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

Chapter 14

The betrothal was announced in the county paper on the fourth of June, and the county had, for eleven days, no idea at all what to do with itself.

There had been, in the ordinary run of things, three possible stories about the Duke of Ellingham’s marriage. He would marry a London lady of great family and enormous fortune, and the county would be diminished by it. He would marry one of the county’s own daughters, and the county would be enlarged by it. Or he would not marry at all for another ten years, and the county would go on speculating, which was the most comfortable of the three.

Nobody had considered a fourth.

The paper did not explain. It printed the bare facts in the flat black type it used for everything: The Duke of Ellingham to Miss Hester Marlow, of Marlow House in this county, daughter of the late Reverend John Marlow. And then, because the editor was a curious man and could not help himself, one further line: The marriage will take place at the parish church of Hollowfield in September.

That last line did more work than the first. Hollowfield. The county read it twice, and then a third time, and then sat down.

It was the Miss Selbys who worked it out first, and it was the elder Miss Selby — the one with the feather — who carried it round three drawing rooms in a single afternoon, and she did it without malice, which made it worse.

“She sat with the old woman,” she said. “Four winters. Every assembly. In the corner. You remember — she was the one Mrs. Marlow was always sending to sit with the blind woman from the cottage.”

And the room would go quiet, and then somebody would say, “That was the Duchess?” and Miss Selby would say, “That was the Duchess,” and the room would be quiet again in a different way.

By the end of June, the county had settled on a version, because a county always settles on a version, and the version was this: There was a young woman in this county who was kind to a stranger, and it turned out to be the one thing worth doing.

The county told it that way because it was flattering to tell it that way. It made the county a place where such a thing could happen. It made the six years of walking around the old woman at Hollowfield Cottage a matter of not having known, rather than a matter of not having cared.

Hester let them tell it. She had learned, in the corner by the fire, that the way a room tells a story is not something you can correct, and that correcting it is a full-time occupation and returns nothing.

There was one person in that county who could not let it go, and it was not Cecily Marlow.

It was the girl who had laughed.

Her name was Anne Farrow, and she was nineteen, and she had laughed once at a joke made at another woman’s expense and had been sorry before the sound was out of her mouth. She had told the story against herself afterwards, in six drawing rooms, in an attempt to be forgiven. And then the story had grown legs, as stories do, and had become the county’s story, and the county’s version had no girl who laughed in it at all.

So one afternoon in July, Anne Farrow walked three miles to Marlow House and asked to see Miss Marlow, and was shown into the morning room, and stood there with her hands knotted together and said, in one breath:

“I laughed. At the assembly. When your sister-in-law said it. I laughed, and I have been sorry about it since the first second, and I know an apology is not much, but I did not want you to have to be in the same county as me without knowing that I knew.”

Hester looked at her for a moment — a tall, frightened girl with her chin up and her hands shaking, doing the hardest thing anybody in that county had done in six years.

“Sit down,” said Hester. “Have you had tea?”

Anne Farrow had not had tea. Anne Farrow had rehearsed this interview twenty times and none of the rehearsals had involved tea.

“I do not want you to think —” she began.

“I think you walked three miles in the heat to say a thing that nobody made you say,” said Hester, “and that is more than anyone else in this county has done, and I have known the whole of it since the first second, because I was there.” She rang the bell. “Sit down.”

They took tea. They talked for an hour and a half. And in the end, Anne Farrow became — by degrees, over eleven years, and without either of them ever remarking on it — the nearest thing Hester Marlow had to a friend in that county.

That is how these things go. The person who wrongs you in the smallest way, and says so, and means it, turns out to be worth more than fifty who never wronged you at all.

Cecily Marlow wrote a letter of congratulation. It was a good letter. She had spent four days on it and it was, in its way, a small masterpiece — warm, and correct, and entirely without a single sentence that could be read as a reproach.

My dear Hester, — I cannot tell you what joy it gave us all to hear your news…

Hester read it twice and put it in the green book with her father’s name in it, which was where she put the things she intended to keep.

She wrote back. Her letter was shorter. It said that she was very happy, and that she hoped Cecily and Edmund would come to the wedding, and that she would always be grateful for six years of shelter under their roof, and that she hoped Kate and Lucy might come to stay at Ravenshill in the autumn.

That was the whole of it. No coldness, no thrust, no satisfaction taken. Which was, as it happened, the most complete answer she ever gave anybody in her life.

Edmund Marlow, when he read the news, said to his wife, “I always said she would come to something.”

And Cecily Marlow, who had lived with him for nineteen years and had never once been able to say a plain thing to his face, said: “Yes. You did.”