Danielle Steel - A Good Woman

And on the sixth of January, Consuelo quietly gave up the fight. She went to sleep in the early evening, after a long, difficult day. She was holding Annabelle’s hand, and they had talked for a little while that afternoon. Consuelo had smiled at her before she went to sleep and told Annabelle she loved her. Annabelle had been dozing in the chair next to her at eight o’clock that night, when she suddenly sensed something different and woke up with a start. She looked at the smooth expression on her mother’s face and instantly saw that she wasn’t breathing, as Annabelle gasped. For the first time in two weeks, her mother’s face was cool, unnaturally so. The fever had left her, and taken Consuelo’s life. Annabelle tried to shake her awake, and saw that it was useless. She knelt at her mother’s bedside, holding her lifeless form in her arms, and sobbed. It was the final goodbye she had never been able to say to her father or brother, and she was inconsolable as she cried.

Blanche found her there a little while later, and started to cry herself. She gently stroked Consuelo’s hair, and then led Annabelle away, and sent Thomas to get Josiah. He was at the house moments later, and did all he could to comfort his wife. He knew all too well how great the loss would be to her, and how much she had loved her mother.

The doctor came that night to sign the death certificate, and in the morning the mortician came to prepare her. They laid Consuelo in state in the ballroom with flowers everywhere, as Annabelle stood by, looking devastated, with Josiah holding her hand.

Friends came to visit all the next day, after seeing the shocking announcement in the paper that Consuelo Worthington had died. Their home was plunged into deep mourning yet again, so soon after their double loss nearly three years before. Annabelle realized that she was an orphan now, and as her mother had said to him, Josiah was all she had in the world. She clung to him through the next days like a drowning person, and at her mother’s funeral at St. Thomas Episcopal Church. His arm was ever around her shoulders, and he was true to his word. Josiah never left her side, and even slept with her in her narrow bed in her childhood room in her parents’ house. She didn’t want to go back to their apartment, and insisted on staying at her house with him. She talked about their moving into the house, which was stately to be sure, but he felt it would be grim, and too hard for her. But for now he let her do as she wished. It was a nearly intolerable loss for Annabelle. Henry was often with them, and was a great comfort to her too. He came to visit frequently and he and Josiah talked quietly in the library late at night or played cards, while Annabelle lay upstairs on her bed, in a state of shock and grief.

It was a full month before she left the house. She had touched nothing in her mother’s bedroom. All Consuelo’s clothes were still there. Josiah was handling the estate at the bank. Her parents’ entire fortune was hers now, including the portion that would have gone to Robert. She was a very rich woman, but it was of no consolation to her. She didn’t care. And although it pained him to do so, in March, Josiah had to relay to her an offer to buy the house, from a family that knew hers. Annabelle was horrified and didn’t want to hear it, but Josiah told her gently that he didn’t think she’d ever be happy there. She had lost all the people she had loved in that house, and the house was filled with ghosts for her. And the offer was a good one, probably better than any they’d get if she decided later to sell it. He knew it would be painful for her to do, but he thought she should.

“But where will we live?” she asked with a look of anguish. “Your apartment will be too small for us once we have a family, and I don’t want another house.” She was strongly inclined to decline the offer, but she also knew the truth of what he said. She and Josiah still needed a house, but had done nothing about it since Josiah wasn’t ready to have children, and all she would ever see in that house were the visions of her parents and brother, all gone now. Even if they filled it with children, it would never fully balance the sadness she felt there, and the memories of those she’d lost.

She talked about it with Hortie, who was pregnant with her third child and sick again. She complained that James had turned her into a baby factory, but her own problems seemed minimal now compared to Annabelle’s, and she tried to advise her as sensibly as she could. She thought Josiah was right, and that he and Annabelle should sell the Worthington mansion, and buy a new house for themselves, that had no bad memories for her, or sad ones.

It broke Annabelle’s heart to do it, but within two weeks she agreed. She couldn’t even imagine giving up the house where she had been so happy as a child, but now it was filled with loss and grief. Josiah promised to handle everything for her, and assured her that they would find a new one, or even build one, which would be a happy project for them. And whatever issues they had between them had gone unaddressed during her period of mourning. She was no longer worried about the family they hadn’t started yet. She was in no mood to think of anything but her grief.

She spent all of April packing up the house, and sending everything to storage. And whatever was of no interest or value to her went to auction to be sold. The servants, Josiah, and Henry were tireless in their efforts to help her, and she spent hours crying every day. She hadn’t been to Ellis Island since her mother’s death. She missed it terribly but was too busy now closing her parents’ house. The last of it went to storage in May, the anniversary of the day she and Josiah had gotten engaged two years before. She was relinquishing the house in June, and going to stay at the cottage in Newport, which she insisted she would keep. She and Josiah were going to spend the summer there.

Six days after she closed the house in New York, the Germans sank the Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, in a terrible tragedy at sea, which revived all her memories of the Titanic, and once again rocked the world and yet another of her mother’s cousins died, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who stayed back to help others into lifeboats as her father and brother had on the Titanic. And like them, Alfred lost his life, when the ship exploded and sank in less than twenty minutes. Two weeks later, Italy entered the war and joined the Allies. And there were terrible stories in the news of nerve gas being used at the front and untold damage to the men it affected. All of Europe was in a state of turmoil, which seemed to mirror the despair and anguish that Annabelle felt.

She spent the rest of May in Josiah’s apartment before she left for Newport in June. She took Blanche and those of her mother’s servants who still remained to Newport with her. At the end of the summer, most of them would be moving on to other jobs, and life as she had known it would be forever changed. Blanche and William the butler would be staying in Newport with a few of the others.

Josiah had promised to come to Newport in mid-June, he was planning to take a longer vacation than usual that year, as he knew that Annabelle needed him with her. She looked heartbroken when she left town. The city home she had loved so much was already in other hands.

Once in Newport, Annabelle spent some time with Hortie, who had come up early with her children, their nanny, and her mother. Although only six months pregnant, she was huge again, and Annabelle was too restless to spend much time with her. She had felt sad and anxious since her mother’s death, and it was hard being in Newport without her. In some ways, it felt to her like a replay of the summer after the Titanic, and she was relieved when Josiah arrived.