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

Chapter 18

In the summer of that year, the Duchess of Ellingham did a thing that the county found very strange and talked about for eleven years.

She bought a house in the village.

It was not a great house. It was a plain stone house at the end of the church lane with six rooms and a walled garden and a pear tree, and she bought it with her own money — forty pounds a year had become, over four years of marriage, a good deal more than forty pounds a year, because she had married a man who had no idea what his own income was and who had handed the whole of the household accounts to her in the second month of their marriage with visible relief.

She bought it, and she furnished it plainly, and she put a housekeeper in it, and she called it Hollowfield House, which the county thought was sentimental and which it was not.

Then she wrote to eleven families in the county.

The letters were all the same letter. It went like this:

Madam, — I am writing to you about a situation I have established at Hollowfield House. It is a small house with six rooms, and it exists for the use of gentlewomen of this county who have no home of their own and no means of keeping one. A lady may live there for as long as she wishes, at no cost, with a room of her own, her meals, and the use of the garden. There is no charity in it and I will not have it called charity. It is a house, and it belongs to whoever needs it, and the only condition is that the lady who lives in it is not required to be grateful to me.

I have a particular reason for writing to you. I have been told that your sister is lately widowed and has no settlement. If she would care to see the house, I will be at home on Thursday.

She sent eleven of those letters. Six were answered. Four ladies came to live at Hollowfield House over the following three years, one after another, and one of them — a woman of sixty-two named Mrs. Alice Ferrers, whose husband had lost everything at cards and then died and left her with nothing but a bad name in three counties — stayed for eleven years, and became, in the end, the person who ran the place.

The county called it the Duchess’s Folly for the first two years. Then a lady from the next county wrote to ask whether there was room, and there was, and she came, and the county stopped calling it a folly, and started calling it the Duchess’s House, and then stopped calling it anything, because it had become a thing that simply existed, the way the church existed and the market existed and the river existed.

Hester never once explained it to anybody. Not to the county, not to her husband, and not even to Anne Farrow, who asked her about it directly one afternoon and got, in answer, a question.

“Did you ever sit in a room,” said Hester, “where everybody was pleasant to you and nobody could see you?”

Anne Farrow thought about it. “At my sister’s wedding,” she said. “For four hours. I thought I was going to go mad.”

“Then you know what the house is for.”

“I do not think I do.”

“It is for the four hours,” said Hester. “It is for the four hours, so that they have somewhere to go afterwards where nobody is being pleasant to them.”