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

Chapter 13

He asked her in the orchard at Hollowfield, on a Thursday, at the end of an afternoon in which nothing at all had happened.

That was the whole design of it, and it was not a design, which is why it worked. They had drunk tea. They had argued about a drainage scheme in the west field, mildly, with the old woman taking Hester’s side out of pure mischief. Hester had read aloud for twenty minutes out of the green book, and the Duke had listened with his eyes shut, which he had begun to do and which she had stopped finding strange.

Then the old woman had gone in to rest, and Prue had taken her, and the two of them were left in the orchard at the back of the cottage with the blossom just going over and the light coming low through it.

They walked the length of the orchard and back. Hester was talking about her mother’s rose bed at the parsonage — she had got to the point in the story where she could talk about her mother without stopping — and she had just said something about the way her mother used to cut roses with a pair of scissors kept in her apron, and then she stopped, because he had stopped.

He was standing in the grass with his hands behind his back, and he looked, for a moment, like a man about to be inspected.

“I have a question,” he said, “and I want you to hear all of it before you answer, because I know what you will say first, and I would like you to have thought about it properly before you say it.”

Hester’s heart began to beat in a way it had not beaten since she was twenty-three and a curate with a stammer walked her home along a lane.

“Go on,” she said.

“You know what I am. You have known since the night at the assembly, and you have never once said a word to me about it, which is one of the reasons I am asking.” He took a breath. “You also know what your brother’s house has been to you. And you know that if you married me you would never have to go back into that house again — but you would have to go into another one, and it would be a bigger one, and it would have a great many people in it who would look at you and work out very fast that you came from a parsonage and a room over a kitchen.”

“Yes,” said Hester.

“So the first thing I want to say is this. I am not asking you to be rescued. I am not offering you a situation. If you say no, I will not be offended, and I will not stop coming on Thursdays, and nothing in your life will change except that you will have one more awkward hour in it, and I can live with that.”

“That is a very strange way to propose to a woman,” said Hester.

“I have not proposed yet,” he said. “I am clearing the ground. There is a great deal of rubbish on it and I mean to take it off first.”

He began to walk again, slowly, and she walked beside him.

“I have been a soldier,” he said. “I have spent six years of my life in places where a man learns what he actually values, and it is not usually what he thought. I have known what I value for about three months. I have been waiting to be sure it was not the winter and the fire and the fact that you were the only person in that county who did not look at me like a purchase.”

“And are you sure?”

“I am sure,” he said, “because on Tuesday I had to go to the county town and I was gone three days, and on all three days I thought about the same thing, and it was not the estate and it was not the drainage and it was not my grandmother.” He stopped walking. “It was that you would have read the fourth poem out of the green book to her on Thursday and I would have missed it. That is what I have been thinking about for three days. A poem I have heard twice.”

Hester stood in the orchard with the blossom going over and could not think of anything at all to say.

“So here is the question,” he said. “And I want you to hear all of it. I am asking whether you would consider, over time, being my wife. Not at once. You may take as long as you like, and I will not ask again, and you may tell me in a month or a year or at Christmas. And if the answer is that you would rather not, then I will ask my grandmother to scold me for a fortnight and I shall survive it.”

“You have thought about this a great deal,” said Hester.

“I have thought about very little else since February,” he said, “and I am a colonel of dragoons, and my staff have noticed, and it has been humiliating.”

Hester laughed. It came out of her the way the first laugh had come out of her in that corner four winters before — startled, unguarded, put away too late to hide.

And then she was crying, which she had not intended, and he stood very still and did not touch her, which was the kindest thing he could have done, because he had understood before she did that she needed to be able to stop.

“I am thirty-one,” she said at last. “I have forty pounds a year and one good gown and a wooden horse.”

“I know.”

“I do not know how to be a duchess.”

“Neither does my grandmother,” he said. “She has been one for thirty-four years and she still says the wrong thing at dinners. She says the only qualification is not being frightened of the silver.”

Hester wiped her face with the back of her wrist, like a schoolgirl, and did not care.

“I would want,” she said slowly, “to still come on Thursdays.”

He looked at her.

“That is the whole of my answer,” she said. “I do not know what I think about anything else yet. But I know that whatever happens, I will still come on Thursdays, and I will not have that taken away from me, not by a title and not by a house and not by anybody’s opinion of what a duchess does with her Thursdays.”

“Then I shall make it a condition of the marriage,” said the Duke of Ellingham. “In writing, if you like. Thursdays at Hollowfield, in perpetuity, and the green book, and the fourth poem.”

And Hester Marlow, who had spent six years being no loss to the set, stood in an orchard in the middle of May and said, “Then yes. Over time. Yes.”