Someone to Hold

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 week. 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.”