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

Chapter 17

She died on a Friday morning in the spring, and the county closed its shutters, and the bell at Hollowfield rang for two hours, and four hundred people came to the funeral, most of whom had never once sat down beside her.

The Duke of Ellingham stood at the graveside with his hat in his hand and did not speak. He had been asked to speak and had declined, and had asked his wife to decline for him, and she had done it, and had said to the man who asked: “He will not speak at it. He has not spoken about her since she died and I do not expect him to for a year. Let him alone.”

He did not speak about her for eleven months. And then, in the following February, he was standing at a window watching the rain come up the valley, and he said, out of nowhere, to the woman reading in the chair behind him:

“She told me once that the only qualification for being a duchess was not being frightened of the silver. She said it to frighten me off, I think. I was twenty-two and I had just inherited and I was very frightened of everything, and she took me into the dining room at Ellingham and made me count the plate out loud, all of it, every piece, and then she said: ‘There. It is only silver. It cannot eat you.'”

Hester put the book down.

“And I have spent eleven months trying to work out why she bothered,” he said. “There were forty people in that house who could have counted the plate. She came down from her rooms herself.”

“Because you were frightened,” said Hester, “and she could hear it.”

“Yes,” he said. “She could always hear it.”

That was the whole of the conversation. But Hester went upstairs afterwards and wrote down the date in the green book, on the back page, in pencil: February — he spoke about her.

The box came up from London in April.

It was a plain wooden box with a brass lock and no name on it, and it came with a letter from a solicitor and a small sealed packet, and Hester opened it alone in the room at Ravenshill where she did her accounts.

Inside were five carved wooden horses, wrapped in a piece of grey woollen cloth that had gone thin with age, each one dark with handling and each one different — one with its head up, one with its head down, one with a forefoot lifted, one standing square, one turned sideways as though looking at something out of frame.

And a sixth shape in the cloth, which was not a horse. It was a small bundle of paper, tied with a black ribbon, and inside it were eleven letters in a small, upright, cramped hand, dated over the last seven winters, all of them addressed to My dear grandson, and all of them, in the last four winters, containing the same two words somewhere in the middle of them.

Hester.

She read them all, sitting at the table, in the afternoon, with the door shut.

In the first of them, written in the fourth winter, the old woman had described her like this:

There is a young woman who sits with me at these assemblies. Her name is Hester. She has a way of telling me what is in the room that makes me think I can see it, which I have not been able to do since I lost my sight, and which I had not realised I missed until she did it. She does not know it. She thinks she is being kind to a poor old woman. I have not corrected her and I do not intend to.

In the fifth winter:

I have been thinking about what a kindness is worth when it is done for nobody. I believe it is worth more than a kindness done for a room, and I have no way of proving it, and it does not matter, because I have decided.

In the seventh winter, three months before the assembly:

I am going to ask you for something when you come home, and I want you to know before you arrive that it is not a favour and it is not an errand. It is the only thing I have ever asked of anybody in my life that I could not have bought, and I am eighty-three years old and I have decided to spend my remaining credit on it.

And underneath, in the same cramped hand, a line that had been written and then crossed out, and then written again below because the old woman had changed her mind about crossing it out:

I want to die knowing that she was seen.

Hester Marlow sat at a table in a room in Ravenshill with eleven letters and five wooden horses in front of her, and she put her head down on her arms, and she cried the way she had not cried at the funeral, because at the funeral there had been four hundred people watching.