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

Chapter 2

There was a way of being spoken to in that house that never once involved being spoken to.

Hester had learned it the way you learn a language you are not allowed to answer in. When Cecily Marlow wanted the room over the kitchen cleaned, she did not say so; she said, in the middle of a sentence about something else, “The chimney smokes so badly up there in September, poor thing,” and looked at the ceiling, and the following morning the room was cleaned. When Cecily Marlow wanted Hester out of the drawing room before callers came, she did not say so; she said to the girls, “Your aunt is so good about the mending,” and the mending was understood to be waiting.

By the time Hester was thirty-one, she could hear the whole of a reproach in the way a chair was moved.