Someone to Hold

by Mary Balogh

  “Yes to everything, ma’am,” he said, glancing at the younger sister, who was flushed with seeming delight. For the first time it struck him that she would perhaps be more of a challenge than he had first thought. It would be a joy to paint youth and beauty, but it was not his way to paint only what he saw with his eyes. Was there any depth of character behind the lovely, eager young face of Miss Abigail Westcott, or was she too young to have acquired any? It would be his task to find out.

  “Let us go down to the library to discuss details,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “I will have some refreshments brought there.”

  But it was Camille Westcott who had the last word before they left the room. “Did you know that Anastasia is coming here?” she asked him.

  He stopped in his tracks.

  “She and Avery,” she told him, “and all the rest of the Westcott family. They are coming to celebrate the seventieth birthday of the Dowager Countess of Riverdale, my other grandmother. You did not know, did you?”

  “No,” he said. No, he had not heard from Anna for more than a week. They did not write to each other as often as they had when she first left Bath. They remained close friends, but the fact that they were different genders complicated their relationship now that she was married. In addition, she was happy now and did not need his emotional support as she had at first. “No, I had not heard.”

  “I thought not.” She half smiled at him. Do you love her? she had asked yesterday when he had asked her if she hated Anna. She was too intelligent not to have noticed that he had evaded answering the question. Just as she had not answered his.

  Anna had rejected the only marriage offer he had made a few years ago, presumably because she did not love him. She had told him at the time that she thought of him as a brother. She had accepted Netherby’s offer, presumably because she did love him and he felt nothing like a brother. It was as simple as that. He was not suffering from unrequited love. His life was full and active and really far happier than he had ever expected it would be. But he would rather she had not been coming back to Bath so soon after the last time.

  “When do you think you will be able to start?” Mrs. Kingsley asked him as they descended the stairs.

  * * *

  Joel was striding back downhill half an hour later, hoping to reach level ground before the lowering clouds overhead decided to drop their rain upon him. He wondered what Anna would have to say when she knew he was painting her sisters’ portraits. And what she thought of the fact that Camille was teaching at the school. Dash it, but he missed the long, almost daily letters they had exchanged when Anna had first left Bath.

  Miss Camille Westcott was going to be difficult to paint. How was he to penetrate all that prickly hostility to discover the real person within, especially when she was determined that he would not succeed? It was altogether possible she would be his biggest artistic challenge yet. As he reached the bottom of the hill and strode briskly in the direction of Bath Abbey, the rain began to fall, not heavily, but in large drops that promised a downpour at any minute. He felt the first stirrings of the excitement a particularly intriguing commission always aroused in him. It did not happen often, but he loved it when it did. It made him feel more like an artist and less like a mere jobber—though he hoped he was never just that.

  He ducked into the abbey just as the heavens opened, and took a seat in a back pew. He found that he was actually looking forward to sharing the schoolroom tomorrow. That had not happened since Anna left.

  Five

  She was within a few hours of surviving her first week of teaching, Camille thought early the following afternoon. But could she do it all over again next week and the week after and so on? If, that was, she was kept on after her fortnight’s trial. How did people manage to work for a living day in and day out all their lives? Well, she would find out. She might be sacked at the end of next week, but she would not quit on her own, and she would find something else to do if she was judged not fit to teach here. For if she had learned anything in the last week and a half, it was that when one had taken that first determined step out into the rest of one’s life, one had to keep on striding forward—or retreat and be forever defeated.

  She would not retreat.

  She would not be defeated.

  And that was that.

  She had done a great deal of soul-searching last evening after reading Aunt Louise’s cheerful, affectionate letter, full of plans for what they would all do in Bath, and after listening to her grandmother and Abigail talk all evening about the myriad pleasures to which they could look forward. The arrival of such illustrious persons would set the whole of Bath society agog, Grandmama had predicted, and everyone would be eager to be a part of any entertainment at which they could be expected to appear. Camille and Abigail would at last be able to step out of the shadows in which they had been lurking to be acknowledged as part of the family.

  Camille was not at all sure she wanted that to happen. She was not sure it ought to happen. She knew she was not ready to rely upon the influence of her family to draw her into a sort of life that could not possibly be more than a shadow of its former self. She did not know yet what she wanted or even who she was, but she was sure—at least, she thought she was—that she needed to stand on her own feet until she had discovered the answers. Would she ever discover them?

  She had made a new decision before she lay down for the night. As a result, she had arisen at first light this morning to write a letter and make a few other preparations, and still be able to arrive early for school in order to have a word with Miss Ford. She had learned from a chance remark made during luncheon earlier in the week that the room that had been Anastasia’s when she lived and taught here was still unoccupied. It seemed to be looked upon as some sort of shrine. And this, Camille could almost imagine visitors being told as they were shown around the building, was where the Duchess of Netherby once lived when she was known as plain Anna Snow. Camille had asked this morning if she might move into the room and pay for her board out of her earnings. Miss Ford had looked at her with disconcerting intensity for several silent moments before asking if she had ever seen the room. Camille had not, and Miss Ford took her there.

