalgia for home, or what had been her home for more than twenty years. And for her friends and neighbors there.

  “Aunt Viola,” Anastasia said, and then paused. “Oh, do you find it offensive when I call you that? I do not know what else to call you. I cannot address you as Miss Kingsley.”

  “I am not offended,” Viola told her.

  “Thank you,” Anastasia said. “Aunt Viola, will you go back home? Please? It would mean so much to me. I do not suppose that argument will weigh a great deal with you, but . . . for Abigail’s sake? I met some of her friends there, and they were genuinely melancholy about her absence and the reason for it. One of them even shed tears and dashed from the room while her mama tried to convince me that she was suffering a head cold. For Camille’s sake too, though it would not surprise me if she chose to remain here rather than go with you.”

  Viola frowned and shook her head. “You will have children, Anastasia,” she said. “Your eldest son will, of course, inherit from Avery eventually. But the younger ones will have to be provided for too.”

  “Avery will provide for them all, no matter how many children we have,” Anastasia said. “He is quite adamant about it. He warned me you would be sure to use that argument. He told me to tell you to think of a more convincing one—if you could.” She smiled, but there was anxiety in her eyes. “Please will you go home and consider it your own? I have drawn up a will, Avery having insisted that what I brought to the marriage remain mine to be done with as I choose. I am leaving Hinsford to Harry and his descendants. There will be no point in his arguing against it. It is done and it will remain so. So if you go home, you will be merely keeping your son’s future home in good order for him.”

  Viola drew breath to speak, let the breath out, and drew it in again. “You have made it nearly impossible for me to say no,” she said.

  “You must say no, though,” Anastasia said, looking stricken, “if you truly do not want to live there. But, please, do not refuse for any other reason. Do not punish me to that degree.”

  “Punish you?” Viola frowned. “Is that what I would be doing? But I suppose you are right. I wish you were not such a . . . pleasant young lady, Anastasia. It would be a great deal easier to dislike you if you were not.”

  For some reason they both laughed.

  “Yet the offer is made for selfish reasons,” Anastasia said. “I want to feel happy about everything in my life, but at the moment I feel happy only about almost everything. I cannot close that gap unless I can somehow make amends for what I know was neither my fault nor yours. Think about it, Aunt Viola. Talk to Camille and Abigail about it, and to Mrs. Kingsley, if you will. Talk to Avery and all the others. It is your right to live in the home my father provided for you. It is not right that it be taken from you because of his wickedness. He was wicked, sad as I am to say it.”

  Viola sighed. “He was my husband, Anastasia,” she said. “And though I know now that he never truly was, it is nevertheless hard for me to be disloyal to the vows I made him when I married him. He was as he was, and he did something right, at least. He fathered four fine young people.”

  “Four? You include me?” Anastasia glanced at her, her eyes suspiciously bright. But they had completed the circuit of the room and Avery was stepping forward to meet them, his lazy eyes taking in his wife’s unshed tears. Viola felt a wave of envy for the sort of love she had known fleetingly once upon a time, before her father presented her with the perfect marriage partner.

 
“I will think about your suggestion, Anastasia,” she said. “Avery, do I have you to thank for Harry’s promotion to lieutenant?”

  “Me, Aunt?” He looked astonished. “Harry made it perfectly clear at the start that he would allow me to purchase his commission but nothing else. I understood that he meant it, that he would be mortally offended if I were to intervene to purchase promotions for him. I took him at his word. And has he been promoted?”

  “A letter arrived yesterday addressed to Camille and Abigail,” she said. “He sounded quite excited. And thank you for not interfering. It is more important that he acquire a sense of self-worth than that he achieve high rank in his regiment.”

  “It is to be hoped that he will acquire both,” he said. “I have great faith in young Harry.”

  * * *

  Joel kept himself busy during the first half of the week in an attempt not to be overwhelmed by the new fact in his life. He did not want to be the sort who would dash out and squander a fortune on riotous living and ruin his own character in the process. And it would be quite easy to do, he had realized in alarm down by the river on Sunday. Money held immediate and almost overwhelming temptation.

