Someone to Hold

by Mary Balogh

  “I cannot bring myself to look at it,” he said abruptly.

  She stared blankly at him for a moment before realizing his thoughts had not been moving along the same lines as her own.

  “I could not bring myself to unwrap it in the carriage yesterday. I thought I needed to be alone. But I was alone all evening and all night and this morning until I went up to the Royal Crescent to make more sketches of your sister. I did not once even glance its way. Now I cannot bear the thought of going home alone and knowing it is there and that I do not have the courage to deal with it. There must be something wrong with me.”

  What if she had never known her own mother? What if now suddenly and unexpectedly she had been presented with a portrait of her, all neatly wrapped up? She would surely be all fingers and thumbs in her eagerness to tear off the wraps that kept that image from her view. Or would she? Would she too be afraid to look? To see the face she had never looked upon in real life and never would now? To see the face of a stranger she could not quite believe was her mother? To come face-to-face with the loneliness she had spent a lifetime denying? She thought of her own mother, of her resentment that she had gone, leaving her two daughters behind in Bath. But at least Mama was alive. At least Camille could bring her image to mind, complete with voice and touch and characteristic gestures and fragrance.

  “Do you think there is?” he asked. “It is only a painting, after all, and probably not even a good one, if Cox-Phillips was right about my father’s talent.”

  “Do you want me open the package with you?” she asked.

  He did not immediately answer but continued to frown at her. “I cannot ask it of you,” he said.

  But he had not said no. He wanted her—no, he needed to have her with him. She was a bit shaken by the rush of . . . joy she felt. When had anyone ever needed her?

  “You did not ask,” she said. “I offered.”

  “Then yes,” he said. But he smiled suddenly. “What if I then discover that I need to be alone?”

  “Then I will come back here.” She shrugged. “I need the exercise anyway.”

  “After all the dancing?” He was still smiling.

  “I will fetch my bonnet and shawl,” she said, and left the room.

  He had not told Anastasia about his discovery of his identity. He had not told her about the portrait of his mother. He had not asked her to go with him to give him the courage to look at it. Not that he had asked her, Camille, exactly, but she knew he wanted her to be with him. Oh, she wished, wished, wished she did not hate Anastasia. In her head she did not, but her heart would not seem to soften. She must make a determined effort to be civil tomorrow evening and during the coming week. But she already was civil. She must go beyond civility, then. She must initiate some conversation with Anastasia, show some interest in her, find some common ground they might share—the school, perhaps, and the pupils they had both taught. She would learn to like the woman if it was the last thing she ever did. Perhaps in time she would even be able to call her sister without always having to add the word half in order to set the proper distance between them.

  They did not talk during the walk to Grove Street or while he unlocked the door of the house and she started on her way upstairs ahead of him. Unlike the other two times she had been here, though, a door on the first floor opened abruptly as she rounded the newel post to continue upward, and a man’s head appeared around the door.

  “Is that you, Joel?” he asked. “I wonder if you— Oh, pardon me.” And his head disappeared back inside and the door clicked shut before either Camille or Joel could say a word.

  “Marvin Silver, my neighbor,” Joel said. “I am so sorry, Camille. I did not expect he would be home yet. I would not have had that happen to you for worlds, especially when you are doing me such a favor.”

  “It does not matter,” she said. “And I offered to come, if you will remember.” She waited for him to unlock the door to his rooms and then hung up her bonnet and went into the living room.

  “I will have a word with him,” he said. “He will not tell anyone.”

  “It does not matter, Joel,” she said again. “I am sick and tired of the rigid rules of propriety that have always governed my behavior. What have they ever done for me?”

  “Well,” he said, “if you can be so brave and decisive, then so can I. It is in the studio. It. You see? I cannot even name it. I fervently wish Cox-Phillips had not even thought of it yesterday.”

  “Bring it out here, then,” she said, “and I will look at it with you. Or I will turn my back and look out through the window while you do so alone, if you would prefer.”

  “No,” he said. “In there.”

  She raised her eyebrows. Into the studio? Was it not his holy of holies? The one place he took no one?

  He turned to her outside the closed door and extended a hand for hers. “Come in with me. Please,” he said.

  Fourteen

  Joel took Camille’s hand in his and took her into his studio. It was an incredibly difficult thing to do. He had never before invited anyone into his work space, even when it was just his crowded bedchamber.

  His almost-completed portrait of Mrs. Wasserman was on the easel, the eighteen charcoal sketches he had done of her strewn on the table beside it. It was an odd moment for him to realize what had been nagging at him for days, the missing detail that would allow him to complete the portrait and sign his name to it, satisfied that it was the best he could possibly do. Although she was always carefully, elaborately coiffed, there was invariably one slender lock of hair that escaped the rest and curled across her forehead just beyond the outer edge of her left eyebrow. It was surely in every one of the sketches, but it was absent from the portrait. She did not look quite herself without it. And such a very small omission made all the difference.