  It was shockingly small. Her dressing room at Hinsford Manor had surely been larger. The furnishings consisted of a narrow bed, an equally narrow chest of four drawers, a small table with an upright wooden chair, and a washstand with a bowl and pitcher upon it. There were three hooks affixed to the wall behind the door, a mirror on the door, and a small mat beside the bed.

  Camille had swallowed hard, lest she make some inadvertent sound of distress, thought about changing her mind, and then, before she could, asked again if she could have the room. Miss Ford had said yes, and Camille had gone in search of the porter to ask if he could make arrangements to have the bag and portmanteau she had packed earlier fetched from the house at the Royal Crescent. She had also handed him the letter she had written to her grandmother and Abigail before leaving for school.

  She had packed in the bags only what she considered the bare essentials for her new life, but even so she wondered if there would be space for everything in the room. The bags had arrived before luncheon, with a note in Abby’s hand, though she had not had time to unpack yet or read the letter. Actually, she had been deliberately avoiding it.

  Camille felt a bit sick to the stomach and was glad she had had no time to eat any luncheon. Even now she could change her mind if she wished, of course. Or tomorrow, or the day after. It was not as if she had done something irrevocable. Except she knew that if she admitted defeat on this one point, then she would soon be admitting it on every point.

  She would not change her mind. If Anastasia had been able to live and work here, then so could she.

  By the early afternoon, she was feeling exhausted and, as usual, untidy and inadequate. The children, in contrast, were as animated and as noisy as they had been all wee
k. Did children ever speak at any volume lower than a shriek? Did they ever run out of energy?

  And then the schoolroom door opened to admit Mr. Cunningham, and Camille felt that his arrival was the last straw. As if she did not have enough to think about without wondering what he thought of her as a teacher and as a person—and without knowing that he would be watching and listening, as she had invited him to do, so that he could paint that infernal portrait for Grandmama. She had even offered to answer any written questions with which he cared to present her. Surely he would not dare. She glared at him as though he had already done something to offend her—as he had. He had come.

  He stopped on the threshold, as he had done two days ago, one hand on the doorknob, and gazed at the scene before him in open astonishment. As well he might.

  “We are learning to knit, Mr. Cunningham,” Jane Evans, one of the youngest and tiniest of the girls, screeched in her high, piping voice a moment before she started to wail, “Miss, I have dropped all my s-s-stitches.”

  Again? Was this the third or the fourth time? This had not been a good idea, Camille thought as she hurried to the rescue.

  “So I see,” the art master replied. “It is a hive of industry in here. The boys too?”

  A typical male remark. Camille did not even dignify it with another glare. She was busy anyway, picking up stitches.

  “In some countries, sir,” Cyrus North informed him, “it is only the men and boys who knit, while the women and girls spin the wool. Miss Westcott told us so when Tommy said only girls knit and sew.”

  How else was she to have persuaded the boys not to mutiny?

  “We are making a rope, sir,” Olga Norton shrieked. Her segment of it was already a couple of inches long, she and a few of the other older girls having already learned to knit had considerable practice. They were both able and willing to be Camille’s helpers in the gargantuan task of showing the boys and the younger girls how it was done and in rescuing them from almost constant difficulties and mishaps.

  Paul Hubbard was darting after his ball of wool, which had dropped from his lap yet again to roll merrily across the floor, unwinding as it went.

  “Ah, a rope. Yes, of course,” Mr. Cunningham said cheerfully, proceeding all the way into the room and closing the door behind him. “In twenty different sections. Why did I not see at a glance? I feel compelled to ask, however. Why a rope?”

  He was clearly enjoying himself—at her expense, Camille thought. It really was the maddest idea she had had yet.

  A chorus of voices was raised in reply, and a score of stitches were dropped and half a dozen wool balls rolled in pursuit of Paul’s. It was only amazing, perhaps, that most of the children had stitches on their needles at all and that almost all had at least a small fringe of what looked roughly like knitted fabric hanging from them.

  He was grinning. How dared he? He would be undermining her authority.

  “We went on another outing this morning,” Camille explained, silencing at least for a moment the clamor around her. “We walked over the bridge and along Great Pulteney Street to Sydney Gardens. Everyone was obedient to the command to walk in a line two by two, holding hands with a partner. Unfortunately, though, each pair chose a different speed and a different moment at which to hurry up or slow down or halt completely to observe something of interest. I was really more surprised than I can say when we arrived at the gardens to discover that everyone was present and accounted for even if a few were still straggling up from some distance away. And the same thing happened on our return to the school. I would not have been at all shocked to discover that I had lost a pupil or three on the way.”

  “Oh, not three, miss,” Winifred informed her. “We were walking in twos, holding hands.”

  Only Winifred . . .

  “A good observation, Winifred,” Camille said. “Two pupils or four, then.”

