Someone to Hold

He spent Monday afternoon and evening sketching Camille from memory—laughing in the rain, sitting at his kitchen table looking just kissed, standing at his living room window, arms wrapped defensively about herself, gazing sightlessly down at the street. He did not want to be obsessed with painting her yet. He wanted to be able to focus upon her sister. But perhaps it was not painting her that was obsessing him.

He was actually glad on Tuesday to have something to distract him. He hired a carriage and went to call upon Mr. Cox-Phillips. The house was somewhere between a manor and a mansion in size, stately in design, and set within spacious and well-tended gardens, commanding a wide and panoramic view over the city below and the surrounding country for miles around. Joel, having instructed the coachman to wait for him, hoping he would not be too long, as the bill would be running ever higher, nevertheless took a few moments to admire the house and the garden and view before knocking upon the door.

He was kept waiting for all of ten minutes in the entry hall, being stared at by a collection of stern marble busts with sightless eyes while the elderly butler inevitably went to see if his master was at home. Joel was admitted eventually to a high-ceilinged library. Every wall was filled with books from floor to ceiling wherever there was not either a window or a door or fireplace. A large oak desk dominated one corner of the room. On the other side an imposing leather sofa faced a marble fireplace in which a fire burned despite the summer heat outdoors. Matching leather wing chairs flanked it.

In one of the chairs and almost swallowed up by it, his knees covered by a woolen blanket, a silver-knobbed cane grasped in one of his gnarled hands, sat a fierce-eyed, beetle-browed gentleman who looked to be at least a hundred years old. His eyes watched Joel cross the room until he came to a stop beside the sofa. Another man, almost equally ancient and presumably some sort of valet, stood behind the gentleman’s chair and also watched Joel’s approach.

“Mr. Cox-Phillips?” Joel said.

“And who else am I likely to be?” the gentleman asked, the beetle brows snapping together in a frown. “Come and stand here, young man.” He thumped his cane on the carpet before his feet. “Orville, open the damned curtains. I can hardly see my hand in front of my face.”

Both Joel and the valet did as they were told. Joel found himself standing in a shaft of sunlight a few feet from the old man’s chair, while its occupant took his time looking him up and down and studying his face. The lengthy inspection made Joel wonder, with an inward chuckle, who was going to be painting whom.

“It was the Italian after all, then, was it?” the old man said abruptly. It did not sound like the sort of question that demanded an answer.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Joel regarded him politely.

“The Italian,” the old man said impatiently. “The painter who thought his swarthy looks and accent that charmed the ladies and foreign names all ending in vowels would hide the fact that what talent he had would not have filled a thimble.”

“I am afraid,” Joel said, “I am not understanding you, sir. I do not know the man to whom you refer.”

“I refer, young man,” the old gent told him, “to your father.”

Joel stood rooted to the spot.

“I suppose,” the old man said, “they did not tell you a thing.”

“They?” Joel felt a little as though he were looking through a dark tunnel, which was strange when he was standing in sunlight.

“Those people at that institution where you grew up,” the old man said. “It would be a wonder if they did not. Very few people can hold their tongues, even when they have been sworn to secrecy. Especially then.”

Joel wished he had been invited to sit down or at least to stand in shadow. There was a dull buzzing in his ears. “Do you mean, sir,” he asked, “that you know who my father was—or is? And my mother?”

“It would be strange if I did not know her,” Cox-Phillips said, “when she was my own niece, my only sister’s girl, and more trouble to her mother than she was worth. Dead the lot of them are now. Never hope to live to be eighty-five, young man. Everybody who has ever meant a thing to you ends up dying, and the only ones left are the sycophants and vultures who think that because they share a few drops of your blood they are therefore entitled to your money when you die. Well, they are not going to have mine, not while I am alive to have a say in the matter, which I will have this afternoon when my lawyer arrives here.”

Most of what he said passed Joel by. His mind was grappling with only one thing. “My mother was your niece?” he asked. “She is dead? And my father?”

“She would never tell her mother who he was,” the old man said. “Stubborn as a mule, that girl was. She would only tell who he was not—and that was every likely and unlikely male her mother could think of, including the Italian, though how she ever got her tongue around his name to say it aloud I do not know. My sister sent the girl away for her confinement and paid a pretty penny for her care for six months too, but the girl died anyway in childbed. The baby—you—survived, more was the pity. It would have been better for all concerned, you included, if you had died with her. Nothing would do for it but my sister had to bring you back here despite everything I had to say to the contrary. Her daughter got her stubbornness from her. She knew she could not bring you to this house to live and explain away to all who would have been sure to ask, and strange if they had not. She ought to have left you where you were. She took you instead to that orphanage and paid for your keep there. She even paid for that art school you wanted to go to, even though I told her she had feathers for a brain. I guessed then, though, that it must have been the Italian. Where else would you have got the cork-brained notion that you could make a decent living painting? They probably tried to make you see better sense at the orphanage.”