Someone To Hold Part 8

"Are you not listening, young man?" c.o.x-Phillips said sharply. "She died seven, eight years ago. How long has it been, Orville?"

"Mrs. Cunningham pa.s.sed eight years ago, sir," the valet said.

"Pa.s.sed," 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 c.o.x-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 pa.s.sing minute. "I certainly did not expect that I was coming here to discover my ident.i.ty. 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?" c.o.x-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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 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," c.o.x-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 G.o.d, 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?" c.o.x-Phillips asked.

"I neither know nor care," Joel a.s.sured 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 grat.i.tude 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 have 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 G.o.d, 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 c.o.x-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 s.p.a.ce 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 cla.s.s 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.

Now Camille was sitting at one of the small pupils' desks. The rest of the children had been dismissed for the day, but Caroline had been invited to stay and tell one of her own stories to her teacher, who had written it down word for word in large, bold print, leaving a blank s.p.a.ce in the center of each of the four pages. Caroline, intrigued by the fact that it was her very own story, was reading it back to Camille, her finger identifying each word. And it seemed that she really was reading.

"You wrote went here, miss," she said, looking up, "when really she ran."

"My mistake," Camille told her, though it had been a deliberate one. And Caroline had pa.s.sed the test, as she did again with the other three deliberate errors.

"Excellent, Caroline," Camille told her. "Now you can read your own story as well as other people's when you want to. Can you guess what the s.p.a.ces are for?"

The child shook her head.

"The most interesting books have pictures, do they not?" Camille said. "You can choose your favorite parts of your story and draw your own pictures."

The little girl's eyes lit up.

But the door opened at that moment, and Camille turned her head in some annoyance to see which child had come back to interrupt them and for what purpose. It was not a child, however. It was Joel Cunningham, who looked into the room, stepped inside when he saw she was there, and then came to an abrupt halt when he saw she was not alone.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "Carry on."

"You will miss your tea if I keep you here any longer," she said to Caroline as she got to her feet. "Do you wish to take your story with you to read and ill.u.s.trate? Or shall we keep it safe on a shelf here until tomorrow?"

Caroline wanted to take it to read to her doll. And she would draw the pictures while her doll watched. She gave Joel a wide, bright smile as he opened the door to let her out, her story clutched to her chest.

"I am trying to coax her to read," Camille explained when he closed the door again. "She has been having some difficulty, and I have been trying out an idea."

"It looks as if you may have had some success," he said. "She seemed very eager to take that story with her. In my day we would have done anything on earth to avoid having to take schoolwork beyond this room."

Camille was feeling horribly self-conscious. She had not seen him since Sat.u.r.day, when she had gone dashing along rainy streets hand in hand with him, laughing for no reason except that she was enjoying herself-and ending up alone in his rooms with him. And if that was not shocking enough, she had allowed him to kiss her and-perhaps worse-she had asked him to hold her. She had been plagued by the memories ever since and had dreaded coming face-to-face with him again.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, clasping her hands tightly at her waist and straightening her shoulders. She could hear the severity in her voice.

"I came to see if you were still in the schoolroom," he told her, running his fingers through his hair, a futile gesture since it was so short. There was something intense, almost wild, about his eyes, she noticed, and the way he was holding himself, as though there were a whole ball of energy coiled up inside him ready to burst loose.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I went to call on c.o.x-Phillips this morning," he said. "He had nothing by way of work to offer me. He is eighty-five and at death's door."

"That is rather harsh." Camille frowned.

"On the authority of his physician," he said. "He expects to be dead within a week or two. He is setting his house in order, so to speak. His lawyer was going to see him this afternoon about his will."

"I am sorry it was a wasted journey," she said. "But why did he invite you up there if he did not wish to hire your services as a painter? Why did he not stop you from going if he suddenly found himself too ill to see you?"

"Oh, he saw me right enough," he told her. "He even had his valet pull back the curtains so that he could have enough light for a closer look." He laughed suddenly and Camille raised her eyebrows. "He was going to change his will this afternoon to cut out the three relatives who are expecting to inherit. I am guessing Viscount Uxbury is one of their number."

"Oh," she said. "He will not like that. But what does this have to do with you?"

"Not here." He turned sharply away. "Come out with me."

Where? She almost asked the question aloud. But it was obvious he was deeply disturbed about something and had turned to her of all people. She hesitated for only the merest moment.

"Wait here," she said, "while I fetch my bonnet."

Ten.

