“Anastasia,” Camille said before she could change her mind, “would you care to come and look in the shops along Milsom Street with me?”
Avery raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. Anastasia looked at her with wide surprised eyes. “Oh, I would indeed, Camille,” she said. “Just give me a moment to fetch my bonnet and reticule.”
Avery looked steadily at Camille and then conversed for several minutes about the weather. “For the weather will always offer an endless supply of fascinating conversation,” he said, “especially when one is fortunate enough to live in England. Or unfortunate, as the case is more likely to be.”
The two ladies set off downhill toward Milsom Street, the most fashionable shopping street in Bath, a few minutes later. They walked side by side, talking about . . . the weather when they spoke at all. It was only as they turned onto Milsom Street that Camille changed the subject.
“Do you prefer to be called Anna rather than Anastasia?” she asked abruptly.
“Anna seems more like me,” Anastasia said. “I did not even know until a few months ago that it is not my full name. I prefer Anna, but I do not resent Anastasia. It is my name, after all.”
“I shall call you Anna from now on,” Camille said. “And, since it is less of a mouthful to call you sister rather than half sister, I shall do that too.”
Oh, this was difficult. This was very difficult. If her lips felt any stiffer, she would not be able to move them at all.
Anna turned her head and smiled at her. “Thank you, Camille,” she said. “You are very kind. I used to walk along this street occasionally for the pure pleasure of looking in the windows and dreaming of what I would buy if only I had limitless money. Once I saved for several months to buy a pair of black leather gloves that were so soft they felt more like fine velvet. I used to come and gaze at them every week. But—”
“Let me guess,” Camille said. “When you had finally saved enough and came to buy the gloves, they were gone.”
“Oh, they were still there,” Anna said. “I tried them on and they fit like . . . well, like a glove. I felt a few moments of glad triumph and utter joy—and then discovered that I could not justify such an extravagance. I left them on the counter with an unhappy shopgirl and went on my way.”
“Oh, but you had killed a dream,” Camille protested.
“I believe I had merely proved,” Anna said, “that having a dream and being on the journey to fulfilling it sometimes brings more happiness than actually achieving it. We have a habit, do we not, of thinking happiness is a future state if only this and that condition can be met? And so much of life passes us by without our realizing how happy we can be in this present moment, or how nearly happy. I had a good life as a girl and young adult despite what I was missing. And I had a dream.”
They had been gazing at bonnets in a window and had now moved on to a bookshop.
“Are you not happy now, then?” Camille asked.
“Oh, I am,” Anna assured her. “Happier than I have been my whole life. But it is not unalloyed happiness, Camille. Nothing is. This is human life in which there is no such thing as perfection. But I am happy. Today you have made me happier. It seems absurd, does it not, when all you have done is invite me to walk here with you and inform me that from today on you will call me Anna and sister? Camille, we are sisters. That is unbelievably precious to me.”
Camille felt guilty, for she could not say quite the same. She had been determined to reach out, though, to act as though Anna were her sister in the hope that in time she would also feel the truth of it.
“I have been very unhappy, Anna—for all the obvious reasons,” she said. “But in a strange way, that very fact is encouraging, for before all this happened I had dedicated my life to achieving perfection. I wanted to be the perfect lady above all else. Happiness meant nothing to me. Nor did love. They frightened me, for they suggested chaos and the impossibility of achieving perfection. Now that I have been desperately unhappy, I understand that I can be happy too and that I can love and be loved, and that unless I allow these things to happen to me, I will be only half alive. Oh, why are we gazing at books and talking about such strange things?”
“Because we are sisters,” Anna said. “This was always my very favorite shop in Bath. I did spend money here when I had some to spare. I have always loved books and the fact that I can read them and ponder them and keep them and see them and smell them—and reread them. What a treasure they are.”
“There is a coffee shop a little farther along the street,” Camille said. “Shall we go there?”
A few minutes later they were seated opposite each other at a small table, smelling the wonderful aroma of the two cups of coffee that had been set before them.
“Anna,” Camille said as she stirred in a spoonful of sugar, her eyes upon what she did. “I am happy about the baby. I shall enjoy being an aunt. There is a baby at the orphanage. She makes my heart ache. I believe I love all the children there, but there is something about her . . . Well.” She looked up. “I wish my father had confessed the truth after your mother’s passing. I wish he had married my mother properly after that and brought you into their home. I would have had an elder sister. I would not have been the eldest myself, and perhaps I would not have felt compelled to earn my father’s forgiveness for not being a son. I think I would have liked being a younger sister, and I think I might have enjoyed looking up to you. Perhaps not, though. Perhaps we would have squabbled incessantly.”