Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(103)
After Grandmama and Abby had left, she dressed in one of the more severe and conservative of her walking dresses and donned a bonnet to match. She put on comfortable shoes since the sort of dainty slippers she had always worn in the days when she traveled everywhere by carriage were useless now except to wear indoors. Finally, taking up her gloves and reticule, she stepped out onto the cobbled street without waiting for a servant to open and hold the door for her and look askance at her lone state, perhaps even try to stop her or send a footman trailing after her. She stood outside for a few moments, assailed by a sudden terror, and wondered if perhaps after all she should scurry back inside to hide in darkness and safety. In her whole life, she had rarely stepped beyond the confines of house or walled park unaccompanied by a family member or a servant, often both. But those days were over, even though Grandmama would doubtless argue the point. Camille squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and strode off downhill in the general direction of Bath Abbey.
Her actual destination, however, was a house on Northumberland Place, near the Guildhall and the market and the Pulteney Bridge, which spanned the River Avon with grandiose elegance. The house was a building indistinguishable from many of the other Georgian edifices with which the city abounded, solid yet pleasing to the eye and three stories high, not counting the basement and the attic, except that this house was actually three houses that had been made into one in order to accommodate an institution.
An orphanage, to be precise.
It was where Anna Snow, more recently Lady Anastasia Westcott, now the Duchess of Netherby, had spent her childhood. It was where she had taught for several years after she grew up. It was from there that she had been summoned to London by a solicitor’s letter. And it was in London that their paths and their histories had converged, Anastasia’s and Camille’s, the one to be elevated to heights beyond her wildest imaginings, the other to be plunged to depths lower than her worst nightmares.
Anastasia, also a daughter of the Earl of Riverdale, had been consigned to the orphanage—by him—at a very young age on the death of her mother. She had grown up there, supported financially but quite ignorant of who she was. She had not even known her real name. She had been Anna Snow, Snow being her mother’s maiden name—though she had not realized that either. Camille, on the other hand, born three years after Anastasia, had been brought up to a life of privilege and wealth and entitlement with Harry and Abigail, her younger siblings. None of them had known of Anastasia’s existence. Well, Mama had, but she had always assumed that the child Papa secretly supported at an orphanage in Bath was the love child of a mistress. It was only after his death several months ago that the truth had come out.
And what a catastrophic truth it was!
Alice Snow, Anastasia’s mother, had been Papa’s legitimate wife. They had married secretly in Bath, though she had left him a year or so later when her health failed, and she had returned to her parents’ home near Bristol, taking their child with her. She had died some time later of consumption, but not until four months after Papa married Mama in a bigamous marriage that had no legality. And because the marriage was null and void, all issue of that marriage was illegitimate. Harry had lost the title he had so recently inherited; Mama had lost all social status and had reverted to her maiden name—she now called herself Miss Kingsley and lived with her clergyman brother, Uncle Michael, at a country vicarage in Dorsetshire. Camille and Abigail were no longer Lady Camille and Lady Abigail. Everything that had been theirs had been stripped away. Cousin Alexander Westcott—he was actually a second cousin—had inherited the title and entailed property despite the fact that he had genuinely not wanted either, and Anastasia had inherited everything else. That everything else was the vast fortune Papa had amassed after his bigamous marriage to Mama. It also included Hinsbury Manor, the country home where they had always lived when they were not in London, and Westcott House, their London residence.
Camille, Harry, Abigail, and their mother had been left with nothing.
As a final crushing blow, Camille had lost her fiancé. Viscount Uxbury had called upon her the very day they had heard the news. But instead of offering the expected sympathy and support—and instead of sweeping her off to the altar, a special license waving from one hand—he had suggested that she send a notice to the papers announcing the ending of their betrothal so that she would not have to suffer the added shame of being cast off. Yes, a crushing blow indeed, though Camille never spoke of it. Just when it had seemed there could not possibly be any lower to sink or any greater pain to be borne, there could be and there was, but the pain at least was something she could keep to herself.
So here she and Abigail were, living in Bath of all places on the charity of their grandmother while Mama languished in Dorsetshire and Harry was in Portugal or Spain as a junior officer with the 95th Light Regiment, also known as the Rifles, fighting the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte. He could not have afforded the commission on his own, of course. Avery, Duke of Netherby, their stepcousin and Harry’s guardian, had purchased it for him. Harry, to his credit, had refused to allow Avery to set him up in a more prestigious, and far more costly, cavalry regiment and had made it clear that he would not allow Avery to purchase any promotions for him either.
By what sort of irony had she ended up in the very place where Anastasia had grown up? Camille wondered, not for the first time, as she descended the hill. The orphanage had acted like a magnet ever since she had come here, drawing her much against her will. She had walked past it a couple of times with Abigail and had finally—over Abby’s protests—gone inside to introduce herself to the matron, Miss Ford, who had given her a tour of the institution while Abby had remained outside without a chaperone. It had been both an ordeal and a relief, actually seeing the place, walking the floor Anastasia must have walked a thousand times and more. It was not the sort of horror of an institution one sometimes heard about. The building was spacious and clean. The adults who ran it looked well-groomed and cheerful. The children she saw were decently clad and nicely behaved and appeared to be well-fed. The majority of them, Miss Ford had explained, were adequately, even generously, supported by a parent or family member even though most of those adults chose to remain anonymous. The others were supported by local benefactors.