  But this was not why he had come in here and brought Camille with him. He took Mrs. Wasserman’s portrait off the easel and set it on the table beside the sketches. Then he strode over to the corner of the room behind the door and picked up the clothbound package he had propped against the wall there yesterday and stood it on the easel instead.

  “Come and see,” he said as he removed the cloth carefully and dropped it to the floor. She came to stand silently beside him.

  His first reaction—perhaps it was a defensive one—was purely critical. She had been formally posed on a gilt-backed, gilt-armed chair, one elbow resting on a small cloth-covered table beside her, her hand dangling gracefully over her lap, holding a closed ivory fan. Her other hand rested on the back of a tiny dog in her lap, its eyes all but invisible beneath its long hair. She was half smiling at the beholder with a carefully contrived expression. There was a certain stiffness about it and about her pose generally, and Joel knew that she had been painted from life, and that she had sat still, probably for hours at a time, while the artist painted her. She was pretty, dainty, graceful—and totally unreal. Looking at her, one saw only the prettiness, the daintiness, the grace, the perfection of hair and complexion and dress and expression, and nothing of the person herself. The eyes looked outward but did nothing to draw the beholder inward. There was no hint of character, of mood, of vitality, of individuality. One could see this young woman, even admire her beauty and the care with which she and her props and surroundings had been arranged and painted. But one could not know her.

  His second reaction was that outside the painting, where he was standing now, was the invisible figure of the painter. There was no hint, either in the facial expression and posture of the woman or in the way she had been painted, of any connection of tenderness, of intimacy, of passion, of love between painter and subject. Had he expected there would be? Had he feared there would not?

  His third reaction—the one he had been holding back—was that this was his mother. She was blond, blue eyed, apparently small and dainty, pretty in a fresh, youthful way without any in
dividuality to set her apart from hundreds of other young ladies her age. She was his mother. She had died giving birth to him. He wondered how old she had been. She looked no older than eighteen in the portrait, probably younger. And the hand that had painted her—the invisible hand though it had touched this canvas numerous times—was his father’s.

  His fourth reaction was that the painting had not been signed. He had not even realized that he had been hoping for some clue, however small, to his father’s identity.

  He became aware again of Camille standing beside him, looking at the painting with him, but not speaking, for which fact he was grateful.

  “Cox-Phillips was right about one thing,” he said, surprised to hear his voice sounding quite normal. “The painter was not particularly talented.” Why had he chosen that of all things to say? The painter was his father—at least, in all probability he was. “He left the beholder with no clue as to who she was. I do not mean her identity. That must be undisputed. I mean her, her character and personality. I see a pretty girl. That is all. I do not feel—”

  “The connection of son to mother?” she said softly after he had circled one hand ineffectually in the air without finding the words he needed.

  “Did I expect to?” he said. “Did I expect to know her as soon as I saw her? To recognize her as part of myself? It is not the painter’s fault, is it, that she is just a pretty stranger, a decade younger than I. I wonder if the dog was hers or the painter’s. Or was it a figment of his imagination? But there is no other evidence that he had an imagination or could paint something that was not before his eyes. He painted her as she sat there before him. She had to sit still for a long time and probably over several sessions.”

  His hand reached out to touch the paint, but he rested his fingertips on the top of the frame instead.

  “There is no evidence,” he said, “that he loved her or felt anything for her. Did I expect that there would be? A grand passion transmitted onto the canvas by a painter deeply enamored of his subject, to be transmitted to the beholder more than a quarter of a century later?” He closed his eyes and lowered his head. “It is a pretty picture.”

  All his life there had been an emptiness, a blank, where his parents ought to have been. He had never dwelled upon it. He had got on with his life, and he had little of which to complain. On the whole, life had been good to him. But the emptiness had always been there, a sort of hollow at the center of his being. Now there was something to fit into that hollow, and it brought pain with it. So close, he thought. Ah, so close. They were so close to him, those two, painter and painted, father and mother, yet so eternally unattainable.

  “Joel.” Her voice was a whisper of sound from beside him.

  Why the devil was he going all to pieces over a mere painting, and not a very skilled one at that? He could have lived the whole of the rest of his life knowing no more than he had ever known about himself without feeling any pain greater than that certain emptiness. Why should knowing a little feel worse than knowing nothing? Because knowing a little made him greedy for more when there was no more?

  He would find a place to hang the painting, he decided, somewhere prominent, where he would see it every day, where it would no longer be something almost to fear but on the contrary, an everyday part of his surroundings. It must hang somewhere where other people would see it too, and he would point it out to any of his friends who came here—Ah yes, that is my mother when she was very young. Pretty, was she not? The painter was my father. He was Italian. He returned to Italy before he knew I was on the way and she never did let him know. A bit tragic, yes. I suppose there was a reason. A lovers’ quarrel, perhaps. She died giving birth to me, you know. Perhaps she intended to write to him afterward. Perhaps he waited to hear from her and assumed she had forgotten him and was too proud to come back. A comfortable myth would grow around the few facts he knew.

