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

Chapter 7

He came late, when the dancing had already begun.

The county had prepared for a coronet and got a man. He was tall and plainly dressed — dark coat, no lace, no rings, boots that had been out in weather — and he walked into that room the way a man walks into a room he has been in a hundred times before, which is to say without looking at it.

He was civil. That was the first thing the county noticed. He was quiet, and he was civil, and he was not at all what anybody had rehearsed for.

The master of ceremonies put two young women in front of him in the first quarter hour, and he stood up with both of them, and he danced correctly, and he said the correct things, and to the sharp eyes watching him from every side of the room he looked like a man performing a task.

Not a man at a ball. A man performing a task.

And all the while, his eyes kept going to the fire.

The old woman was there. Prue had brought her in the plain carriage and handed her down and got her to the chair by the fire and set her into it, and the county had done its usual small vagueness around her — a gentleman had handed her into supper, somebody had put a cup in her hand, and then the room had closed over her the way water closes over a stone.

She sat with her clouded eyes and her folded hands. She turned her head a little at every voice, the way the blind do, as if she were sorting them. And she was sorting them. She was listening for one in particular.

It had not come yet.

Because Cecily Marlow had swept past just then with a daughter on each arm, and had seen the Duke of Ellingham standing not ten feet away with nobody at his elbow, and had seen Hester standing exactly where a spare woman ought not to stand — in the light, near the eligible man, in a gown that had been turned twice — and she had dealt with it the way she dealt with everything Hester did that got in her way.

She had sent her to the fire.

“Go and sit with the blind old woman,” she said, pleasant as anything, loud enough for the two families nearest to hear. “You are no loss to the set, and somebody ought to keep her from wandering.”

A girl standing by the pillar laughed once.

Then she wished she had not, and looked at the floor, and stayed looking at it for the whole of the next dance.

Hester did not answer. There was nothing to answer. She set her glass down on the sill, and she crossed the room — not fast, not with her head down, but the way she crossed it every winter, which was the way a woman crosses a room she has crossed a hundred times — and she sat down beside the old woman and took the cold hand in both of hers.

“It is only me, ma’am,” she said. “It is Hester. I am sorry I was so long.”

And the blind face turned up toward the voice and lit like a window with a lamp behind it.

The Duke of Ellingham saw the whole of it.

He was at the top of the set with a partner whose name he had already lost. And he saw a woman in a made-over gown sent out of the light like a thing put away for the evening. And he saw where she was sent. And he saw her go to it — not as a punishment, not dragging her feet, not with any of the small martyrdoms that a woman in her position might have been forgiven for — but the way you go to a warm room after a cold passage.

He saw her take the hand. He saw the blind face light.

And he knew that face. He had known it all his life. He had sat by it three nights ago over tea she could not pour, and heard her say find her, and be kind to her, and he had said I will know the moment when it comes.

He stood very still for a moment at the top of the set.

Then he said something to the young woman beside him — a short, distracted sentence, an apology of some kind — and she would repeat it, mortified, for years afterwards, because it was the only thing the Duke of Ellingham ever said to her and it was “Forgive me. I have just seen my grandmother.”

And he left the top of the set.

He crossed the whole length of the room to the fire.

A duke walking out of a dance he has only just begun is a thing a room feels before it sees. The music did not stop. The attention did. Heads turned. The families by the pillar turned. The mothers turned, one after another, like weathercocks in a shifting wind. Cecily Marlow, three couples down with a daughter on each side, turned last, and felt the first cold touch of a thing she could not yet name.

He passed all of them. He looked at none of them.

He walked to the darkest corner of that bright room, to the fire, where a blind old woman sat with a poor relation’s hand in both of hers. And there, in front of the whole county, the Duke of Ellingham stopped.

And he bowed.

Not the civil half-bow he had given his partners. A deep bow, from a tall man, to a blind old woman in a plain grey gown that the county had been stepping around for seven years.

“Grandmother,” he said.

The word went through the room like cold water down the back of the neck.

The old woman lifted her free hand and found his face with it and read it the way the blind do — brow, cheek, jaw, the shape of a smile under her palm. And she smiled.

“You came after all,” she said.

“I told Susan — I told Prue I would find you by the fire.”

“You always could.” He was down on one knee now, careless of the county, still holding her hand. “You are the only person in this room worth crossing it for.”

“Then you have not looked at the room.” She turned her blind face, and she did not let go of Hester’s hand; she drew it in, and held it against both of hers. “But I find I am not alone. Will you present me to my companion? I have wanted to meet her for a long time.”

And the Duke of Ellingham, on one knee on the floor of the county assembly rooms, turned his head and looked directly at Hester Marlow for the first time.

Hester Marlow, who had spent four winters being looked through by every man in that room, found herself being looked at.

She had no idea what to do with her face.