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

Chapter 8

The old woman did not let go of Hester’s hand.

She drew it in, and she held it against both of hers the way you hold something you have decided not to lose, and she turned her blind face out toward the room she could not see. She could feel it listening now — every soul in it, the mothers and the daughters and the master of ceremonies and the fiddlers with their bows still down, the whole bright weight of three parishes leaning in.

And she gave her account.

“This is Hester,” she said. “I do not know her other name. In four winters, I have never needed it.”

Her voice was not loud. It carried anyway. Old voices do, when they have spent fifty years being heard across drawing rooms.

“She is the reason I still come out among people at all. I will tell you what she has been to me, since you are all so interested of a sudden.”

Somebody in the back of the room shifted their feet. Nobody else moved.

“Seven years ago I came among you blind,” she said. “And you put me in a corner — not unkindly. You had a great deal to do and I could not be seen to. So I sat through three winters of your assemblies. I heard every one of you enjoy yourselves, at the length of my arm. And not one of you ever sat down.”

She paused, and the pause was not dramatic; it was the pause of a woman checking her own arithmetic before she read it out.

“Why would you? I could tell you nothing you wanted, and I could not see to be flattered.”

Cecily Marlow’s fan had stopped moving. She was three couples down, with a daughter on each arm, and she had gone the colour of skimmed milk, and she had not yet understood why.

“Then a girl was sent to my corner as a punishment,” the old woman said. “And she looked at the corner they had sent her to, and she decided that the two of us might as well be in it together.”

Hester’s hand moved, involuntarily, as though she would take it back. The old woman held it.

“She has given me every evening since. She tells me the colour of the gowns. She walks me to the window when my knees seize — and she does it slowly, because she worked out in the first winter that fast walking frightens me, and she has never once said so out loud. She reads to me. And not in the loud, slow voice the young keep for the old. She reads to me as though I were a person. And she keeps my dead.”

The fiddler’s bow touched a string by accident; the note went out into the room and died there.

“She asks after my sister, who loved yellow roses. She asks after my boy who went for a soldier and never came home. She asked me this winter — this winter, in this room, in that corner — whether it was six horses or four that my husband drove through the flood the night he came for me.”

She turned her head, and though she could not see them, every person in that room felt looked at.

“It was six,” she said. “She is the only living soul who knows it. Because she is the only one who ever troubled to ask.”

Somewhere near the door, a woman put her hand over her mouth.

“You called her no loss to the set,” the old woman said, and she said it without heat, which made it worse, which is why she said it that way. “I have sat in rooms like this one my whole long life. I have been in drawing rooms in London and in Vienna and in a house in the country where the King’s own cousin dined at my table. And I never met one person in any of them worth the half of her.”

She finished. She folded her hands again, over Hester’s, and she said nothing more, and she did not need to.

Nobody in that room said anything at all.

It lasted four seconds. It felt like a quarter of an hour. The master of ceremonies looked at the fiddlers; the fiddlers looked at their shoes. Fifty people stood in a bright room and discovered, all at once, that they had been walking around the grandmother of the Duke of Ellingham for seven years, and had been kind to her exactly once, and had not known it, and had not done it themselves.

Then the Duke of Ellingham got up off his knee.