"Let the Widow Eat in the Kitchen," Her In-Laws Said — The Duke Carried His Plate Down to Join Her
Chapter 20
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The wedding breakfast was held at the Anchor—not in the taproom, but in the kitchen. 200 people could not fit into the kitchen of the Anchor, so they spilled out into the yard and the taproom and the street beyond: sailors and soldiers and fishwives and dockyard men and half the dukes and earls of Hampshire, all eating mutton stew and pepper water and oyster pie off the same plain white plates.And the Duke of Aldridge, in his wedding coat, with his new wife on his arm, walked through the crowd from the kitchen to the long table in the yard carrying his own plate.He carried it into the kitchen of the Anchor every Sunday for the next 40 years. He carried it into the kitchen at Aldridge Court, too, where the Duchess cooked one dinner a week for the whole household with her own hands, and the servants ate at the same table as the family, and nobody in the county dared say a word about it.The first Sunday she cooked at Aldridge Court, the household was terrified. 40 servants, from the steward down to the boy who cleaned the boots, had been told that the new Duchess intended to cook dinner herself, and that they were all to eat it at the same table as the family in the great servants' hall.The old butler, Mr. Pinn, who had served three Dukes of Aldridge, went to the duke privately and asked whether His Grace was quite sure."Quite sure, Pinn," said the duke. "Wait till you taste it."Pinn tasted it. He sat at the long table in the servants' hall between the Duchess and the second footman, and ate two helpings of oyster pie and three of pepper water. And at the end of the meal, he stood up slowly with tears in his eyes and proposed a toast to Her Grace that the whole hall drank standing.After that, Sunday dinner at Aldridge Court became the most sought-after invitation in Hampshire. Earls and bishops angled for it. A royal duke came once by special request and ate in the servants' hall between the housekeeper and the head gardener, and said afterwards it was the best dinner he had eaten in his life. Nobody in the county ever again dared to suggest that anybody should eat in the kitchen because they were not good enough for the dining room.And in the long gallery at Aldridge Court, among the portraits of 300 years of dukes and duchesses in velvet and ermine, there hangs one picture that visitors always stop to look at.It shows a small, crowded, fire-lit kitchen with copper pans on the walls and the sea through the window. At the end of a long scrubbed table, a young woman in an apron is laughing, and across from her, a tall dark man in a fine black coat sits with his dinner on a plain white plate, looking at her as if there were nobody else in the world.The painter called it The Duke's Supper.Grace always called it home.