Farthing Read Online Free PDF

young, much younger than her husband, and she was looking at me timidly as if she would like to have a conversation but didn’t know where to begin. “Isn’t it a glorious day,” I said, insipidly enough.
    “Beautiful, yes, and such lovely countryside,” she said.
    “The gardens were laid out by Nash,” I said, slipping easily into my old role as daughter-of-the-house.
    “We have his plans for the gardens. There are also some very interesting sketches the young ladies of the family made of them soon after they were planted. The trees, of course, were saplings. It seems strange
    to me sometimes that we are seeing them as Nash meant them to be seen, when he himself could only imagine them in their full glory.”
    “That is strange,” she said, struck by the observation. “So much we do casts such long shadows.
    Do you plant more trees?”
    “When one dies or is blown down my father always plants a new sapling,” I said. “And when Hugh and I
    were children we used to plant acorns, hundreds of them every year. It was a project of ours, and we’d think of our descendants marveling at the oak forests.”
    But Hugh was dead, and my putative descendants wouldn’t be Eversleys or grow up here. That was just as true when I was a child and would have been true whoever I married. After Daddy dies the estate and the title will go to cousin Alfred, though I was due for most of the money and plenty of other bits of land that aren’t entailed on a male Eversley heir.
    “Tom and I live in quite a small house,” Lady Manningham confided. “We don’t have any family Page 12

    property like this. Tom’s a bit of a self-made man.”
    “One of the best kinds,” I said, entirely sincerely.
    “He was made a baronet for services to industry,” she went on, encouraged. “I thought it quite silly at first, being Lady instead of Mrs., but being here has made me see it in quite a different light. I mean people have always been ennobled for serving their country; it’s just a matter of how and what, isn’t it?”
    “I think one of my ancestors was ennobled for doing something unspeakable for Henry VII,” I said, truthfully enough, and then repented of it when I saw how she was trying to cover up her look of horror.
    “No, seriously, you plant some acorns for your descendants,” I said, and she put her hand on her stomach in that way that newly pregnant women always do, with that look. I raised my eyebrows, and she put her finger to her lips and nodded, so I just smiled. She was a much nicer person than Mummy usually invited along to her bashes, though I suppose it was Sir Thomas who had actually been invited, and Lady Manningham had just come along as his wife.
    She looked away, clearly seeking for some different topic of conversation. I was glad enough, because however pleased I was, and I was, that she was knocked up, I couldn’t help feeling envious, because it was what I was so longing for myself at that moment. It was all very well David saying it was nice to be on our own for the time being and that there was plenty of time, and he was right, of course, but I did so want to start a family right away, and couldn’t help being cross sometimes that stupid nature wasn’t cooperating.
    “So, you still go to church,” Lady Manningham said.
    “Yes,” I said. It was the only possible answer unless I wanted a long conversation about things that were none of her business, such as David’s lack of particular religious feeling and my non-conversion to
    Judaism. If she’d known anything about the religion at all she’d have been able to tell I hadn’t converted the day before when she was introduced to me and saw that I wasn’t wearing a hat. I was wearing one that morning, of course, I’d just been to church, but I hadn’t taken up covering my hair as Jewish women do. However, she clearly didn’t know a thing. If anything, I go to church more often than I would if I
    hadn’t married David. I’d always gone at