  He turned to look at Camille. “I will not paint you with a contrived smile on your face,” he told her, “or with a fan in one hand that has no function but to be decorative. I will not set a little toy of a dog on your lap to arouse sentiment in the beholder. I will not paint you with flat eyes and an unnatural perfection of feature and coloring.”

  “They would have to be very unnatural,” she said. “And I do not like little dogs. They yap.”

  He smiled at her and then laughed—and then reached for her and drew her against him with such force that he felt the air whoosh out of her lungs. He did not loosen his hold but clasped her as though she were his only anchor in a turbulent sea. She let herself be held and set her arms about him. Her face was turned in against his neck. For long moments he buried his own face against her hair and breathed in the blessed safety of her.

  “I am sorry,” he said then. “I am behaving as though I were the only person ever to suffer. And how can I call this suffering? I ought to be rejoicing.”

  “There are some things worse than not knowing your parents,” she said. “Sometimes knowing them is worse.” She sighed, her breath warm against his throat, and lifted her head. “But that is not really true, of course. How can I know what it would have been like not to know my father? How can you know what it would have been like to know yours? We cannot choose our lives, can we? We have some freedom in how we live them, but none whatsoever over the circumstances in which we find ourselves when we are born. And I do not suppose that is a very original observation.”

  “Camille,” he said, smiling at her.

  “But here we both are,” she said, half smiling back, “on our feet and somehow living our lives. Why are we so gloomy? Must we wallow in the tragedies of the past? When I stepped out of my grandmother’s house just over two weeks ago and set out for the orphanage and Miss Ford’s office, I had decided that for me at least the answer was no. Definitely not. Never again.”

  “I have identity at last,” he said. “All is well.”

  He cupped her face in both hands, and they gazed into each other’s eyes, both half smiling, for long moments. She closed her own briefly when he traced the line of her brows with his thumbs and ran one of them along the length of her nose, and opened them again when he feathered both thumbs along her lips, pausing at the outer corners. Her fingertips came to rest lightly against his wrists. He smiled more fully at her, drew breath to speak, changed his mind, and then spoke anyway.

  “Come to bed with me,” he said.

  He regretted the words immediately, for her hands tightened about his wrists, and he guessed he had ruined the fragile connection he had felt between them. She did not step away from him, however, or pull his hands away from her face. And when she spoke, it was not with either indignation or outrage.

  “Yes,” she said.

  * * *

  They left the portrait of his mother on the easel, uncovered, and crossed the hall to enter his bedchamber, not touching each other.

  “I am not the tidiest of mortals,” he said as Camille heard the door close behind her.

  The bed had been made up, but the blankets hung lower on one side than on the other, and one pillow still bore the imprint of his head, presumably from last night. A book lay open and facedown on a table beside the bed. Camille itched to mark the page, close the book, and check to see that the spine had not been damaged. A few other books were strewn on the floor with a scrunched-up garment, probably his nightshirt. But at least there was no noticeable sign of dust.

  “I never had to be tidy until recently,” she said. “I always had servants to do everything for me except breathe.” Her hair had given her particular trouble in the last couple of weeks. She was unaccustomed to brushing and styling it herself. And why did dresses almost invariably have to open and close down the back, when one’s elbows did not bend that way and one had no eyes in the back of one’s head?

  But why were they talking and thinking of such things, allowing awkwardness and self-consciousness to enter the room wit
h them? She had made a decision, a very spur-of-the-moment one, it was true, for his suggestion had been totally unexpected, but she had no wish to go back on it. She had come to believe that for twenty-two years she had been only half alive, perhaps not even that much, that she had deliberately suppressed everything in herself that made her human. Now suddenly she wanted to live. And she wanted to love, even if that word was a mere euphemism for desire. She would live, then, and she would enjoy. She would not stop to think, to doubt, to feel awkward.

  She turned toward him. He was looking steadily back as though giving her the chance to change her mind if she so wished. How could she ever have thought him anything less than gorgeous? His hair, very dark, like his eyes, had surely grown in just the two weeks since she had known him. His facial features were all suggestive of firmness and strength. His Italian lineage was very obvious in his looks, but so was his English lineage, though he looked nothing like the young woman in the portrait. It was not just his looks, though. Mild-mannered and soft-spoken though he was, and seemingly uninterested in male pursuits and vices, there was nevertheless something very solid about him and very male. She could not quite explain to herself what it was exactly and did not even try. She just felt it.

  He was gorgeous and she wanted him. It was really as simple—and as shocking—as that. She did not care about the shocking part. She wanted to be free. She wanted to experience life.

  “Camille,” he said, “if you are having second thoughts . . .”

  “I am not,” she assured him, and took one step closer to him even as he took one toward her. “I want to go to bed with you.”

  He set his hands lightly on her shoulders and moved them down her arms. For a moment she regretted not being as slender and delicately feminine as Abby was—and as Anastasia was. But she brushed aside such foolish, self-doubting thoughts. She was a woman no matter what she looked like, and it was she he had asked to go to bed with him, not either of the other two. She slid her hands beneath his coat to rest on either side of his waist. His body was firm and warm.