  He also did not want to think too much about Camille—or, rather, what he owed Camille. He owed her marriage. Having an affair with her was somehow quite different from having an affair with Edwina had been. With Edwina it had been like a game in which they both knew the rules and had no wish to change them. With Camille it was no game. He knew she had slept with him not just for the simple enjoyment of sex. And it had not been just that with him either. The trouble was that he did not know quite what it had been. Love? But frequently she annoyed him enormously, and, to be fair, he believed he annoyed her too at times. Regardless of what it was between them, of course, he did owe her marriage. He just did not want to think about it yet. His head felt a bit as though it had been invaded by wasps or hornets.

  But good God, the sex had been enormously enjoyable.

  He spent most of Monday working. He was at the house on the Royal Crescent during the morning, explaining to Abigail Westcott how he planned to pose and paint her. He sent her off to change into her favorite dress, not necessarily the most fashionable or the finest or the most admired or even the prettiest, but the one in which she felt most herself. In the meanwhile he chose a chair and its correct positioning with relation to the light and the other aspects of the room. Her mother was there, taking the place of the maid who usually sat silently in a corner as chaperon.

  Abigail returned wearing a light blue cotton frock, which looked well-worn and slightly faded. Her mother looked at her somewhat askance, but Joel knew immediately that it was perfect. Her hair was dressed simply and took nothing away from the pure youthful prettiness of her face. He had had some doubt about the cheerful floral upholstery of the chair he had chosen, but when she sat in it, leaning slightly forward, and gazed at him with her happy, eager face and her sparkling, slightly wounded eyes, he knew that the painting he wanted was before his eyes and merely needed to be melded with the sketch he had made yesterday and then transferred to canvas in his studio.

  “No, ma’am,” he explained when Miss Kingsley asked him if he would be painting here at the house. “When I paint from life, my mind becomes too caught up in getting every fine detail correct and my spirit is silenced. And my subject becomes stiff and wooden from holding a pose and an expression. No, I will sketch what I see now as quickly as I can and then paint in my studio. If I need to see the original again, as I probably will, then we will set up this scene again.”

  He spent all afternoon on the painting and the evening too until the light became too poor. He was a bit uneasy that it was all happening so fast. Each step of the process usually took him a great deal longer. But inspiration was something that must be trusted above all else. He had learned that over the past ten years or so. And he was inspired now. He saw the girl as she was and as she must appear on his canvas, and he could not paint fast enough so that he would not lose that spark in himself that would do her justice. How did one capture light and hope and vulnerability on canvas without losing the fine balance among the three and without giving in to the temptation to paint the merely mundane—a very pretty girl in her case?

  A notice of the death appeared in the Bath papers on Tuesday morning and identified Joel by name as both the great-nephew of the deceased and the principal beneficiary of his will. Mr. Cox-Phillips was described in the notice as one of the wealthiest men in Somerset and, indeed, the whole of western England.

  Joel went to the funeral. It was at a church in a village north of Bath, where apparently his great-uncle had worshipped regularly until the last six months or so, when deteriorating health had kept him at home. Joel was a bit surprised at how well attended the funeral was. He sat alone in a pew at the back, and he stayed behind the small crowd that gathered around the grave in the churchyard afterward for the burial. Uxbury was there, making a show of dignified grief, as were the two men with him. Joel did not think Uxbury had seen him until, just as Joel turned away at the end to return to his waiting carriage, the man leveled a steady look at him. Joel had not made any display of grief during the ceremonies, though he felt some. Perhaps, he thought in the carriage on the way back to Bath, it was the grief of regret for what might have been. If he had learned the truth a year ago, even six months ago, perhaps he could have had some sort of relationship with the man in whose house his grandparents and his mother had lived. Now it was too late.

