Three Sisters Were Presented for the Duke to Marry — He Chose the Quiet Woman Pouring the Tea
Chapter 18
The Dowager Duchess of Ravensgate had been going downhill for eleven days.
The doctors had all been sent away for the same reason, which was that she had taken to asking them whether they could tell her the name of every young woman in every house in London, and when they could not, she had told her maid to stop letting them into the house.
When Diana came into the room, the old woman was propped up, with her hands on the coverlet, and her eyes were closed, and she looked, in the candlelight, like a small bird caught in a church and too tired to fly out.
But she heard the door, and she opened her eyes, and looked at Diana; and onto her face came the last and strangest smile — the smile of an old, tired woman who has done one piece of work well and is now, at last, ready to put it down.
He had told her that morning. She had listened, and nodded, and said one thing: “Send her to me before dinner.”
“Come in,” she said. “And sit where I can see you, because I am not long for the view.”
Diana sat.
She looked at the old woman, and folded her hands, and showed, with the ease of long practice, that she understood what was happening, because she had known a dying house before, and a dying scholar. But before she could say a word, the Dowager reached over to her bedside table, where she had kept, for two days, a small, worn case, and held it out; and inside was a single ring — a dark sapphire in a plain setting, worn so thin the gold had begun to show through in three places.
“This is not the Ravensgate jewel. The Ravensgate jewel is a monstrous great thing with a stone the size of a pigeon’s egg, and my son’s grandmother left it to the family, and it has been worn by every duchess since you were nothing, and none of them ever liked it. This is James’s ring. He was the man I married before I was the Duchess of anything — he was a naval man, and he died at twenty-nine, off Portugal, three years after we were married. He gave me this on the last evening he was at home, and I have never once taken it off except to put on a different dress and a different name. I am putting it off now. I want my son’s wife to have it. It is a small thing, and it belongs to no title, and I have thought about it a great deal longer than I have thought about the pigeon’s egg, and if you are going to be the woman in that drawing room, I would like you to have a thing that belonged to no house.”
And then the Dowager Duchess of Ravensgate did two things: she put the ring into Diana’s hands, and then she said the last thing she ever said, very quietly, and none of it made any sense until the morning.