Someone to Hold

“It is,” he agreed as they strolled the short distance along Bennett Street to the Circus. They crossed the road to the great circular garden at the center of it and strolled inside the rails. All around them rose the three massive curved segments of the circle of houses with their elegant, classical design. There were very few lights behind any of the windows. It was late.

“I painted all day,” he told her. “I painted furiously and without a break and achieved that total focus I always aim for when I am creating. I painted your sister—from the sketches I made, from memory, and from that part of myself I can never describe in words. The portrait is not by any means finished, but I am terribly pleased with it. There is something so . . . delicate about her being that I have very much feared I would never quite capture it either in thought or in vision or on canvas. But I think I have caught her beauty, her joy in living, her vulnerability, her sadness, her unquenchable hope. Oh, I could pile word upon word and still not express what it is about her I sense. I have never painted anything so quickly. But it is not slipshod or shallow or . . .” His voice trailed away.

“I shall look forward to seeing it when it is finished,” she said, her voice prim. They were strolling about the inner perimeter of the garden.

He sighed. “What I was trying to do,” he said, “was focus my mind upon one thing so that all the thoughts that have been teeming through it and tormenting me for days would be silenced. I was more successful than I expected. But the thing is, Camille, that somewhere behind my concentration upon the one thing, my thoughts were being tamed and sorted so that when I finally stepped back from the canvas, I knew one thing with perfect clarity . . . well, two things, actually.”

She turned her head to look at him. She was using both hands to hold together the edges of her shawl, but he took one of her hands in his and laced their fingers. She grasped both edges of the shawl with the other hand. She did not say anything. But what did he expect her to say? She would think he had brought her out here to tell her about his day of painting.

“One thing I knew, the lesser thing,” he said, “was that I am indeed going to keep that house and use my money to do something with it that will share the bounty and the beauty, something that will lift people’s spirits and feed their souls. Particularly children, though not exclusively. I do not know either the what or the how yet, but I will. And I will live there to give it the warmth of home as well as everything else. I will have animals there and . . . people.”

Good God, he was a coward. He had not known that about himself until recently. He drew her arm beneath his own, their hands still clasped. He stopped walking and they faced outward, looking toward the steep descent of Gay Street.

“The other thing I knew with perfect clarity,” he said, “was that I love you, that I want you in my life whatever that turns out to be, that I want to marry you and have children with you and make a family with you in that house—with children of our own bodies and adopted children and dogs and cats and . . . well, snakes and mice too, perhaps, if we have sons or intrepid daughters. I am not sure I can ask it of you. You have lived a very different life. You have grown up the daughter of an earl in an aristocratic household. You are a lady through and through. When I saw you tonight I thought you the most beautiful woman I had ever seen—I did not exaggerate that. I also thought you the grandest, the most remote, the most unattainable. It felt presumptuous to love you.”

“Joel,” she said, cutting his eloquence short. “You can be sure.”

He looked at her blankly in the near darkness. He could be sure? He heard the echo of his own words—I am not sure I can ask it of you.

“Can I?” he asked.

“You will need a lady to run that house of yours while your head is among the clouds,” she said. “One thing I can do with my eyes blindfolded and my hands tied behind my back is run a household. I may find it hair-raising to have shrieking children and barking dogs and squeaking mice and absentminded artists underfoot, but if I can walk into an orphanage and start teaching a schoolroom full of children of all ages and ability levels; if I can get them to knit a purple rope as a collective project and march them all about Bath clinging to it; if I can teach a certain absentminded artist to waltz, I can do anything.”

“But . . .” He was squeezing her fingers and her hand very tightly, he realized before relaxing his grip. “Would you want to, Camille?”

She sighed, a sound of exaggerated long-suffering. “The thing is, Joel,” she said, “that I really am a lady by upbringing and cannot shrug off the training of a lifetime in a few brief months. I did it once, shockingly, almost a week ago when I asked you to take me home with you. I do not believe I could do it again. I could not possibly ask you to marry me. A lady does not, you know. That is a gentleman’s task.”

He gazed at her. Darkness or no darkness, there was no mistaking the expression on her face.

“I am not a gentleman,” he said, his eyes settling on her lips.

“I think it is a man’s task, Joel,” she said, “even if he is not also gentle or genteel. You are very definitely a man. It was the first impression I had of you when we met in the schoolroom, and it offended me, for I had never consciously thought it of any other man, even Viscount Uxbury. It struck me that you were very . . . male.”

He wondered if she was blushing. It was impossible to know in the darkness. But if she was, her eyes were certainly not wavering from his.