The Duke’s Fiancée Threw Water at the Maid — She Wiped It Off and Said, “You Will Remember This Day”

Part 8

The Dowager Duchess died in the winter of the twelfth year, at Ravenshollow, in her own bed, at the age of seventy-three.

She had been failing for a year and pretending not to. She had ridden out in the autumn and caught a chill that she refused to name, and by December she was mostly in her sitting room by the fire with a shawl around her shoulders, receiving her son and her daughter-in-law and her grandson, and being extremely difficult.

She had, in her last years, become a little formidable legend in the household.

The staff were entirely devoted to her and entirely frightened of her, which she considered correct. The village regarded her with a mixture of awe and terror, which she considered correct. And her grandson, who was twelve, thought she was the best person he had ever met, which she considered suspicious and mentioned at least once a week.

Three days before she died, she sent for Cora.

Cora came into the sitting room and found the old woman propped up on cushions, very thin, with her rings loose on her fingers and her voice down to a whisper.

“Sit,” said the Dowager Duchess.

Cora sat.

“I have a document,” she said. “In the drawer. Bring it.”

Cora brought it. It was a single sheet of paper in the old woman’s hand, dated the previous spring, witnessed by two servants.

“Read it.”

It was a bequest. The Dowager Duchess had left to the parish of St. Mary’s in Wapping, and to a charity for the relief of girls who had no references and no place to go, the entire sum of her personal fortune, which was considerable, and which she had inherited from her own father, and which she had never once spent.

Cora read it twice.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.

“Because I did not want you to make a fuss over me before I was dead,” said the Dowager Duchess. “It is much better to make a fuss over me when I cannot hear it.”

“Edmund will—”

“Edmund will do exactly what he is told, as he always has, in matters that do not matter.” The old woman’s mouth moved in something that was almost a smile. “I have watched you for twelve years, Cora. You have never once asked me for money. Not once. Every other person in this house has asked me for something, and you never have, and I have found it extremely irritating.”

“I didn’t need—”

“You did need. That is not the point.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “There is a kind of person who takes power and uses it to get even, and there is a kind of person who takes power and uses it to be safe, and there is a kind of person who takes power and uses it for the people who cannot take any. I was the second kind. I spent forty years making certain that nobody could ever look down on me again, and I called it dignity, and it was fear wearing a good coat.”

She opened her eyes.

“You are the third kind. I do not entirely understand you, and I have never entirely liked you, and I have been proud of you every single day since the fourteenth of January.”

Cora took her hand.

“I want you to know something,” said the Dowager Duchess. “There is a reason I was in that room, that day. When Cordelia threw the water. I could have stopped it. I could have said one word — enough — and she would have stopped, and the whole terrible thing would never have happened. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“I want to know if you have forgiven me.”

Cora looked at the old woman’s face — the cold, proud, careful face, which had aged badly and which was, in that moment, entirely open.

“I have forgiven you,” she said. “I forgave you the night you knelt in my room with the pearls. You do not have to keep paying for it.”

“That is a very irritating thing to say to a dying woman,” said the Dowager Duchess.

“I know.”

The old woman laughed — a small, cracked, breathless laugh — and closed her eyes, and said, “Send the boy in. I want to tell him something appalling about his father.”

She died three days later, in the night, while the snow came down over the park, and the servants stood in the corridor with their heads bowed, and her son sat beside her with her hand in his until the morning.

At her funeral, the whole village came, and half the county came, and there were a great many fine carriages on the drive, and the sermon was long and full of praise that everyone present knew to be at least half untrue.

And after it was over, and the carriages had gone, and the house had gone quiet, Cora walked up to the sitting room and stood alone by the empty chair, and looked at the fire, and said, out loud:

“Thank you. I will never entirely understand you either.”