Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(114)

The need to step into Anna Snow’s shoes to discover what they felt like? What an absolutely ghastly thought. But if she stood out here any longer, she would lose her courage and find herself trudging back uphill, lost and defeated and abject and every other horrid thing she could think of. Besides, standing here was decidedly uncomfortable. Though it was July and the sun was shining, it was still only morning and she was in the shade of the building. The street was acting as a type of funnel too for a brisk wind.

She stepped forward, lifted the heavy knocker away from the door, hesitated for only a moment, then let it fall. Perhaps she would be denied employment. What a huge relief that would be.



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*

Joel Cunningham was feeling on top of the world when he got out of bed that morning. July sunshine poured into his rooms as soon as he pulled back the curtains from every window to let it in, filling them with light and warmth. But it was not just the perfect summer day that had lifted his mood. This morning he was taking the time to appreciate his home. His rooms—plural.

He had worked hard in the twelve years since he left the orphanage at the age of fifteen and taken up residence in one small room on the top floor of a house on Grove Street just west of the River Avon. He had taken employment at a butcher’s shop while also attending art school. The anonymous benefactor who had paid his way at the orphanage throughout his childhood had paid the school fees too and covered the cost of basic school supplies, though for everything else he had been on his own. He had persevered at both school and employment while working on his painting whenever he could.

Often after paying his rent he had had to make the choice between eating and buying extra supplies, and eating had not always won. But those days were behind him. He had been sitting outside the Pump Room in the abbey yard one afternoon a few years ago, sketching a vagabond perched alone on a nearby bench and sharing a crust of bread with the pigeons. Sketching people he saw about him on the streets was something Joel loved doing, and something for which one of his art teachers had told him he had a genuine talent. He had been unaware of a gentleman sitting down next to him until the man spoke. The result of the ensuing conversation had been a commission to paint a portrait of the man’s wife. Joel had been terrified of failing, but he had been pleased with the way the painting turned out. He had made no attempt to make the lady appear younger or lovelier than she was, but both husband and wife had seemed genuinely delighted with what they called the realism of the portrait. They had shown it to some friends and recommended him to others.

The result had been more such commissions and then still more, until he was often fairly swamped by demands for his services and wished there were more hours in the day. He had been able to leave his employment two years ago and raise his fees. Recently he had raised them again, but no one yet had complained that he was overcharging. It had been time to begin looking for a studio in which to work. But last month the family that occupied the rest of the top floor of the house in which he had his room had given notice, and Joel had asked the landlord if he could rent the whole floor, which came fully furnished. He would have the luxury of a sizable studio in which to work as well as a living room, a bedchamber, a kitchen that doubled as a dining room, and a washroom. It seemed to him a true palace.

The family having moved out the morning before, last night he had celebrated his change in fortune by inviting five friends, all male, to come and share the meat pies he had bought from the butcher’s shop, a cake from the bakery next to it, and a few bottles of wine. It had been a merry housewarming.

“You will be giving up the orphanage, I suppose,” Marvin Silver, the bank clerk who lived on the middle floor, had said after toasting Joel’s continued success.

“Teaching there, do you mean?” Joel had asked.

“You do not get paid, do you?” Marvin had said. “And it sounds as though you need all your time to keep up with what you are being paid for—quite handsomely, I have heard.”

Joel volunteered his time two afternoons a week at the orphanage school, teaching art to those who wanted to do a little more than was being offered in the art classes provided by the regular teacher. Actually, teach was somewhat of a misnomer for what he did with those children. He thought of his role to be more in the nature of inspiring them to discover and express their individual artistic vision and talent. He used to look forward to those afternoons. They had not been so enjoyable lately, however, though that had nothing to do with the children or with his increasingly busy life beyond the orphanage walls.

“I’ll always find the time to go there,” he had assured Marvin, and one of the other fellows had slapped him with hearty good cheer on the back.

“And what of Mrs. Tull?” he had asked him, waggling his eyebrows. “Are you thinking of moving her in here to cook and clean for you among other things, Joel? As Mrs. Cunningham, perhaps? You can probably afford a wife.”

Edwina Tull was a pretty and amiable widow, about eight years Joel’s senior. She appeared to have been left comfortably well-off by her late husband, though in the three years Joel had known her he had come to suspect that she entertained other male friends apart from him and that she accepted gifts—monetary gifts—from them as she did from him. The fact that he was very possibly not her only male friend did not particularly bother him. Indeed, he was quite happy that there was never any suggestion of a commitment between them. She was respectable and affectionate and discreet, and she provided him with regular female companionship and lively conversation as well as good sex. He was satisfied with that. His heart, unfortunately, had long ago been given elsewhere, and he had not got it back yet even though the object of his devotion had recently married someone else.