Someone to Hold

He stood where he was for a few moments longer, his expression inscrutable, before turning away to pour their tea. He brought their cups and saucers to the table and set down the one without milk before her. He sat down while she stirred in a spoonful of sugar.

“Your betrothed never kissed you?” he asked. “Was not that a bit odd?”

Ought she to have been kissed merely because she was engaged to be married? But that was not what her betrothal had been all about. “I did not believe so,” she said.

“Would you have gone through life unkissed?” he asked her.

“Probably,” she said.

“But you would surely have wanted children,” he said. “He would have wished for heirs, would he not?”

“Of course,” she said. “And we would both have done our duty. But do we have to speak on this topic? I find it extremely uncomfortable.” She stirred her tea again.

He was not going to let the matter drop, though. “What I find strange,” he said, “is that there is a class of people to whom marriage and marital relations are quite impersonal, devoid of real feeling or any sort of passion. Or happiness.”

“I wanted to be perfect,” she reminded him, though there was something very arid in the word in contrast to the real feeling and the passion and the happiness of which he had spoken. She found her hand was trembling when she tried to lift her cup.

“Camille,” he said, and she could feel his eyes very intent on her though she did not look up at him. “What happened to you must surely have been the very best thing that could possibly have happened.”

She lurched to her feet, sending her chair clattering backward to the floor, and hurried into the living room, where she turned blindly right instead of left and came up against the living room window instead of the hallway, where she might have grabbed her pelisse and bonnet and hurried away from there, rain or no rain. She came to a stop, hugging her arms about herself and gazing out into pelting rain without really seeing it.

“Camille.” His voice came from just behind her.

“I suppose you disliked me even before you met me,” she said. “She wrote and told you all about me, did she—Anastasia? And you disliked me when we met—I saw it in your face when Miss Ford introduced us. And I know you resented my walking into the schoolroom and looking at your pupils’ paintings. Since then you have seen how poorly I teach and control my class, and you resent the fact that I am now living in her room at the orphanage. I have not liked you very well either, Mr. Cunningham, but I have not been cruel to you. You may have a poor opinion of the life of privilege in which I grew up, but at least I was taught decent manners.”

“Camille,” he said, “I had no intention whatsoever of being cruel. I daresay my words were poorly chosen.”

She laughed harshly—and heard, appalled, what sounded more like a sob than laughter. “Oh really?” she said. “And what words were those?”

“You were headed for a life of cold propriety and duty,” he said. “You surely cannot believe now that you would have been happy with Viscount Uxbury.”

“You do not understand, do you?” she said, looking downward and seeing the rain actually bouncing off the road. “I did not expect happiness. Or want it. I did not expect unhappiness either. My feelings were never in question or in turmoil until a few months ago. Now there is nothing but turmoil. And unhappiness. Misery. Self-pity, if you will—that is what you called it earlier this week. Is this better than what I had? Seriously, Joel? Is it better?”

She turned as she spoke and glared at him when she realized he was so close behind her.

“You would have married a man who publicly and maliciously insulted your name as soon as he learned something about you that offended him even though you were in no way to blame,” he said. “How would he have treated you if you had already been married?”

She had been trying for several months not to ask herself that question. “I will never know, will I?” she said.

“No,” he said, “but you can make an educated and doubtless accurate guess.”

She hugged herself more tightly. “Yet you still think I deserve what happened to me,” she said.

He frowned. “That,” he said, “is not what I said. It is certainly not what I meant. Sometimes good can come out of disaster. You had schooled yourself all your life not to feel emotion. You believed that that is what perfect ladies do. Perhaps you were right. But if it is indeed so, then perfect ladies are surely to be pitied.”

“My mother is a perfect lady,” she said. And because he did not immediately answer, the words echoed in her head. Was that all her mother had ever been? The empty shell of a perfect lady? Camille had always wanted to emulate her unshakable poise and dignity. Her mother had never been at the mercy of emotion. She was never vividly happy or wretchedly unhappy. She had been a model of perfection to her elder daughter. Only now did Camille ask herself what had lain beneath that disciplined exterior. Only now did she wonder if it had been a misery bordering upon despair, for Mama had been married to Papa for almost a quarter of a century before she knew that she had never been married at all, and Papa must have been wretchedly hard to live with as a husband.

“Do you miss her?” he asked softly.

Abby did. She had said so a few days ago. Did she, Camille, miss her too? “I am not sure I know who she is any more than I know who I am,” she said, and felt dizzy at the truth of the words she spoke. Oh, how could what was happening to her be the best thing that could possibly have happened? She reached out one hand to pat his shabby jacket, just below the shoulder. “Will you hold me, please? I need someone to hold me.” She would have been appalled, surely, if she had stopped to listen to her own words of weakness. They went against everything she had always been and everything she was trying to be now.