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

Chapter 16

She kept the Thursdays.

That is the thing to hold on to, out of everything that came after, because everything that came after was the sort of thing that happens to a woman who marries a duke, and the Thursdays were the sort of thing that happens to a woman who is exactly herself.

The Duchess of Ellingham kept Thursdays at Hollowfield Cottage for three winters more. She went in the plain carriage, because the plain carriage was what the old woman liked, and she went alone, because the old woman had asked her to come alone. Prue made tea. They sat on either side of the fire. And Hester read the four poems out of the green book, and told her what was in the county paper, and described the gowns at whatever assembly had been held that week, which she still attended and which the old woman still asked about.

Tell me what they are wearing. I always like to know what they were wearing.

The old woman’s knees got worse. By the second winter she could not be walked up and down the passage any longer, so Hester walked her from the chair to the window and back — six steps, twelve steps, six steps — and they did it four times an afternoon, and the old woman counted every one of them aloud, in a voice of enormous complaint, and made Hester laugh every time.

By the third winter, she was mostly in her bed.

The physicians came and said what physicians say, which was that she was very old and had had a long life and there was nothing to be done that was worth the doing. She received this news with the flat composure of a woman who has buried a husband and a son and had decided, some time ago, that she would not make a fuss about the end of it.

She asked them to stop coming. She asked Prue to send for Hester, and Hester came on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday, which had not happened in four winters, and sat down beside the bed, and took the cold hand in both of hers.

“It is only me, ma’am,” she said. “It is Hester. I am sorry I was so long.”

And the blind face turned toward the voice and lit like a window with a lamp behind it — the same as it had lit in the corner of an assembly room on the first night of it, the same as it had lit a hundred times since, and the whole of that story was in that one small movement, and neither of them said so.

“You are not so long,” said the old woman. “You have never once been so long.”

She had two things to say, and she said them that afternoon, and then she slept, and she died on the Friday morning with Prue on one side of the bed and Hester on the other, in the spring of the third year, at the age of eighty-six.

The first thing she said was about the horse.

“The little wooden horse,” she said. “You have it still.”

“I have it on my dressing table,” said Hester. “It has been there since the day you gave it to me. My maid thinks it is eccentric.”

“Your maid is correct.” The old woman’s mouth moved. “There is a box in London. Prue knows the house. There are five more in it. They are yours. Not the family’s. Yours. I have put it in the will, and my grandson has seen the will, and if anybody argues about it you may tell them that a duchess may leave her ornaments to whomever she pleases and that this duchess was very particular about horses.”

“I will tell them that,” said Hester.

“Good.” A pause. “The grey one is not in the box. The grey one broke its leg in the ford. I have never replaced the grey one and I do not want it replaced.”

“I know,” said Hester. “You told me. Six horses, and the grey was your favourite, and he came to you soaked to the waist and told you about the grey first.”

The old woman lay with her eyes closed for a while.

“Thirty years,” she said, “and nobody asked me. And then you did.”

The second thing she said was about the silence.

“You asked me once why I waited,” she said. “Four winters, and I never told them. You asked me in this room and I gave you an answer and you took it.”

“You said you would never have known which of them meant it.”

“That was the answer for the county,” said the old woman. “It was true, but it was not the whole of it, and I have been lying here all winter thinking about whether I owed you the whole of it, and I have decided that I do.”

Hester sat very still.

“I could have told them who I was any day of those four winters,” the old woman said. “And you would have been raised up, and it would have cost me nothing, and I did not do it. Do you know why?”

“Because of the county.”

“Because I was afraid,” said the old woman.

Hester said nothing.

“I was afraid that if I said who I was, you would become a person who came on Thursdays to the Duchess of Ellingham,” she said. “And I had not been anybody’s Thursday in thirty years. I had been a mother, and a wife, and a duchess, and a name on a subscription list. And for four winters I was a blind old woman in a corner who got told the colour of the gowns, and I have never in my whole life been so happy as I was in that corner, and I did not want it to end, and I did not end it.”

She stopped. Her breathing was bad that week and she had to take the sentences in pieces.

“So I let a whole county walk around me for four winters,” she said. “And I let you sit there in a grey gown in the dark thinking you were nothing, when I could have made you something in an afternoon. And I have wondered all winter whether that was a wicked thing to do, and I have decided that it was.”

“It was not,” said Hester.

“It was,” said the old woman. “It was a small wickedness done for a large love, and it cost you four winters of being nobody, and I have counted them, and I have counted them many times.” She turned her blind face toward the voice. “So I am telling you now. Not because I want to be forgiven. I have been forgiven by better people than you. But because I have decided that you should know the truth of what you were to me, and it is not the story the county tells, and it is not the story my grandson tells. It is a much smaller and much worse and much better story than either of them, and it belongs to you, and you may do what you like with it.”

Hester Marlow sat by the bed of the Dowager Duchess of Ellingham and thought about it for a long time.

Then she said: “You were afraid, and you were selfish, and you were also the only person in that county who ever looked at me as though I were a person, and you did it by sitting in a corner and saying nothing. Those things are all true at once and I am not going to try to make them into one thing, because I have spent thirty-one years watching people make things into one thing, and it never helps.”

“Then you are wiser than my son was,” said the old woman.

“No,” said Hester. “I am just very used to holding more than one thing at a time. You taught me that, in the corner. You never once told me a simple story about anybody. You told me about a husband who drove six horses through a flood and was also a fool about money. You told me about a sister who loved yellow roses and was also unkind to her own children. You told me the whole of people, and nobody had ever done that for me before, and it is the reason I could sit in my brother’s house for six years without hating anybody, and it is the reason I am going to sit here now and not hate you.”

The old woman’s hand moved in hers.

“Then I have done one thing right,” she said, “and it took me eighty-six years.”