“She does not feel your compulsion to break away from all that is familiar in order to stand alone, then?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But I respect her right to reshape her life as she sees fit. All I ask is that my right to do the same be respected. Perhaps it is selfish of me to abandon and upset her and turn my back upon our grandmother’s hospitality. It undoubtedly is, in fact. But sometimes we have no choice but to be selfish if we are to . . . survive. That is too extravagant a word, though I cannot think of a better.”
“You feel threatened by the fact that your father’s family has decided to come to Bath to celebrate a birthday?” he asked her.
“Not exactly threatened,” she said, frowning as she gave his question some consideration. “Just . . . interfered with. As though I am incapable of working all this out on my own. As though I am just a . . .”
“Helpless woman?” he suggested.
“A pampered woman,” she said. “As I am. Or as I always have been. It is strange how I never realized it until recently. I always thought of myself as strong and forceful.”
“Perhaps you have always been right about yourself,” he said. “It must have taken great strength to do what you have done this week when you really did not have to.”
“Strength?” she said. “Or just stupidity? But Abby is beside herself with excitement that everyone is coming here. For her sake I must be glad too that they are determined to gather us back into the fold.”
“Is that why they are coming?” he asked.
But their tea arrived at that moment and prevented her from answering. The teapot was large, the Sally Lunns enormous. Joel hefted the teapot and poured their tea, while Miss Westcott regarded her tea cake in some astonishment. It had been cut in half and toasted, and there were generous portions of butter and jam to spread on it.
“Oh, goodness me,” she said. “I have just remembered that I missed breakfast as well as luncheon. This is one of the famous Sally Lunns?”
“And I expect you to eat every mouthful.” He grinned at her.
She looked at him with some severity after taking a bite, chewing, and swallowing. “Do not think, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, “that I do not know what you are up to and why you have brought me here and plied me with tea and . . . and this. And oh goodness, it is delicious. You think to get me talking about myself and my life so that you can paint me in such a way as to expose me to the world as I do not choose to be exposed.”
“I do not paint nudes,” he could not resist telling her, and her mouth, which had been open to take another bite, snapped shut. “Perhaps you merely looked weary and a bit lost, Miss Westcott, and I took pity on you and brought you here to revive you. Perhaps, having found myself sitting across the table from you, I make conversation because even a man who is not a gentleman does not invite a lady to tea and then gobble down his food without saying a word to her. He might leave her with the impression that the food was of more importance than she.”
She looked hard at him before disposing of another mouthful. “The point is,” she said, “that aristocratic families do not acknowledge their illegitimate offshoots, Mr. Cunningham. The aristocracy is all about the succession and property and position and fortune. Legitimacy is everything. If my father’s family had known from the outset that he was not married to my mother and that we were therefore illegitimate, they would have ignored her and pretended we did not exist. It is what my mother did for more than twenty years with Anastasia, though she knew of her existence, and it is what the others would have done too if they had known. It is certainly what I would have done. When she was admitted to the salon at Avery’s house, where we were all gathered a few months ago at the request of my brother’s solicitor, everyone was outraged, and justifiably so. She was very clearly not one of us. I was more infuriated than anyone else.”
“Why was that?” he asked while she spread butter and jam on the other half of her Sally Lunn. He hoped she would not suddenly realize again that she was doing what she had assured him she would not do—talking about herself, that was. But it was not just his portrait of her that made him want to hear more. He was fascinated to listen to the story of that day from her point of view. He had heard it from Anna’s at the time in the long letter she had written him only hours afterward.
“I was the perfect lady,” she told him. “By design. I was very conscious of who my father was and what was due to me as his daughter. From early childhood on I made every effort to do and be everything he would expect of Lady Camille Westcott. I was an obedient child and paid every attention to my nurse and my governess. I spoke and thought and behaved as a lady ought. I intended to grow up to be perfect. I intended to leave no room in my life for accident or catastrophe. I think I truly believed that I would never be exposed to trouble of any sort if I kept to the strict code of behavior set down for ladies of my class. There was never a rebellious bone in my body or a wayward thought in my mind. My world was narrow but utterly secure. It was a world that did not allow for a cheaply dressed woman of the lower classes being admitted into my presence and my family’s and actually being invited to sit down in our midst. I was outraged when it happened.”
Joel finished his tea cake and drank the rest of his tea without immediately responding. Good God, she must have been detestable, yet all in the name of what she had been brought up to consider right. But having aimed for perfection in the narrow world into which she had been born, she was finding the plight in which she now found herself bewildering, to say the least. He sat back in his chair and looked at her with renewed interest. Such a woman might be expected to be bitter and brittle. She, on the contrary, had neither crumbled nor raged against the injustice of it all—or, if she had, she was over it now. She had not wrapped herself in self-pity, despite the accusation he had made a couple of days ago. She was not interested in taking advantage of the imminent arrival of her family to try to claw her way back into some semblance of her old life.