Someone to Hold

Was one of the three relatives to whom the old man referred Viscount Uxbury?

“I am going to leave everything to you, young man,” Cox-Phillips said. “It will be written into my new will this afternoon, and I shall have enough people to attest to the soundness of my mind and the absence of coercion that even the cleverest solicitor will find it impossible to overturn my final wishes.”

Joel was on his feet then without any consciousness of having stood up. “Oh no, sir,” he said. “That is preposterous. I do not even know you. You do not know me. I have no claim upon you and have no wish for any. You have shown no interest in me for twenty-seven years. Why should you show some now?”

The old man clasped both hands over the head of his stick and lowered his chin onto them. “By God, Orville,” he said, “I think he means it. What do you think?”

“I believe he does, sir,” the valet agreed.

“Of course I mean it,” Joel said. “I have no wish whatsoever, sir, to cut out your legitimate relatives from a share in whatever you have to leave them. If you intend to ignore them out of spite, I will not have you use me as your instrument. I want no part of your fortune.”

“You think it is a fortune?” Cox-Phillips asked.

“I neither know nor care,” Joel assured him. “What I do know is that I have had no part of you or of my grandmother all the years of my life and that I want no part of your possessions now. Do you believe that would be compensation enough? Do you believe that I will remember you more kindly if you buy my gratitude and affection? I detect no sort of fond sentiment in you at coming face-to-face with me at last, only a confirmation of what you have suspected all these years, that my father was—or is—an Italian painter whom you despised. You would not have brought me here at all today, I now realize, if you had not conceived this devilish idea of using me to play a trick on your relatives. I will have no part of it. Good day to you, sir.”

He turned and strode from the room. With every step across the carpet he expected to be called back, but he was not. He found his way downstairs and across the hall past the blindly staring busts and out onto the terrace, where the hired carriage awaited him.

“Back to Bath,” he said curtly as he pulled open the door and seated himself inside.

Fury gave place to a racing mental confusion that could not be brought into any semblance of order as the carriage conveyed him back down to the city. His mother had died giving birth to him in secret. Good God, he did not even know her first name or anything about her except that she had conceived him outside wedlock and had stubbornly and steadfastly refused to name his father. His grandmother had taken him to the orphanage and made sure he had everything he needed, even an art education after he was fifteen, but had withheld herself. She had looked at him from afar but had given him no opportunity to look upon her and know that there was someone in this world to whom he belonged. His father was, presumably, an artist of Italian nationality who had been in Bath painting. It seemed to have been his own looks, Joel thought, that had convinced Cox-Phillips—his great-uncle—that it was so. He did not know the man’s name, however, or whether he was alive or dead.

He paid off the carriage outside his rooms but did not go inside. There would not be enough space in there or enough air. He struck off on foot along the street with no particular destination in mind.

* * *

Caroline Williams had been attending school for a year and had somehow got away with pretending she could read. She liked to choose books Camille had read to the class and recite them from memory, but sometimes her memory was defective. Somehow or other the teaching methods that had worked with other children had not worked for her. Camille had pondered the problem until something that might help had suggested itself on Sunday when she was in the playroom holding Sarah again. Caroline had been reading a story to her doll—not the one written in the book, however, but one she was making up with considerable imagination and coherence as she went.

Now Camille was sitting at one of the small pupils’ desks. The rest of the children had been dismissed for the day, but Caroline had been invited to stay and tell one of her own stories to her teacher, who had written it down word for word in large, bold print, leaving a blank space in the center of each of the four pages. Caroline, intrigued by the fact that it was her very own story, was reading it back to Camille, her finger identifying each word. And it seemed that she really was reading.

“You wrote went here, miss,” she said, looking up, “when really she ran.”

“My mistake,” Camille told her, though it had been a deliberate one. And Caroline had passed the test, as she did again with the other three deliberate errors.

“Excellent, Caroline,” Camille told her. “Now you can read your own story as well as other people’s when you want to. Can you guess what the spaces are for?”

The child shook her head.

“The most interesting books have pictures, do they not?” Camille said. “You can choose your favorite parts of your story and draw your own pictures.”

The little girl’s eyes lit up.

But the door opened at that moment, and Camille turned her head in some annoyance to see which child had come back to interrupt them and for what purpose. It was not a child, however. It was Joel Cunningham, who looked into the room, stepped inside when he saw she was there, and then came to an abrupt halt when he saw she was not alone.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Carry on.”