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

Chapter 6

The county had a new great man that winter, and it was in a fever about him.

The Duke of Ellingham had come into the neighbourhood in the autumn. He had opened the great house at Ravenshill, which had stood shut for eleven years and which the county had long ago stopped thinking of as a house at all and begun thinking of as a landmark, the way you think of a hill. He had brought staff with him. He had had the chimneys swept and the drive gravelled and the windows opened, and smoke had been seen from the chimneys in October for the first time since anybody could remember.

He was young. He was unmarried. He was richer than the whole of that assembly put end to end, and richer than the next county’s as well. He had been a soldier, which the older men found reassuring and the younger men found unanswerable. And he had so far refused every card and every invitation in the neighbourhood, on the ground of being newly settled and not yet in the way of company.

Which meant that the winter assembly would be the county’s first sight of him.

Every mother in three parishes had drilled every daughter for a fortnight. Gowns had been turned and re-trimmed and turned again. Two girls had been sent to the county town for gloves. One mother had written to London for a pattern and had it three days late and had wept. The Miss Selbys had quarrelled about a feather.

And what no mother in three parishes knew — what no soul in the county knew, except one old woman at the end of a lane and her companion of thirty years — was where the Duke of Ellingham had spent his evenings that autumn instead.

He had spent them at Hollowfield Cottage. By the fire. With the blind old woman.

Three days before the assembly, he sat there again, in the low chair that had become his chair without anyone saying so, drinking the tea she could no longer pour for him. Prue made it. Prue had made it for him eleven times now and had stopped standing on ceremony about it somewhere around the fourth.

“You will go to this ball,” the old woman said.

“I would rather be here.”

“I know you would. That is why you will go.” She had her hands folded and her blind face turned toward the fire, and her voice had the flatness of a woman who has already won the argument and is merely waiting for the other party to catch up. “You will go, and you will stand up with their daughters, and you will be civil, because I did not raise your father to raise a rude man.”

“You did raise my father.”

“I did, and he was rude, and it was my fault, and I am correcting it in you.” She found his sleeve with her hand. “And you will do one thing for me while you are there.”

“Anything.”

“There is a young woman who will be at that assembly. Her name is Hester. I do not know the rest of it, and I have never wanted to.” Her fingers tightened on the cloth of his sleeve. “For four winters, that girl has sat with me at every assembly in this county when not another creature would. She reads to me. She walks me about when my knees seize. She remembers my dead better than I do. She thinks I am a poor old woman with an annuity.”

She paused.

“She has been exactly as kind as if I were a duchess. Which tells you the whole of her.”

The fire shifted. Somewhere in the back of the cottage, Prue was setting the kettle down with great care and listening to every word of it.

“I want you to find her,” the old woman said. “I want you to be kind to her. I have wanted for four years to do one good thing for that child, and I am too blind and too poor in this county’s eyes to do it myself.”

“Then let me tell them who you are.”

“You will not,” she said. “Not for my sake. I am done with being seen. But for hers, one day, when the moment is handed to you, you may. You will know it when it comes.”

“I will know it when it comes,” he said.

He had no idea, drinking his grandmother’s tea in a low chair by her fire, what was coming.

The county would hand him the moment three nights later, wrapped and tied and smiling, in the person of a woman named Cecily Marlow.