Joel grasped Camille's hand without conscious thought when they left the building and strode along the street with her. He had only one purpose in mind-to go home. It was only as they crossed the bridge that he wondered at last why he had turned to Camille Westcott of all people. Marvin Silver or Edgar Stephens would surely be home soon, and they were good friends as well as neighbors. Edwina was probably at her house. She was both friend and lover. And failing any of those three, why not Miss Ford?

But it was for the end of the school day and Camille he had waited as he paced the streets of Bath for what must have been hours. She would listen to him. She would understand. She knew what it was like to have one's life turned upside down. And now he was taking her home with him, even after what had happened there the last time, was he? His pace slackened.

"I ought not to take you to my rooms," he said. "Would you prefer that we keep walking?"

"No." She was frowning. "Something has upset you. I will go home with you."

"Thank you," he said.

A few minutes later he was leaning against the closed door of his rooms while Camille hung up her bonnet and shawl. It seemed days rather than hours since he had left here this morning. She went ahead of him into the living room and turned to look at him, waiting for him to speak first.

He slumped onto one of the chairs without considering how ill-mannered he was being, set his elbows on his knees, and held his head in both hands.

"c.o.x-Phillips is my great-uncle," he said. "It was his sister, my grandmother, who took me to the orphanage after her daughter, my mother, died giving birth to me. She was unmarried, of course-her name was Cunningham. My grandmother was extremely good to me. She paid handsomely for my keep until I was fifteen, and then, when she heard of my longing to go to art school, she paid my fees there. She loved me dearly too. She watched me from afar a number of times down the years and was so deeply affected each time that she suffered low spirits for days afterward."

"Joel-" she said, but he could not stop now that he had started.

"She could not let me see her, of course," he said. "She could not call at the orphanage and reveal herself to me. I might have climbed up onto the rooftop and yelled out the information for all of Bath to hear. Or someone might have seen her come and go and asked awkward questions. She could love me from afar and lavish money on me to show how much she cared, but she could not risk contamination by any personal contact. Something might have rubbed off on her and proved fatal to her health or her reputation. I was, after all, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of a fallen woman who just happened to be her daughter and apparently of an Italian artist of questionable talent who lived in Bath for long enough to turn the daughter's head and get her with child before fleeing, lest he be forced into doing the honorable thing and marrying her and making me respectable."

"Joel-" she said.

"Do you know what I was doing today between the time the carriage brought me back and the time I came to the schoolroom?" he asked, looking up at her. He did not wait for her to hazard a guess. "I wandered the streets, mentally squirming and clawing at myself as though to be rid of an itch. I felt-I feel as though I must be covered with lice and fleas and bed bugs and other vermin. Or perhaps the contaminating dirt is all inside me and I can never be rid of it. That must be it, I think, for I will never be anything but a b.a.s.t.a.r.d to be shunned by all respectable folk, will I?"

Good G.o.d, where was all this coming from?

"Joel," she said in her sergeant's voice, "stop it. Right this minute."

He looked blankly up at her and realized suddenly that he was sitting while she was still standing in the middle of the room. He leapt to his feet. "Yes, ma'am," he said, and made her a mock salute. "I feel as though I am teetering on the edge of a vast universe and am about to tumble off into the endless blackness of empty s.p.a.ce. And how is that for hyperbole, madam schoolmistress? I ought not to have brought you here. I ought not to have kept you standing while I have been sitting. You will think I am no gentleman and how very right you will be. And I ought not to be spouting all this pathetic nonsense into your ear. We scarcely know each other, after all. I a.s.sure you I am not usually this-"

"Joel," she said. "Stop."

And this time he did stop while she frowned at him and then took a few steps toward him. If he had not been fearing that at any moment he might faint, or fall off the edge of the universe, and if his teeth had not been chattering, he might have guessed her intent. But her hands were against his chest and then on his shoulders and then her arms were about his neck before he could do so, and by then it was too late not to take advantage of the comfort she offered. His arms went about her like iron bands and pressed her to him as though only by holding her could he keep himself upright and in one piece. He could feel the heat and the blessed life of her pressed to him from shoulders to knees. Her head was on his shoulder, her face turned in against his neck, her breath warm against his skin. He buried his face in her hair and felt almost safe.

Will you hold me, please? I need someone to hold me, she had said to him here on almost this very spot a few days ago. Now it was he making the same wordless plea.