  He went to the offices of Henley, Parsons, and Crabtree in the afternoon. Mr. Crabtree seemed to take satisfaction in informing him that Mr. Cox-Phillips’s relatives did indeed intend to contest the will with all the vigor of their combined influence. They would not succeed, he told Joel again. They had remained in Bath, however, though they had removed from the house. In the meantime, the solicitor produced some papers and spread them upon his desk, went into a lengthy explanation that Joel would have liked to have translated into intelligible English, and concluded with a rough estimate of the total fortune, which might have had Joel’s jaw hanging if he had not been clenching his teeth so hard.

  He would have painted himself into oblivion for the rest of the day if his door had not been almost constantly knocked upon from the moment he returned home. Everyone he had ever called friend, and a few who were mere acquaintances, came to commiserate with him at his loss and congratulate him upon his good fortune. Even Miss Ford came from the orphanage, accompanied for propriety’s sake by Roger, the porter. She had closed the school for the rest of the week, she informed him. She supposed he would have more important things to do on Wednesday and Friday than teach his art pupils, and Miss Westcott certainly did. The Dowager Countess of Riverdale had arrived in Bath with her eldest daughter, Lady Matilda Westcott, and the family was busy celebrating and wished to include Miss Westcott in their activities. Miss Ford herself had been invited to join the family at the public tea in the Upper Assembly Rooms on Thursday afternoon and to attend a private assembly there on Saturday evening.

  Anna and Netherby called at Joel’s rooms too not long after Miss Ford left—the first time Anna had ever been there. She hugged him tightly while Netherby looked on complacently, exclaimed with delight at the size of his rooms, examined closely the portrait of his mother, and sat beside him on the sofa, patting his hand and assuring him that if her experiences were anything to judge by, he would soon recover from his bewilderment and reconcile his life to the new reality without losing himself in the process.

  “For that is one’s greatest fear,” she said, echoing what he had been feeling. “One starts to believe that one does not know oneself at all. It is a terrifying feeling. But of course you are who you have always been, and you will get through to the other side more or less intact.”

  “It is the less part that worries me,” he said, and they both laughed.

  Netherby informed him that he had better
attend the public tea in the Upper Assembly Rooms on Thursday so that they could all boast of an acquaintance with the man who had become the sensation of Bath.

  “There is nothing like the background of an orphanage upbringing to lend an irresistible aura of romance to a story like yours,” he said with a weary-sounding sigh.

  Anna laughed at her husband. “And you must come to the assembly on Saturday too,” she said to Joel. “Camille has taught you to waltz, and I simply must see for myself how apt a pupil you have been.”

  “I can go up and see the house whenever I wish,” Joel said impulsively. “I believe I would rather not go alone.” But, no, it would not do to invite Anna to accompany him—or even Anna and Netherby. “The gardens seem extensive and well tended, and the view is spectacular. Perhaps some of your family would like to come up there with me—for a picnic, maybe, which I will provide, of course. On Friday afternoon?”

  He was struck by the dizzying fact that he could afford such an extravagance.

  “Oh, Joel,” Anna said. “That would be wonderful. Would it not, Avery?”

  “I can confidently predict,” Netherby said, “that your newly acquired property will be mobbed by Westcotts on Friday, Cunningham.”

  That was settled, then, it seemed.

  Camille did not come to his rooms. But of course she did not. Had he expected she would? It seemed to Joel far longer than two days since he had seen her. Now, with school canceled for the rest of week, he would not see her until Thursday afternoon. It seemed like an eternity away.

  He did not go to her either. He did not know why. He felt a bit . . . shy? That was not at all the right word. But something had happened on Sunday to change everything, and he was feeling a bit—well, panicked. And he was feeling too overwhelmed by everything else to sort out his feelings for her and do what must be done. Except that it was not just what must be done, was it? Surely, it was what he wanted to do. Quite frankly, he did not know anything any longer, least of all the meaning of love. And his obligation to Camille was not only about love, anyway. She might be with child by him. And even if she was not . . .