Someone to Hold

And he noticed that tomorrow’s shop organized itself on the desktops at the other side of the room and acquired cards in everyone’s boldest and best handwriting announcing prices and the number or quantity of each item that price would buy. He noticed that the “cash” box acquired square cardboard “coins” upon which the value was written large—and neat. Tomorrow, Miss Westcott explained as though she were addressing a recalcitrant regiment, all the shoppers would be issued with a set amount of cardboard money to spend, and the rest of the coins would be left in the cash box so that the shopkeepers could give change. No one would be allowed to spend more money than he or she had. If they had bought too much, they would have to decide what to relinquish.

Joel wondered if any of his group wished they were minting square coins rather than painting their dreams, though none of them complained, and there was no discernible lack of concentration. On the whole their efforts showed greater artistry than usual.

He followed the painting session with the usual discussion after they had looked at one another’s work. Then he supervised as they cleared up. It rather annoyed him that he watched more carefully than usual to make sure they returned the supplies only to the bottom two shelves of the storage cupboard and arranged them there in a neat, orderly fashion. Anna had forever scolded him for encouraging slovenliness in his pupils and for encroaching upon her shelves, and he had forever defended himself for the pleasure of annoying her further by talking of artistic liberty.

As soon as he had dismissed his group, they wandered over to the other third of the room, he noticed, instead of darting out to freedom as they would normally have done. By that time Miss Westcott had all the children sitting in a circle on the floor about her chair, cross-legged except for Monica, whose legs would not cross and lie flat like everyone else’s but remained annoyingly elevated with knees up about her ears while she fought against losing her balance and being tipped backward to the floor. She was sitting on her heels at Miss Westcott’s suggestion—Miss Nunce had insisted, without any success, that Monica persist in the cross-legged stance until she stopped being stubborn and did it properly. Miss Westcott had taken a book from the new bookcase and was reading from it in a strident voice that nevertheless seemed to have captured the attention of her audience.

Joel slipped out unnoticed. There was something he needed to do.

* * *

After three days in the schoolroom, Camille had come to the conclusion that she was the world’s worst teacher.

She looked about the now-empty room with a grimace, ignoring the ingrained inner voice of her education, which warned that wrinkles would be the dire and inevitable result of frowns and grimaces and overbright smiles. That inner voice, which for so long had been her daily guide to genteel behavior, now annoyed her considerably. She would frown if she wanted to.

When she had arrived on Monday morning, the schoolroom had been neat and orderly, with straight rows of desks, a bare teacher’s desk, neatly aligned books in the bookcase Grandmama had donated, easels stacked neatly at the far side of the room next to the window, and supplies arranged with almost military precision on the five deep, wide shelves of the storage cupboard. Yet now . . .

And there were no servants here to run about after her, picking up what she dropped, straightening what she had not bothered to tidy for herself. She was it. Actually, on this particular occasion, she and that man were it, but he had gone merrily on his way as soon as he had dismissed his class, leaving the easels where she had set them earlier out of the goodness of her heart. He had not even uttered any word of farewell. She almost wished he had not cleared away everything except the paintings and the easels. Then she would have had even more to complain of and might have thought the absolute worst of him, as he no doubt was thinking of her.

She had hated having him here, listening to everything she said, a witness to the chaos of the afternoon, to the untidiness, the lack of discipline, her appearance . . .

Her appearance.

Camille looked down at herself and would have grimaced again if she had not still been doing it. She had worn the most conservative of her dresses, as she had yesterday and Monday, but . . . her sleeves were still pushed up in a most unladylike fashion. She rolled them down to her wrists a few hours too late. The wrinkles from elbows to wrists might never iron out. And what on earth must her hair look like? The bun she had so ruthlessly fashioned this morning had been disintegrating ever since, and she had been impatiently shoving escaped strands of hair into it. She felt it now with both hands and realized that it must resemble a bundle of hay after a hurricane had blown across the field. And how long had that one strand been dangling down her neck?

And why did she care? He was only a man, after all, and recent experience had taught her that men were sorry, despicable creatures at best. He was also a rather shabby man—that coat and those boots! She did not care a fig what such a man thought of her. Or any man. She felt aggrieved, though, that he had left her alone to deal with the paintings and to put away the easels, though the disorder he had left behind was nothing compared to what she had created in her third of the room. The desktops were covered with . . . things ready for tomorrow’s shop.

She had conceived the idea with the hope that the children would learn something practical they could apply to their future lives after they had left here and must provide for their own needs on what would probably be very little income—unless by some miracle they should discover themselves to be heirs or heiresses to a vast fortune, as their former teacher had done. Since that was as unlikely as their being hit by a shooting star, they needed to learn something about prices and quantities and choices and making money stretch. They needed to learn the difference between necessities and luxuries. They needed—