Someone to Hold

“Ah,” he said, raising his quizzing glass halfway to his eye, “but it was not a question, Camille. And in my experience there is very little one needs to do. One shudders at the thought of ordering one’s life about such a notion of duty.”

She knew Avery well enough to realize that there was never any point in arguing with him. She took her leave of everyone else.

“I wonder,” she said tartly when they were on the pavement outside the house and the door had closed behind them, “if you told Anastasia that she was going to marry you and, when she refused, informed her that you had not been asking.”

“I am wounded to the heart,” he said, offering her his arm, “that you would think me so lacking in charm and personal appeal that Anna would not have said yes on the instant when I told her she was to marry me.”

She took his arm and looked at him, quelling the urge to laugh. “How did you persuade her?” she asked.

“Well, it was like this, you see,” he said, leading her toward Brock Street and, presumably, toward the steepness of Gay Street down into the town, a route she normally avoided. “The dowager countess and the aunts and the cousins, with one or two exceptions, were trying to convince her that the most sensible thing she could do was marry Riverdale.”

“Alexander?” she said, astonished. But it would indeed have made sense. A marriage between the two of them would have reunited the entailed property and the fortune to sustain it.

“I offered her an alternative,” Avery said. “I informed her that she could be the Duchess of Netherby instead if she wished.”

“Just like that?” she asked him. “In front of everyone?”

“I did not drop to one knee or otherwise make a spectacle of myself,” he said. “But now that you have put a dent in my self-esteem, Camille, I must consider the fact that my title outranked Riverdale’s and my fortune very far surpassed his. Do you suppose those facts weighed heavily with Anna?” He was looking sideways at her with lazy eyes.

“Not for a moment,” she said.

“You do not consider her mercenary or calculating, then?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “You know, Camille, it is just as well that Bath boasts hot springs that are said to effect miracle cures whether the waters are imbibed or immersed in. Otherwise it would surely be a ghost of a city or would never have existed at all. These hills are an abomination, are they not? I am not even sure it is safe for you to hold my arm. I fear that at any moment I will lose control and hurtle downward in a desperate attempt to keep my boots moving at the same pace as the rest of my person.”

“Sometimes you are very absurd, Avery,” she said.

He turned his head toward her again. “You are in agreement with your sister upon that subject,” he said. “It is what she frequently says of me.”

“Half sister,” she said sharply.

He did not reply as they made their way down Gay Street. Camille had to admit in the privacy of her own mind that it felt good to have the support of a man’s arm again. And Avery’s felt surprisingly firm and strong when she considered the fact that he was scarcely an inch taller than she and was slight and graceful of build. But . . . he had felled Viscount Uxbury with his bare feet.

“Avery,” she asked him, “why did you insist upon coming with me?”

“The fact that I am your brother-in-law is not reason enough?” he asked. Strangely, she never thought of him in terms of that relationship. “Ah, I beg your pardon—half brother-in-law. But that makes me sound smaller than I am, and I really am quite sensitive about my height, you know.”

She smiled but did not turn her face his way or answer his question. They were almost down the steepest part of the descent.

“The thing is, you see, Camille,” he said, his voice softer than it had been, “that though my father married your aunt years ago and so made us into sort-of cousins, and I have felt a certain cousinly affection ever since for you and Abigail and Harry; and although I have known Anna for only a few months and it may seem unfair that I do not feel less for her accordingly, in reality, my dear, I am quite desperately fond of her. If you will forgive the vulgarity—the former Lady Camille Westcott might not have done so, but the present Camille possibly might—I would even go further and say that I am quite head-over-heels besotted with her. But that is only if you will indeed forgive the vulgarity. If you will not, then I will keep such an embarrassing admission to myself.”

Camille smiled again, though she felt a bit shaken. It made a certain sense, however, she thought, that the cool, aloof, cynical, inscrutable, totally self-sufficient Duke of Netherby would fall as hard as a ton of bricks if ever he did fall. Who, though, could have predicted that it would happen with someone like Anastasia—who had looked as shabby as Joel did now when she first appeared in London. That last thought left her feeling even more shaken.

“What are you trying to say, Avery?” she asked him.

“Dear me,” he said, “I hope I am doing more than trying, Camille, when I have braved the perils of such a suicidal hill. What I am saying is that Anna understands. I believe her understanding and patience and love will be endless if they must be, just as her heartache will be. She loves me as dearly as I love her—of that I have no doubt. She is as exuberantly happy about the impending birth of our child as I am terrified. She loves and is loved by a largish circle of family members on both her mother’s side and her father’s. Her maternal grandparents adore her and are adored in return. She has everything that only her wildest dreams were able to deliver through most of her life. No, correction. Almost everything.”