"Let the Widow Eat in the Kitchen," Her In-Laws Said — The Duke Carried His Plate Down to Join Her
Chapter 16
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He never once asked her for anything, either. He only came and worked and ate his supper at the kitchen table afterwards across from her while she told him about her day. Some nights, after the last customer had gone, they sat at the kitchen table and talked about India, about the tamarind tree and the surf at Madras, and the Sunday suppers on the veranda, and about Frederick.It was the first time since he died that Grace had been able to talk about him to anyone who had known him, and she found that she could not stop. She told Nick things she had never told anybody. He told her things about the war in the north that he had never told anybody, either.One night he brought her a letter. It had come to Aldridge Court from Madras in a careful clerk's hand, and it was from Muthu. The old cook had heard from a returning officer that the captain's lady was alive and in England. He had paid a letter writer in the bazaar to send her his blessing and his wife's, and a recipe for a lime pickle that Grace had always got wrong. She read it in the kitchen and cried, and then she laughed, and then she made the pickle. It came out perfectly.It was in August, on a warm, still evening with the kitchen door open to the yard and the sound of the sea coming in, that he finally put down his fork and said it:"Marry me, Grace."She did not answer for a long time."No," she said at last. "Not yet."He did not seem surprised. He only waited."I spent two years being small in somebody else's house," said Grace slowly, "eating in the kitchen because they were ashamed of me. I've had 3 months in my own house being myself. I'm not ready to give it up, Nick—not for anyone, not even a duke." She looked down at her hands on the table. "And I don't know how to be a duchess. I'd be standing in a ballroom in Hampshire and every woman there would be thinking what Lady Ashdown thought:Tavern girl.""Then don't be a duchess," said Nicholas Fane. "Be Grace. Keep the Anchor. Keep the kitchen. I'll come here if you'd rather. I'd rather be here than anywhere I've ever been in my life." He paused. "But I'll wait if you want me to. I've waited 3 years already. I'm good at it."She looked at him across the kitchen table in the lamplight, with the sea sighing outside the open door."Ask me again," she said, "in a year."The story of the duke and the dinner plate reached London in September.It traveled the way all the best stories travel in England: not through drawing rooms, but through kitchens. Mrs. Dawlish told her sister, who was cook to the Bishop of Winchester. The bishop's footman told the coachman of Lady Hartland, who told her lady's maid, who told Lady Hartland while she was dressing her hair. Lady Hartland told it at dinner in Grosvenor Square that same evening, and by the end of the week, there was not a house in Mayfair where it had not been repeated: