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

Chapter 15

They were married in September, in the parish church of Hollowfield, which seated a hundred and forty and held two hundred and eleven.

The county came. All of it. Every family in three parishes, and a good many from the next, and the Miss Selbys, and Mrs. Dodridge, and Anne Farrow standing at the back, and Mr. and Mrs. Marlow in the fourth pew, and Kate and Lucy Marlow in new white gowns, and the girl who had once put a feather in her hair at war with her gown wearing a bonnet so plain and so correct that Hester laughed when she saw it and had to pretend it was a cough.

And in the front pew, on the left-hand side, with a cushion at her back and Prue Hollis beside her, sat the Dowager Duchess of Ellingham.

She was well enough that year to sit in the front pew and hear it done. That was the whole reason the wedding was in September and not in the spring, and everybody who was anybody in that church knew it, and there was not a woman in the building who did not have to look at the window during the second hymn.

She could not see any of it. She heard all of it. And when the vicar came to the part about for better, for worse, she said it out loud with the rest of them, in a clear, carrying, cracked old voice, because she had promised herself in the carriage that she would.

The bride wore ivory silk with a grey sash, because grey had been her mother’s and because she had decided, in a conversation with herself that lasted three weeks, that she would not pretend to be somebody else on the one day in her life when she was allowed to be exactly herself.

The Duke of Ellingham, who had been told what the sash was, looked at it for a moment at the church door and then looked at his wife and said, “It is the exact colour of the sky in the corner of that assembly room.”

“It is the exact colour of the sky in the corner of that assembly room,” she agreed. “It was my mother’s. It has been turned twice.”

“I know,” he said. “You told me. It is the best gown in the county and I have said so since November.”

There was a wedding breakfast at Ravenshill for a hundred and sixty, which the county talked about for nine years.

And at half past four in the afternoon, when the last of the carriages had gone down the drive and the last of the county had been got into them, the bride and groom did not go anywhere at all.

They drove three miles in a plain carriage to a cottage at the end of a lane, and they sat down by the fire, one on each side of the low chair, and they had tea that Prue made, and they stayed until nine.

And the old woman, who could not see either of them, sat with her hands folded and her blind face turned toward the fire, and heard the two people she loved most in the world talk to each other in an ordinary voice about drainage and poetry and the price of oats, and she thought — and she never said this out loud to anybody, not even to Prue, though Prue knew — that if she had been offered the whole of her life over again, with the sight and the courts and the drawing rooms and the six horses, she would have given all of it back for that one afternoon in a cottage with nothing in it but a fire and a kettle and two people who did not have to be told who she was.