An Anne Perry Christmas_ Two Holiday Novels - Anne Perry [71]
Naomi gave a rueful little shrug. “It was easier than I expected.” She looked at Benjamin, avoiding Ephraim's eyes, but both imagined she was perfectly aware that he was looking at her.
“How did you do it?” Antonia asked.
Naomi smiled at her. “With more invention than I am proud to admit,” she answered. “Let me do you the favor of not telling you, so you can meet the village with complete innocence. People speak of you so highly.” She looked at Antonia with candid regard. “You are much admired, even by those who are stupid enough to listen to Gower. Your reputation is your greatest asset. And when we all go away again, you will remain here and it will matter that it is not changed.”
Antonia smiled, but she did not attempt to speak.
Henry had not thought of it in quite those bold terms before, and he realized that perhaps Antonia had not either. None of them had looked beyond the shock and anger of the present. But of course Benjamin would return to the Holy Land. He was probably in the middle of some great excavation. Ephraim would go back again to Africa and his exploration, the plants and discoveries that so fascinated him. Naomi would make the long journey back to America, and then westward once more to take up Nathaniel's work, and her own friends in the life they had made there. Even Henry would return to Primrose Hill, and the joys and cares of London. Antonia would then taste the full measure of her loneliness.
Henry remembered the death of his own wife. At first, shock numbs much of the deepest ache. There are things that have to be done, people told, arrangements made. One forces courage to surmount weakness and for the sake of other people, one behaves with dignity.
But afterward, when the first mourning is over and the attention goes, friends and family return to their own lives, then the true weight of loss descends. Everything one used to share is no longer as it was. The silence of the heart is deafening. Antonia had yet to face that.
Naomi had already experienced it, but she at least had some work that would occupy her energies and her thoughts. Of course Antonia had the estate to run, and her care for Joshua, but his grief was her burden as well.
“What did you learn?” Benjamin was asking Naomi now. She had already answered some of his questions, and Henry had not been listening.
“He seems to have spent the evening with the Pilkingtons,” Naomi replied, a faint look of distaste on her face. “Mrs. Pilkington is a woman of extraordinarily generous bosom, balanced by an opposingly mean spirit. She has opinions as to the moral value of everything, good or bad. Decadent is her favorite word. I don't know why, because I don't think she knows what it means.”
“She is new money?” Henry inquired, aware of all the social differences that carried, the envy and the ambition.
Naomi's face lit with a smile, broad and candid. “Exactly! Old money must be immorally obtained. Hers is new, of course. She has espoused Gower's cause, precisely because the older families can't stand him. And the violin recital was ‘decadent,’ so she did not attend. She probably doesn't know Bach from Mozart, and doesn't want to be upstaged, poor soul.” There was a sudden thread of pity in her voice, as if the absurdity of pretension had betrayed its inner fear and its emptiness.
Ephraim saw it, and a shred of its meaning registered as surprise on his face, not at the village, but at what he had glimpsed in Naomi, a new beauty. “But Gower was there?” He grasped at the personal meaning.
“Yes. He left to go home at just after ten,” she replied.
“Then he could have got to the lower crossing by the time Judah did,” Benjamin deduced. “But it would have been hard. Don't the Pilkingtons live right