Someone to Hold

Seven

If Camille ever heard anyone claiming to have cried herself to sleep, she would call that person a liar. How could one possibly fall asleep when one’s chest was sore from sobbing and one’s pillow was uncomfortably damp, not to mention hot, when one’s nose was blocked, and when one was so far sunk in the depths of misery that the notion of self-pity did not even begin to encompass it? And when one knew what a perfect fright one was going to look in the morning with swollen eyelids and lips, red nose, and blotchy complexion?

She did not cry herself to sleep. But she did cry and had to lie on her bed with a handkerchief half stuffed into her mouth, lest she wake everyone in the building. She tried to remember the last time she had wept, and could not recall any such occasion since she was seven and had saved her meager allowance for two whole months until she could purchase a fine linen man’s handkerchief. She had then spent hours and days painstakingly embroidering the initial of her father’s title—R for Riverdale—across one corner with I love you, Papa, beneath, the whole message decorated with flowery twirls and curlicues and a few little flower heads thrown in. It was the first time she had given him a birthday present all her own. He had glanced at it on the great day, thanked her, and put it into his pocket.

His lack of enthusiasm had been deflating enough when she had hoped, even expected, pleasure, astonishment, pride, paeons of praise, warm hugs, effusive thanks, and eternal love to pour out of him. How silly a seven-year-old child could be. And how vulnerable. A few days later she had gone into her father’s study on some now-forgotten errand and had seen the handkerchief crumpled up on his desk. When she had gone to fold it neatly, she had discovered that it had been used to clean his pen and was liberally stained with ink that would never wash out. She had dashed upstairs—she had been taught that a lady never dashed anywhere—squeezed between her bed and the wall in the nursery room she shared with Abigail and cried and cried until she retched dry heaves, though she would not tell anyone what had made her so unhappy.

One would have expected her to have learned her lesson from that episode. But it seemed she had not. She could remember persuading herself at the time that her embroidery stitches must have been poorly executed, and she had worked hard and tirelessly to improve her skills.

She did not even know precisely why she wept now. The room was tiny and the bed narrow and none too soft and she ought to have waited until Monday because she did not know what she was going to do with herself all day tomorrow and Sunday. But surely none of those facts would have reduced her to tears for the first time in fifteen years. She had upset Abby and Grandmama by coming here. But it was not that either. She had muddled through a week of teaching and had no idea how she was going to get through another—and another. It was not that either, though.

Admit the truth, Camille.

She cried because her heart had been broken—though that was not strictly true either. Her heart had not been involved in her betrothal. She had not been in love with Viscount Uxbury. It was just that he had seemed perfect—the perfect gentleman, the perfect suitor: wellborn, elegant, wealthy, mature, steady, serious minded, morally upright . . . She could go on and on. It had not hurt either that he was tall and well built and handsome, though she had not been drawn to him for those trivial facts alone. There had been nothing trivial about Lady Camille Westcott’s opinions and actions. He had seemed perfect. He had seemed—though she had never consciously thought it—everything she would have liked her father to be. He was reliable, the very Rock of Gibraltar. The whole of her future had been built upon that rock.

And he had let her down. Oh, not so much in forcing an end to their betrothal. She had understood the reason for that, though his rejection had taken her by surprise and hurt her. No, it was what had happened afterward, what she had learned only today. He had said something about her after going uninvited to a ball in Anastasia’s honor, something so insulting that Avery and Alexander had had him removed from the house. He had said shameful things about her during his duel with Avery too, in the hearing of what was undoubtedly a large crowd of gentlemen, not to mention Elizabeth and Anastasia.

It had been shockingly unkind of him. Oh, and far more than unkind. It had been cruel. And it seemed so out of character for the man she had thought him to be. Hearing of it had shattered the last of her illusions about the perfect gentleman and aristocrat with whom she had expected to spend the rest of her life. It had, in fact—yes, it was not too inaccurate a phrase. . . . It had broken her heart. One did not have to be in love with a man to have one’s heart broken. Perhaps it was because Viscount Uxbury now somehow represented the whole of her life as it had been, though she had not known it at the time. It had all been built not upon rock, but upon sand. And, like even the most carefully built sand castle, it had crumbled and fallen.

She had laughed with genuine glee when she heard the story of Uxbury’s humiliation at Avery’s hands—or rather at Avery’s feet. It had felt very good to know that after insulting her he had been made to look a fool before his peers. She was only human, after all. But while she had been walking back from Sally Lunn’s with Mr. Cunningham, the misery of it all had come close to overwhelming her, and she had felt her heart fracture. Her father and Viscount Uxbury were very different from each other—yet much the same after all. Could she ever trust anyone again? Was she as entirely alone in this world as she felt?

Was everyone essentially alone?

Oh yes, there was a great deal of self-pity in her misery. And she hated that. Hated it.