Someone to Hold

by Mary Balogh

  “I do not know.” She shrugged. “But Abby has missed her.”

  “And you?” he asked.

  “I do not know,” she said again, and it was her turn to look out through the window on her side of the carriage in order to discourage further conversation—though she was the one who had brought up the subject. It was actually a good thing she had read her mother’s letter early this morning before school. She had been unable to weep over it—she had had a class of children to face. Would it have made a difference if Mama had stayed? Abby was only eighteen, little more than a child. And as for Camille herself . . . Well, sometimes she felt as though she had been cast into outer darkness. She had felt when she came to Bath that there could not possibly be anything more to lose. But there was. Her mother had gone away.

  The carriage was making a sharp turn between two stone gateposts and then proceeding along a winding driveway until a modestly sized mansion appeared to the right, a panoramic view downward opened up to the left, and a carefully laid-out, well-tended garden stretched out on either side of them.

  “This is it,” Joel said unnecessarily.

  He helped Camille alight, instructed the coachman to wait, and approached the steps to rap the knocker against the front door. He was looking grim again, and she knew he would rather be anywhere else on earth. She could not feel sorry, though, that she had goaded him into coming. She really believed he would be forever sorry if he did not. Of course, Mr. Cox-Phillips might refuse to see him or to answer any questions if he did admit them. But at least Joel would be able to console himself in the future with the knowledge that he had done everything he could.

  An elderly butler admitted them to a hall cluttered with marble busts surely designed to make any chance visitor uncomfortable enough to flee. They all had empty eye sockets but stared anyway. Camille stared right back after the butler had gone off to see if his master was receiving. He had looked as though he might be on the verge of refusing even to check until his eyes had alit upon Camille, and without conscious thought she had reverted to a familiar role and had become Lady Camille Westcott without uttering a word. He had inclined his head deferentially and gone on his way.

  “He may have been instructed to toss me out if I should ever have the effrontery to return,” Joel said with a grin that did not quite compensate for the tense look on his face.

  “Then it is a good thing I came too,” she said. “I have my uses. I do not for one moment believe these marble busts are either marble or authentic. If they came from Italy or Greece or anywhere other than some inferior workshop in England, I would be very surprised.”

  “We concur in that,” he agreed.

  The butler returned and invited them to follow him. They were admitted to a library, one that lived up to its name. As far as she could see from a single glance, there was not a space on the walls that was not taken up with bookshelves, and there was surely not a space left on those shelves for even one more book. The room was in semidarkness, heavy curtains having been drawn across the windows, perhaps to preserve the books or perhaps to protect the old man’s eyes from bright sunlight.

  There were three people already in the room, apart from the butler, who withdrew after admitting them and closed the door behind him. There was what appeared to be a very old, wizened man in the chair by the fireplace—the fire was lit even though the air was stifling. He even had a heavy blanket covering him from the waist down and a tasseled nightcap on his head. Behind his chair stood a soberly clad individual, every line of whose body told Camille that he could be nothing else but a valet.

  The third occupant of the room was silhouetted against the fireplace so that until he moved he appeared only as a tall, broad-shouldered, well-formed man dressed in the very height of London fashion. When he did move, in order to take a few steps away from the fire and toward the door, he revealed himself also to be an extremely handsome man—with a haughty, condescending expression on his face.

  “That is quite far enough, fellow,” he said, looking Joel over from head to toe with insolent contempt and the aid of a quizzing glass. “I can see the butler ought to have known better than to come asking if he might admit you when my cousin is not well enough to make an informed decision. I shall be having a word with the servants about allowing in every riffraff petitioner who thinks to take advantage of Mr. Cox-Phillips’s advanced age and frail health. Fortunately for him, such persons will have to get past me in the future now that I am here to protect him. You may take yourself off with the . . . lady.” He turned dismissive eyes upon Camille, who had remained behind Joel, half hidden in shadow.

  She felt close to fainting, though not from the heat of the room. The training of years kept her from doing anything so missish or from otherwise humiliating herself. “How do you do, Lord Uxbury?” she said, stepping out of the shadows and looking him steadily in the eye.

  He dropped his quizzing glass on its ribbon, and his eyes fairly started from his head. It was a brief setback. He recovered within moments, and a sneer replaced his look of shock. “Well, upon my word, if it is not Miss Westcott,” he said, emphasizing her title, or, rather, her lack thereof, and subjecting her to a sweeping head-to-toe perusal.

  She had last seen him at Westcott House in London on the afternoon of the day she learned the truth about her father and his bigamous marriage to her mother. She had received him and told him what she had just learned, expecting that he would be full of concern for her plight and determination to bring forward their wedding. That had been shortsighted of her, of course, for he was as much a stickler for social correctness as she and it would have been out of the question for him to marry a bastard. He had taken a hasty leave and written to her almost immediately suggesting that she send a notice to the morning papers, breaking off their betrothal.

  Now he looked both familiar and . . . alien. As though he were someone from another long-ago lifetime, which, in a sense, he was. She had never before seen that look of contempt on his face directed at her. She had never witnessed him being spiteful. But she recalled that he had openly insulted her in her absence at Avery’s ball and again in Hyde Park during the duel. And she recalled with intense satisfaction that Avery, who must be a full head shorter than he and surely at least a couple of stone lighter, had knocked him down and out with his bare feet.

