Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [39]
“Changed beyond belief,” Samuel was answering. A curious expression crossed his face, laughter in his eyes and something which could have been excitement, and both sadness and distaste in his mouth. “The war had left everything in a flux.” And he proceeded to describe its color, violence, corruption and excitement. He told of it so enthrallingly even the old lady listened, begrudging every vivid moment.
“I’m sure you could not imagine, Mrs. Ellison, being a young man recently returned from the fear and hardship of war, and the strange tragedies of victory which were far more bitter in the mouth than any of us had foreseen.”
He moved from the city life to his adventure westwards.
“The men and women who took the wagon trains through were among the finest and bravest I’ve ever known,” he said with fierce admiration. “The hardships they endured, without complaint, were enough to make you weep. And they were all sorts: Germans, Italians, Swedes and French, Spaniards, Irish and Russians, but so many from right here. I came across one group of English people who were pushing all their worldly possessions in handcarts, women walking beside, some with babes in arms, going all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. God knows how many died on the way.”
“I cannot imagine it,” Caroline said softly. “I don’t know how people have the courage.”
Caroline watched Samuel and thought of the previous evening at the theatre, and how utterly different that had been. She could see perfectly in her mind’s eye Cecily Antrim’s vivid figure illuminated on the stage, her hair like a halo in the lights, her every gesture full of passion and imprisoned despair. She wanted so much more than she had. Would that woman ever conceive of what it would be like to struggle simply to survive?
Or were the emotions much the same, only the object of the hunger different? Did one long for love, for the freedom to be yourself, unrestrained by social expectations, with the same fierceness as one hungered for religious or political freedom, and set out to walk on foot into a vast and unknown land inhabited only by an alien race who saw you as an invader?
Cecily Antrim was fighting a complex and sophisticated society in order to win the freedom to say anything she wished. Caroline felt threatened by her. Sitting here watching Samuel and less than half listening to him, she could admit that. She was used to a world where certain things were not said. It was safer. There were things she did not want to know—about others and about herself. There were emotions she did not want to think others understood. It made her naked in a dangerous way, and far too vulnerable.
Cecily Antrim was very brave. Nothing seemed to frighten her sufficiently to deter her. That was part of what Joshua admired so much; that, and her beauty. It was unique, not a prettiness at all, far too strong, too passionate and uncompromising for that. Her face had a symmetry from every angle, a balance in the smoothness of the bones, the wide, unflinching eyes. She moved with extraordinary grace. She made Caroline feel very ordinary, sort of brown and old, like a moth instead of a butterfly.
And the worst thing of all was that it was not merely physical. Cecily had such vigor and courage to fight for whatever she believed in, and Caroline was increasingly unsure of what she thought was right or wrong. She wanted to agree with Joshua that censorship was wrong. The only way to freedom and growth, to the just equality of one person’s faith with another’s, was for ideas to be expressed and questions to be asked, comfortable or not. And for laws to be changed, people’s emotions had to be awoken, and their sympathies for passions and beliefs outside their own experience.
That was what her mind told her. Deeper, woven into her being, was the conviction that there are things