“Go Sit With the Blind Widow, You Are No Loss to the Set” – The Duke Crossed the Room to Her

Chapter 11

Hester went to Hollowfield the following Thursday, because it was Thursday, and because there was no version of her life in which she did not.

She went on foot, three miles, in the cold, and she arrived with her boots wet, and Prue Hollis opened the door and looked at her for a long moment and then said, “She has been at that window since two o’clock, and she cannot see out of it.”

Hester sat down in the low chair by the fire and took the cold hand in both of hers, and neither of them said anything for a while.

“I should have told you,” the old woman said at last.

“Perhaps.”

“You are angry.”

“No,” said Hester, and found, to her own surprise, that it was true. “I am not angry. I have been trying all week to find the anger and there is none there. I have only been — ” She stopped. “I have only been afraid that you will not want me now.”

The old woman’s hand closed on hers, hard, with a strength that startled them both.

“You are a fool,” she said, “and I have loved you four winters, and if you say a thing like that again I shall have Prue throw the kettle at you.”

“Then why?” said Hester. “Four winters. You could have told them any day. One word at any assembly in four years and they would have fallen over themselves. Why did you sit there in the corner with your hands folded while they walked around you like a chair?”

And the old woman was quiet for a long moment, and then she gave the answer, and it was the answer to the whole story.

“Because if I had told them who I was,” she said, “they would have been kind to me for it. And I should never have known which of them meant it.”

The fire cracked.

“You I was sure of,” she said. “You did not know there was a thing to be got. That is why I could not spend you. Do you understand? If I had stood up in that room and said I am the Duchess of Ellingham, you would have been kind to me from that day forward, and I should have spent the only friendship I have had in thirty years on a debt.”

Hester sat with that.

“You were never a debt,” she said.

“No,” said the old woman. “I was a Thursday.”

They had tea. Prue made it, and Hester poured it, because the old woman’s hands had begun to shake that winter and she would not admit it, and it was easier to pour the tea than to talk about the shaking.

And in the middle of the second cup, Hester’s eye went, as it had gone a hundred times in four winters, to the small carved wooden horse on the mantelpiece.

It was old. It was dark wood, polished by handling, and it stood about four inches high with its head up and one forefoot lifted, and it was the only ornament in that room that was not a book or a cushion or a piece of plain china.

She had never asked about it. Poor relations do not ask about other people’s ornaments.

She asked now.

“Ma’am,” she said. “The little horse on the mantel. The wooden one.”

The old woman’s face turned toward the sound of the mantelpiece, which was a thing she did out of habit, and her mouth did something complicated.

“Ah,” she said.

“I have looked at it for four winters and never asked. I am asking now.”

The old woman was silent a while. Then she said, “Bring it to me.”

Hester brought it. The old woman took it in her hands and turned it over the way she must have turned it over a thousand times, thumb finding the small chipped place at the base, thumb finding the worn smoothness along the neck where hands had held it.

“There were six of them,” she said. “Carved by a man in the village where I was married. He made them for the horses, so that I should have them to look at when they were in the stable. Six little horses in a row on my dressing table, for four years.”

“Six,” said Hester.

“Six,” said the old woman. “And then the flood came, and my husband drove them through it in the dark, and the water was to their bellies, and one of them — the grey, the one that was my favourite — one of them broke its leg in the ford and had to be shot on the bank on the other side, and he came to me soaked to the waist and told me about it before he told me anything else, because he knew I would want to know about the grey first.”

Hester did not say anything.

“I have five of them somewhere,” said the old woman. “In a box, in London, in a house I have not opened in seven years. I brought this one because it is the one he was holding when he told me.” Her thumb moved over the chipped place. “It has been on that mantelpiece for seven years and not one person in this county has ever asked me what it was.”

Hester said, “I did not ask because I thought it would be rude.”

“It would have been the kindest thing anybody in this county could have done,” said the old woman. “But you asked me about the horses. In the autumn. In the corner. With the fiddles going. Nobody has asked me about those horses in thirty years, and you asked me because you were listening, and you kept it, and you brought it back to me four months later like a thing you had found on a walk.”

She held the horse out.

“Take it,” she said.

“Ma’am, I cannot —”

“You can, and you will, and you will not argue with me about it, because I am very old and I have decided.” She pressed it into Hester’s hands and closed Hester’s fingers around it, feeling for them, the way the blind do, reading the shape of the hands. “You kept my dead for me. This is the last of them and I would rather it was in your hands than in a box in a house I shall never open again.”

Hester sat in the low chair by the fire with a wooden horse in her hands and wept, quietly, the way a woman weeps who has spent thirty years learning not to.

And the old woman sat with her hands folded and her blind face turned toward her, and let her.

The Duke of Ellingham called the next day and found his grandmother in excellent spirits and Hester Marlow with her eyes red, and had the great good sense to say nothing about either.

He came the day after that as well. And the day after that.

By the end of January he was riding over to Hollowfield four afternoons a week, and by the end of February he had begun to arrive at the hour when Hester arrived, which was a thing nobody remarked upon out loud, and which the old woman remarked upon constantly, in the privacy of her own head, with enormous satisfaction.