  “I beg your pardon . . . Viscount Uxbury, is it?” Joel said. “But my business is with Mr. Cox-Phillips. When I spoke with him a couple of days ago, he seemed perfectly capable of speaking for himself and of personally asking me to leave if he so desires.”

  Camille looked at him in some surprise. He was not quite as tall as the viscount, and he did not have such a splendid physique or as obviously handsome a face. Indeed, he looked even more shabby than usual in contrast to the splendor of Lord Uxbury’s Bond Street tailoring. But he looked suddenly very solid and immovable. And he looked in no way cowed at having been called a fellow and a riffraff petitioner. He spoke with quiet, firm courtesy.

  “If this is not the first time you have come to pester my cousin,” the viscount said, “then it is a very good thing I came when I did. And Miss Westcott is not fit company for anyone in this house or any other respectable dwelling.”

  “You have come back, then, have you?” the elderly gentleman said from beside the fire. “You have changed your mind, have you?”

  “I have not, sir,” Joel assured him. “I have come on a different matter.”

  “Do not distress yourself, Cousin,” the viscount said, his manner transformed into something altogether more soothing and deferential. “I shall escort this fellow and his . . . doxy out to—”

  “I will distress myself, goddamn it, Uxbury,” the old man said irritably, “if you continue treating me as though I had more than just one foot in the grave. How dare you treat me as if I have an imbecile mind, and not more than half an hour after you set foot in my house? Uninvited, I might add. Go an
d find yourself a guest room to stay in for a few nights if you must stay while you still have first choice. I daresay the other two claimants to my fortune are springing their horses in the hope of getting here as fast as they can.”

  “I will see this fellow and his woman out before I do so, Cousin,” Viscount Uxbury said. “Your physician would not wish you to—”

  “My physician,” the old gentleman said, one of his hands closing about the knob of a cane by his side and banging it feebly on the floor, “would not want me to be plagued to death a few days earlier than I will be popping off anyway by relatives who pretend to believe that they have my best interests at heart. And I pay a butler to show guests in and out. I believe I pay him handsomely. Do I, Orville?”

  “You do, sir,” his valet assured him.

  “Out.” Mr. Cox-Phillips raised his cane a few inches from the floor and waved it in the viscount’s direction. “And you two, come forward and have a seat.”

  Joel and Camille stood aside to let Viscount Uxbury pass. He looked haughtily and with considerable venom from one to the other of them as he did so, and Camille could not resist expressing some spite of her own.

  “I hope you did not take any permanent harm from the kick you took to the chin, Lord Uxbury,” she said.

  His jaw hardened, and he strode from the room. Camille met Joel’s eyes briefly, and it was possible she saw the hint of a smile there. But then he gestured toward the heavy sofa that faced the fireplace adjacent to Mr. Cox-Phillips’s chair. She went and sat down, and Joel took his place beside her.

  “May I present Miss Camille Westcott, a friend and colleague who was kind enough to accompany me here today, sir?” Joel said.

  The gentleman’s eyes turned upon Camille and examined her closely from beneath bushy eyebrows. “I do not have an imbecile mind, young lady, despite my age and infirmity,” he said. “You were once betrothed to that relative of mine, I recall. Riverdale’s daughter, I believe—the late Riverdale.”

  “That is correct, sir,” she said. “I broke off the engagement after it was discovered that my father was already married when he wed my mother and that my sister and brother and I were therefore illegitimate.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “That was the reason, was it? It was unsporting of Uxbury to call you a doxy just now, though I am not surprised. A nasty little weasel of a child, he was, I remember. Not that I saw him often. I took pains not to. Families tend to be pestilential collections of people who just happen to share some blood, but mine was always worse than most. Or do all people think that? What is your connection to Cunningham? The word colleague is meaningless without an explanation.”

  “I teach school at the orphanage where he grew up,” she explained. “He volunteers his services as a teacher there too. I offered to accompany him here when he decided to return.”

  “You convinced him, did you,” he said, “that he was an idiot to turn down the chance of inheriting the bulk of my fortune just because of a bit of pride?”

  “I did no such thing, sir,” she said.

  “And yet,” he said, “you could have had a splendid revenge upon Uxbury by talking your colleague into doing him out of what he thinks to inherit.” His nightcap had slipped down almost over one of his eyes, and his hand had slid off the head of the cane, which fell to the carpet. “Orville, rearrange those damned cushions behind me. Where are they?”

  The valet plumped up the cushions behind and to both sides of the old gentleman, moved him gently back against them, straightened his nightcap, tucked the blanket more securely about his waist, and picked up his cane.

  “I came back,” Joel said when the valet had resumed his place behind the chair, “to find out more about my mother and my grandmother, sir. And there has been no mention of my grandfather. But perhaps you are not feeling well enough—”

  “A worthless waste of space and air,” Mr. Cox-Phillips said. “Henry Cunningham inherited a tidy sum of money and sat on it for the rest of his life without either enjoying it or investing it—or spending any of it on my sister or my niece. An amiable idiot who came to stay here for a week soon after his marriage and left here almost twenty years later in his coffin. I was happy to spend much of that time in London.”