  “Or you could have lost some of us in the maze, miss,” Jimmy Dale added to a flurry of laughter. “We all went into it, sir, and we all got lost because we kept dashing about in a panic and listening to one another instead of working out a system, which is what Miss Westcott said afterward we ought to have done. She had to come in there herself to rescue the last four of us or we might still be there, and we would all have missed our luncheon and Cook would have been cross.”

  “Miss Westcott did not get lost herself in the maze?” Mr. Cunningham asked. He was still grinning, his arms crossed over his chest, and still clearly enjoying himself enormously. And he was looking more handsome than Camille wanted him to look. Whatever must he be thinking of her? Paul had retrieved his ball of wool and was chasing someone else’s, causing the two lengths of wool to tangle together.

  “She did get lost,” Richard said, “but she found the four who was missing and brought them out by using a system. She was not in there more than ten minutes.”

  “Eleven,” Winifred said.

  “The four who were missing, Richard. Plural,” Camille said. “We are knitting a rope, Mr. Cunningham, so that everyone can hold on to it whenever we go walking. As well as keeping everyone together and safe, it will teach cooperation. The older pupils will have to shorten their stride to accommodate the younger ones, and the brisk walkers will have to slow down a bit while the loiterers will have to keep a steady pace.”

  Mr. Cunningham was looking at her with laughing eyes, and Tommy announced that he had two more stitches on his needle than he had had when he started the row and asked if that was a good thing.

  “Artists,” Camille said firmly, “you will be delighted to know that it is time to go to your art lesson.”

  There was one faint cheer and a few protests that the pieces would never grow long enough to be crocheted together into a rope if they did not keep at their knitting. But within minutes the art class was in progress. Mr. Cunningham was teaching his group an actual skill today. He was demonstrating with charcoal on paper how to achieve perspective and depth. The accomplished knitters who remained on Camille’s side of the room settled down with clacking needles to a steady rhythm, and the learners gradually mastered the art of knitting from one end of a row to the other with a regular tension and no stitches either added or dropped. Most followed her suggestion to unwind a length of wool before they actually needed it so that the ball would not be constantly jerked onto the floor to roll away. Within an hour Camille felt able to pick up a book and read aloud to a relatively tranquil room.

  She was one step closer to surviving her first week.

  And now she was fully and officially exhausted—with bags still to unpack upstairs. She was also still half convinced that she must be the world’s worst teacher. But there was a certain feeling of triumph that she had done what she had set out to do. She had even gone one step further than she had originally planned. She was on her own. On Monday she would start her second week of teaching and perhaps do better.

  Why, then, did she feel like bawling?

  Jane, seemingly in unconscious sympathy, suddenly burst into noisy tears as one of her needles jerked free of the stitches and went somersaulting end over end over her desk to clatter onto the floor. Camille lowered the book with an inward sigh, but one of the older girls had already hurried to the child’s rescue with helping hands and soothing murmurs.

  * * *

  They were knitting a rope in more than twenty parts. Whatever had put such an insane idea into her head? It afforded Joel endless amusement for the rest of the afternoon. Would it not have been less costly, less trouble, and a good deal faster to buy one or, better yet, to ask Roger if there was a length lying around somewhere in the building? She must have applied to Miss Ford to use some of the cash that was reserved for extra school supplies. Joel wondered if she realized it was Anna who had set up that fund quite recently and promised to replenish it whenever it ran low. Who, he wondered, was going to join all the pieces into one when they were finished? Had she
thought that far ahead?

  And why bright purple?

  But perhaps, he thought as the afternoon wore on, it was actually a brilliant idea she had had, just as the shop had been. Knitting was a useful skill to have, for boys as well as for girls, but how could one persuade the boys and the reluctant girls to want to learn and keep at the task unless one could interest them in the production of some specific object? And how could one persuade the children, especially the older ones, to walk the streets of Bath clinging to a purple rope that would connect them together like an umbilical cord and make keeping an eye on them easier for their teacher unless one could give them a proprietary interest in the thing? How was one to devise a practical project on which all could work together regardless of age and gender, and one on which the older and more experienced could help the younger and more halting? She was actually teaching far more than the basic skill itself. And the children were excited . . . about learning to knit.

  His own group was attentive enough as he taught some of the tricks of creating depth and perspective. But when they proceeded to work on the exercise he set, they also listened to the story she was reading and an unusual peace descended on the schoolroom, broken only occasionally by a cry of anguish from one of the knitters. Each time that happened, one of the other children went quietly to the rescue so that Miss Westcott could continue with the story. The air of contentment in the room was especially extraordinary for a Friday afternoon in July.

  She looked as forbidding and humorless as ever, Joel thought, observing her covertly as he kept an eye on his own group, offering quiet suggestions and comments as needed. She spoke like an army sergeant, even when reading aloud. She displayed none of the sparkle and warmth that had characterized Anna and made her so beloved in the schoolroom. The children ought to be as miserable as they had been under Miss Nunce’s brief, unlamented reign. That they were not was a bit of a puzzle. Miss Westcott was a bit of a puzzle. She looked one thing, yet was another.