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

Chapter 12

The county had a great deal to say about those afternoons, and none of it was said in front of the Duke of Ellingham, and all of it was wrong.

What the county said was: the Duke of Ellingham is paying attention to the poor relation out of gratitude to his grandmother, and it is very handsome of him, and it will not last past the spring.

What was actually happening was much simpler and much harder to see.

He had begun, in the middle of February, to arrive at three o’clock, which was when she arrived. He had begun to walk his horse the last half-mile so that he came down the lane on foot, which meant he came in with the cold on him and no ceremony, which meant Prue stopped announcing him and simply opened the door. He had begun to sit in the other low chair — the one that had always been there and had never been used — and to drink tea he did not want, and to listen.

He was a quiet man. That was the first thing Hester learned about him, and it surprised her, because the room had made him out to be a man of pronouncements, and pronouncements are the least of what a quiet man does.

He had been a colonel of dragoons for six years in a war that had killed most of the men he had trained with. He did not talk about it. But he listened to his grandmother the way a man listens who has learned that the people who matter do not last, and he asked questions the way Hester asked them — not to fill a silence, but because he wanted the answer.

And by the end of February, he had begun to ask them of her.

“Tell me about your father,” he said, one wet afternoon, when the old woman had fallen asleep in her chair with the fire on her face.

And Hester, who had spent six years being asked nothing by anybody, discovered that she did not know how to answer a question about herself. She started three times. She got out that he had been a clergyman, and that he had read aloud after supper, and that he had a way of reading poetry as though it were an argument he was winning.

“What was his favourite?”

“Gray’s Elegy. And the one about the — ” She stopped. “The one about the churchyard. He liked anything about churchyards. He said a man who is not afraid of a churchyard has not thought about it properly.”

The Duke of Ellingham laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of him, and Hester felt something in her chest turn over.

“My grandmother says the same about graveyards,” he said. “She says the only people who are comfortable in them are the ones who have never buried anybody.”

“Yes,” said Hester. “That is exactly what he said.”

And then neither of them said anything for a moment, and the fire filled it, and it was not uncomfortable, and that was the thing that frightened her most of all.

He asked her, that same week, about the ledger.

They had got onto the subject sideways — she had said something about the price of oats at Marlow’s, and he had asked how she knew, and she had said, without thinking, that she kept the accounts.

“You keep the accounts,” he said.

“Someone must, and I am better at figures than Edmund.”

He looked at her for a moment. “How much better?”

And because he asked the way he asked everything — as though the answer mattered and would not be laughed at — she told him. She told him about the double-entry book, and the book she had taught herself out of when she was nineteen, and the fact that her brother’s affairs were in a worse state than he knew, and that there was a mortgage on the east field that Cecily did not know about, and that the timber was being sold too fast.

She stopped, abruptly, aware that she had just said a great deal about a family that was not hers, to a man who could ruin them with a sentence.

“Forgive me,” she said. “That was not mine to say.”

“It was yours to say,” he said. “You are the only person in that house who knows it.”

“That does not make it mine.”

“No,” he agreed. “It does not. But it makes you the only one who can be trusted with it, and I shall not repeat it, and if you want my advice about the east field I will give it, and if you do not, we shall talk about something else.”

They talked about something else. But the following Thursday, he brought a book — a thin, dry, grey book about the management of small estates — and left it on the table by the fire without a word about it, and Hester took it home in her reticule and read it in three nights.

The old woman noticed everything. That was the thing about her being blind: she had spent seven years building an attention out of sound and breath and the way a chair moved, and she could hear the shape of a conversation from the next room.

She said nothing for six weeks. That was a discipline, and she was proud of it, and she would have told anybody who asked that a grandmother’s first duty is to keep her mouth shut.

Then, one afternoon in March, when Hester had gone out to the pump and the Duke was standing at the window watching her cross the yard in the rain, the old woman said, from her chair, without preamble:

“She will not be got with a house.”

He did not turn round. “I know.”

“Nor with a title. She has watched what a title does to a room and she does not want any part of it.”

“I know.”

“Nor with gratitude. If you make her feel grateful to you she will be polite to you for the rest of her life and never once be easy with you again.”

“I know, Grandmother.”

The old woman folded her hands.

“Then what do you mean to do?”

And he turned round then, and he looked at her — a woman who could not see him, who had raised his father, who had buried her husband and her son and her daughter-in-law, who had sat in a corner for seven years so that she would never have to wonder whether anybody meant it.

“I mean to be a man she can be easy with,” he said. “For as long as it takes. And if that is the whole of it, then that is the whole of it, and I shall still come on Thursdays.”

The old woman sat very still for a moment.

“Your grandfather,” she said at last, “used to say that the only thing he had ever done that he was proud of was that he never once made me feel like a favour.”

“I know,” said the Duke of Ellingham. “You have told me. Six horses through a flood, and never once made you feel like a favour.”

“Seven,” she said. “There were seven in the end, but I only ever tell people six, because six is the number that frightens them.” She smiled at the fire. “You may marry her.”

“I have not asked her.”

“Then ask her,” said his grandmother. “But not yet. Not while she is still afraid of you. Wait until she has stopped being afraid, and then wait a fortnight longer, because she will be afraid again when she sees it coming, and you will need to wait that out too.”

He waited until the middle of May.