  “Henry,” Joel said. “And what was my grandmother’s name, sir? And my mother’s?”

  “My sister was Mary,” the old man said. “My niece was Dorinda. She must have been named by her idiot of a father. Who else would have named a poor girl Dorinda?”

  “What can you tell me about her?” Joel asked. “What did she look like?”

  “Not anything like you, young man,” Mr. Cox-Phillips assured him gruffly. “She was small and blond and blue eyed and pretty and as silly as girls come. She led my sister a merry dance before she took after that foreign painter fellow, but the dance became less merry when he disappeared off the face of the earth and she started growing plump and denying everything under the stars that could be denied. When denials were no longer of any use, she swore to her mother that he was not the one, but she would not say who was. If it was not the painter, though, then there must have been another Italian in Bath. There is no mistaking your lineage.”

  “You do not remember his name?” Joel asked.

  “I never made the smallest effort either to learn it or to memorize it,” the old man said, pausing for a few moments while his breath rasped in and out. “Why should I? He was beneath my notice. He ought to have been beneath my niece’s notice too, but he was a handsome devil and she was too like her father—nothing much in her brain to hold her ears apart.” His eyes fluttered closed and his head drooped back against the cushions while he caught his breath again.

  “We must leave you to rest, sir,” Joel said, getting to his feet.

  The old gentleman’s eyes opened. “It was a good thing for you,” he said irritably, “that you turned up here so soon after Uxbury. I doubtless would not have allowed you in otherwise. You made yourself perfectly clear a few days ago and I have no reason to feel kindly toward you.”

  “Then I must be thankful that my timing was so good,” Joel said. “I will not trouble you further, sir. Thank you for telling me what you have about my mother and grandparents.”

  The eyes had closed again. But Mr. Cox-Phillips spoke once more. “Orville,” he said, “have someone go into my sister’s room and find that miniature she always kept beside her bed. I daresay it is still there. I do not know where else it would be. Have it given to Mr. Cunningham on his way out. I will be glad to be rid of it.”

  The valet took a few steps forward and pulled on the bell rope beside the mantel.

  “A miniature?” Joel asked.

  “Of my niece,” the old man said without opening his eyes.

  Camille got to her feet and turned to leave. The poor man looked very tired and very ill. But Joel stood frowning down at him.

  “Who painted it, sir?” he asked.

  “Ah.” There was a rumble from the chair, which Camille realized was a laugh. “You may blame—or thank—your grandmother that you exist, young man. She took Dorinda to him. He was Italian and handsome and spoke in that silly accent Italians tend to affect, and it seemed to follow that he must therefore be an artist of superior talent. He painted her.”

  He clearly had nothing more to say. After regarding him for a few moments longer, Joel looked blankly at Camille and walked beside her from the room and down the stairs. They waited silently in the hall until the butler came and handed a small cloth-bound bundle to Joel before opening the door for them.

  The carriage had waited.

  Twelve

  Joel slid the package down the side of the seat next to the window. It had been called a miniature, but it felt a bit larger than that to him. He would wait to unwrap it until he was alone.

  Henry and Mary Cunningham.

  Dorinda Cunningham.

  Th
ree strangers. All dead. They did not feel like people who were in any way connected to him, though he shared their name and their blood. Would his mother seem more real when he looked at her likeness? Or less so? Would he sense his father’s hand in the composition and the brushstrokes? Would he see from her face that she had been looking into his father’s, and what she had felt doing so? He felt sick with apprehension at the thought of unwrapping the package. He almost wished the portrait did not exist or that Cox-Phillips had not remembered it.

  The carriage lurched into motion and he recalled that he was not the only one whose emotions had been aroused during this visit. Camille had come here with him after a full day of teaching to offer moral support, only to find herself horribly insulted by the man she had once been close to marrying.

  “I am so sorry,” he said.

  “About Viscount Uxbury calling me a doxy?” she said. “About his saying that I was not fit to be in that house? Why would you be sorry? You did not say it. Nor did you drag me here.”

  “Despite the old saying about sticks and stones,” he said, “words do hurt. And you once held him in high enough esteem to agree to marry him.”

  “I always thought that above all else he was a gentleman,” she said. “It hurts to know I was so wrong. And it always hurts to be accused of being something one is not. Yet I cannot help remembering that when Anastasia was admitted to Avery’s salon and offered a seat, I was outraged because she was not fit to be in that house with respectable people, among whose number I counted myself. Sometimes other people’s words become uncomfortable mirrors in which we gaze upon ourselves.”

  “I must repeat what I have said before,” he said. “That man is altogether unworthy of you, Camille. He is a thoroughly nasty customer, and you had a fortunate escape from him. What I was really apologizing for, however, was my own negligence in not smashing that aristocratic nose of his and blackening both his eyes. I ought to have done that much for you—and rammed his teeth down his throat. I have been put to shame by the Duke of Netherby.”