"My dearest Grace,Grace read it three times.Then she sat on the edge of the narrow bed with the letter in her lap and the candle burning down, and remembered a wet April morning two years before when she had stood in Broad Street in front of the boarded-up windows of the Anchor, and read the notice on the door, and seen the name of an attorney in the High Street, Mr. Ezra Hobbs. She had turned round and walked away from her own front door.For the first time since the morning she buried her husband, Grace Ashdown put her face in her hands and cried. She cried for a long time: for Frederick, and her father, and Muthu, and the tamarind tree, and for two years lost in a room under the eaves.And when she had finished, she washed her face in the cold water in the jug, folded the letter, and put it in the bosom of her black dress against her heart. Then she took down her trunk from the top of the wardrobe and began to pack.It did not take long. Everything she owned in the world fitted into it with room to spare: two black dresses, a shawl, a red coat folded small, and a letter. Outside the little window under the eaves, the sky over the Hampshire Downs was already turning gray with the dawn.She came down the main staircase at 7:00 the next morning in her black dress and her bonnet, with her trunk bumping on the stairs behind her, carried by the footman who had spoken up at dinner. Nobody had told him to carry it. He had simply appeared at the top of the attic stairs at half past six and picked it up.
If you are reading this, I am gone and you are in England and Nick has kept his word. Don't cry too long, love. You never could cook when you were crying.
I have one secret to confess and then I'll let you go. When your father's letter came last year and you cried in the kitchen house for three nights, I wrote to old Hobbs, the attorney in Portsmouth High Street. Do you remember my godmother, old Mrs. Ashdown of Petersfield, who left me 800 pounds when I was 21? My mother always said it was a waste of good money on a younger son. I never touched it. I was saving it for a thing that mattered.
I told Hobbs to buy the Anchor back from your father's creditors, every brick and beam of it. The deed is in your name, Grace, not mine. Yours. Hobbs has it in his strongbox waiting for you. I meant to tell you on your birthday. I'm sorry I won't be there.
Go home, love. Light the fires. Cook for the sailors again. Laugh in the kitchen till they hear you on the quay. And whatever my mother says to you—and she will say a great deal—don't let her make you small. You were never small. You were always the biggest thing in any room you walked into.
All my love for always,
Fred."
"Let the Widow Eat in the Kitchen," Her In-Laws Said — The Duke Carried His Plate Down to Join Her
"Let the Widow Eat in the Kitchen," Her In-Laws Said — The Duke Carried His Plate Down to Join Her
Chapter 12
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