Why exactly was he feeling so upset? He had always known that someone had handed him over to the orphanage, that whoever it was had chosen not to keep him, that in all probability that meant he was illegitimate, the unwanted product of an illicit union, something shameful that must be hidden away and denied for the rest of a lifetime. Yes, something-almost as though he were inanimate and therefore without real ident.i.ty or feelings. A b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He had always known, but he had never given it a great deal of thought. It was just the way things were and would always be. There was no point in brooding about it. Having learned now, though, the name and ident.i.ty of the woman who had abandoned him and her relationship to him-she had been his grandmother-and knowing how she had gazed on him in secret and been upset for days afterward without ever being upset enough to come and hug him, everything in him had erupted in pain. For now it was all real. And that man, his great-uncle, had insulted what little dignity he had, wanting to use him in order to wreak vengeance upon legitimate relatives who he believed had neglected him.

Joel knew all about neglect. He did not necessarily approve of vengeance, however, especially when he had been appointed as the avenging agent. Just like an inanimate thing again.

She used a sweet-smelling soap, something subtly but not overpoweringly floral. He could smell it in her hair. She was not slender, as her sister was and as Edwina was-and as Anna was. But her body was beautifully proportioned and voluptuously endowed. She was warm and nurturing and very feminine-despite the fact that on first acquaintance she had made him think of warrior Amazons, and despite the fact that she had just spoken to him in a voice of which an army sergeant might be proud.

They could not stand clasped thus together forever, he realized after a while, more was the pity. He sighed and moved his head as she raised her own, and they gazed at each other without speaking. She kept her femininity very well hidden most of the time, but her defenses were down at the moment. She was warm and yielding in his arms, and her eyes were smoky beneath slightly drooped eyelids.

He kissed her, openmouthed and needy, and tightened his hold on her again. He pressed his tongue to her closed lips and they parted to allow him to stroke the warm, moist flesh behind them. She shivered and opened her mouth and his tongue plunged into the heat within. He felt himself harden into the beginnings of arousal as his hands moved over her with a need that was somehow turning s.e.xual. But . . . she was offering comfort because he was bewildered and suffering. How could be take advantage of that generosity of spirit? He could not, of course. Reluctantly he loosened his hold on her and took a step back.

"I am so sorry," he said. "That was inappropriate. Forgive me, please. And I have not even invited you to sit down."

"I am sorry too," she said as she moved away from him to sit on the sofa. "I am sorry it has been so upsetting to you to have learned that your grandmother supported you but did not openly acknowledge you. It is the way the world works, though. It would have been stranger if she had made herself known to you. She had feelings for you despite everything, however, and she did do her best for you."

"Much good her tender sensibilities did me," he said. "And her best."

"Well, they did." She had herself firmly in hand again and looked like the stern, proper lady with whom he was more familiar. She sat with rigidly correct posture and a frown between her brows-she frowned rather often. "The orphanage is a good one. So, I a.s.sume, was the art school. You are a talented artist, but would you be doing as well as you are now if you had not gone there? She paid your fees. Could you have gone otherwise? Or would you have spent your life chopping meat at a butcher's shop while your talent withered away undeveloped and unused? She could not show her affection openly. It is just not done in polite society for b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to be openly acknowledged. And that is exactly what you are, Joel. Just as it is exactly what I am. Neither of us is to blame. It just is. Your grandmother did what she could regardless to see that you had all the necessities of life in a good home as you grew up and to help make your dream come true when you were old enough to leave."

"All the necessities." He stood with his hands at his back, looking down at her. He did not want to hear excuses for his grandmother. He wanted to feel angry and aggrieved, and he wanted someone to feel aggrieved for him. "Everything except love."

"So, would you rather not know what you learned today?" she asked him, her expression stern. "Would you prefer to have gone through life not even sure that your name was rightfully your own? Do you wish you had not gone to that house today?"

He thought about it. "I suppose not," he said grudgingly. "But what have I learned, Camille, beyond the very barest facts? My mother would never say who my father was. c.o.x-Phillips concluded he was the Italian painter solely on the evidence of my looks and the fact that I paint. I do not know anything about my mother and next to nothing about my grandmother. My great-uncle is the curmudgeon you said he used to be. I have no wish to know anything about his other three relatives, who are presumably mine too. And I do not imagine they would be delighted to know anything about their long-lost relative, an orphanage b.a.s.t.a.r.d, either."

"Mr. c.o.x-Phillips invited you to call on him, then, just in order to tell you the truth about yourself before he dies?" she asked him.

He stared at her. Had he not told her? No, he supposed he had not. "He wanted to write me into his will this afternoon," he said. "He wanted to leave me everything. Just to spite those other three. I said no, absolutely not. I was not going to have him use me in such a way."

She stared back at him.