Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(115)
“I am quite happy to enjoy my expanded living quarters alone for a while yet,” he had said. “Besides, I believe Mrs. Tull is quite happy with her independence.”
His friends had finished off the food and wine and stayed until after midnight. It had felt very good indeed to be able to entertain in his own rooms and actually have enough chairs for them all to sit on.
Now he strolled about his living and working quarters in the morning sunshine and reveled anew in the realization that all this space was his. He had come a long way in twelve years. He stood before the easel in the studio and gazed at the portrait he had been able to leave propped on it. Apart from a few small finishing touches, it was ready to be delivered. He was particularly pleased with it because it had given him problems. Mrs. Dance was a faded lady who had probably never been pretty. She was bland and amiable, and at the beginning he had asked himself how the devil he was going to paint her in such a way that both she and her husband would be satisfied. He had wrestled with the question for several weeks while he sketched her and talked with her and discovered that her amiability was warm and genuine and had been hard won—she had lost three of her seven children in infancy and another just before he finished school. Once Joel had erased the judgmental word bland as a descriptor, he came to see her as a genuinely lovely person and had had great pleasure painting her portrait. He hoped he had captured what he saw as the essence of her well enough that others would see it too.
But though his fingers itched to pick up his brush to make those finishing touches, he had to resist. He had made arrangements with Miss Ford to go to the orphanage school early today, since he had an appointment with another client this afternoon, which he had been unable to shift to a different time. But even the thought of going to school early could not dampen his mood, for he would have the schoolroom to himself and his small group today and, if he was fortunate, for the rest of the summer.
While Miss Nunce had taught at the orphanage school, Joel and his group had had to squeeze into a strictly calculated third of the schoolroom—she had actually measured it with a long tape borrowed from Roger, the porter, and marked it out with chalk. They had crowded in with their easels and all the other necessary paraphernalia of an art class while she conducted her lessons in the other two-thirds. Her reasoning had been that he had one-third of the total number of schoolchildren while she had two-thirds. The art equipment did not factor into her view. But last week, Miss Nunce had resigned in high dudgeon before she could be forcibly ejected.
Joel had not been there at the time, but he did not mourn her departure. It had not been beyond the woman to intrude upon his third of the room, stepping carefully over the chalk line so as not to smudge it, to give her verdict on the paintings in progress, and invariably it was a derogatory judgment. She was an opinionated, joyless woman who clearly despised all children, and orphans in particular. She appeared to have seen it as her personal mission to prepare them to be humble and servile and to know their place—that place being the bottom rung of the social ladder, or perhaps somewhat below the bottom rung. Sometimes he had thought she resented even having to teach them to read, write, and figure. She had done her utmost to quell dreams and aspirations and talent and imagination, all of which in her view were inappropriate to their parentless condition.
She had walked out after Mary Perkins went running to find Miss Ford to tell her that Miss Nunce was beating Jimmy Dale. When Miss Ford had arrived on the scene, Jimmy was standing in the corner, his back to the room, squirming from the pain of a sore bottom. Miss Nunce, it seemed, had discovered him reading one of the new books—unfortunately for him, one of the larger, heavier volumes—and actually chuckling over something within its pages. She had taken it from him, instructed him to stand and bend over his desk, and walloped him a dozen times with it before sending him to the corner to contemplate his sins. She had still been holding the book aloft and haranguing the class on the evils of the trivial use of one’s time and of empty-minded levity when Miss Ford appeared. Seeing her, Miss Nunce had turned her triumphant glare upon the matron.
“And this,” she had pronounced, “is what comes of allowing books in the schoolroom.”
The books, together with a large bookcase to display them, had been donated a short while ago by a Mrs. Kingsley, a wealthy and prominent citizen of Bath. Miss Nunce had been quite vocal in her opposition at the time. Books, she had warned, would merely give the orphans ideas.
Miss Ford had crossed the room to Jimmy, turned him by the shoulders, and asked him why he had been reading in class. He had explained that his arithmetic exercise was finished and he had not wanted to sit idle. Sure enough, all his sums were completed and all were correct. She had sent him back to his seat after first removing her shawl and folding it several times into a square for him to sit on. She had asked the day’s monitors to take charge of the room and invited Miss Nunce to step outside, much to the disappointment of the children. Joel would have been disappointed too if he had been there. But then, the incident would not have happened if he had been there. No child at the orphanage was ever struck. It was one of Miss Ford’s immutable rules.
Less than fifteen minutes later—the children and some of the staff in other parts of the building had heard the teacher’s raised voice alternating with silences that probably indicated Miss Ford was speaking—Miss Nunce had stridden from the building with Roger a few steps behind her to lock the door, lest she change her mind.