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

Chapter 20

Thirty-one years later, on a cold Thursday in November, an old woman sat in the corner of the county assembly rooms with a wooden horse in her lap and watched a young woman being sent to the fire.

She had not meant to come. She was seventy-two and had not been to an assembly in nine years, and she had come tonight for a reason that had nothing to do with the dancing, which was that her granddaughter was nineteen and had been brought out that autumn and had asked her, in the carriage, in a very small voice, whether she would come and sit at the side of the room and tell her who everyone was.

The granddaughter’s name was Honoria, which had caused a small amount of comment at the christening and a very great deal of pleasure to a blind old woman who had died three weeks before it.

The girl had been standing in the light for twenty minutes. She had been looked through by four young men in a row, all of whom had been told her name and had already forgotten it. And the girl — who was tall and plain and had her grandmother’s flat way of speaking — had gone to the side of the room, and stood there, and her grandmother had watched her do it, and had watched her decide something, and had seen exactly what she had decided.

She was deciding whether to leave.

And in that moment, across the room, a woman in a made-over gown was being steered out of the light by her sister-in-law, and was being handed toward the corner where an old lady with a stick sat alone, and the sister-in-law said something pleasant and loud about keeping her from wandering, and somebody laughed.

The old woman in the corner saw all of it — the gown, the shove, the laugh, the girl’s face going still the way a face goes still when it has decided not to mind.

And she got up.

It took her a moment. She was seventy-two and her knees had been bad since she was forty, and there was a wooden horse in her lap and she had to put it down on the chair to have both hands free. She put it down carefully, on its side, on the seat of the chair, so that it would not roll.

Then she crossed the room.

She crossed the whole length of it — past the mothers, past the girl who had laughed, past the young men who had looked through her granddaughter — and she stopped in front of a woman of about thirty in a gown that had been turned twice, who was sitting on the edge of a bench beside an old lady with a stick, doing the thing that Hester Marlow had done four winters in a row and had never once been thanked for.

“May I sit with you?” said the Dowager Duchess of Ellingham.

The woman looked up. She had a plain, tired, intelligent face and the beginning of a line between her brows.

“There is room,” she said, “but I do not think you want to. I am nobody.”

“So am I,” said the Duchess of Ellingham, and sat down.

They talked for two hours.

She told the woman — whose name was Mary, and who was a rector’s daughter, and who kept the accounts for her brother’s shop and had a cough she had not mentioned to anybody — the colour of every gown in that room, and which of the young men would be a fool at thirty, and what there was for supper, and where the good fire was, and why the fiddlers always played that one too fast.

And in the quiet hour she took a small green book out of her reticule, and read aloud — not in the loud, slow voice the young keep for the old, but as though the woman beside her were a person — and the woman sat and listened with her hands in her lap and did not once look at the room.

At the end of the evening, when the carriages were being called, the woman said: “I do not know why you sat with me.”

“Yes, you do,” said the Duchess of Ellingham. “You are going to be kind in a corner for years, and nobody is going to see you, and you are going to do it anyway, and one day somebody will see, and it will not be the way you imagine. That is all. That is the whole of what I came here to say to you, and I have been waiting thirty-one years to say it to somebody.”

“You do not know me,” said the woman.

“No,” said the Duchess of Ellingham. “And I do not want to. That is rather the point.”

She went back to her chair and picked up the wooden horse and put it back in her reticule, where it lived, and where it had lived since the day she decided that a thing which had sat on a mantelpiece for seven years unasked-about should not sit on a shelf for another thirty.

Her granddaughter found her at the door.

“Grandmama,” she said, “you left the corner. Everyone saw. You crossed the whole room in the middle of the dancing and everyone watched you.”

“I know,” said the Duchess of Ellingham.

“Why?”

And Hester Marlow — who had been no loss to the set, and had been a duchess for thirty-one years, and had buried the woman who made her, and had built a house for four ladies who had nowhere to go, and had read the same four poems out loud every Thursday for seven winters and then, after that, every Thursday to nobody in particular, because she had got into the habit of it and did not intend to stop — looked at her granddaughter in the doorway of the assembly rooms where her whole life had turned.

“Because a woman crossed a room for me once,” she said, “and it took her forty years to find the moment, and I have decided not to wait that long.”