"Let the Widow Eat in the Kitchen," Her In-Laws Said — The Duke Carried His Plate Down to Join Her
Chapter 4
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Grace laughed at him and went back to the kitchen.He came back the next night and the next. The transport was delayed for 3 weeks by storms in the Channel, and Frederick Ashdown ate dinner at the Anchor every single one of those 21 nights. On the fourth night, he came into the kitchen to thank her and stayed to help her peel potatoes. On the tenth, he walked her along the harbor wall in the moonlight and told her about his family: his father, the baronet, who was dead; his mother, who was proud; his elder brother, who would inherit everything; his sister, who was a child; and the house in Hampshire called Ashdown Park, with its deer and its lake and its 40 rooms where he had been lonely all his life.On the 19th night, he asked her to marry him, properly this time, on one knee in the kitchen among the pots with his hat in his hand. Grace said yes.His mother did not.Lady Margaret Ashdown's letter arrived at the Anchor three days later. Frederick read it in the kitchen and went white and then red, and then he tore it into small pieces and dropped them into the fire. He would not tell Grace what it said, but one of the pieces did not burn and fluttered out onto the hearth, and Grace picked it up later when he had gone. It had only five words on it in a fine, sloping, elegant hand:"The harbor and tavern girl never..."They were married at St. Thomas's Church in Portsmouth on the 15th of April, 1813. Tom Penrose gave his daughter away, weeping into a handkerchief the size of a sail. Half the Royal Navy came to the wedding breakfast at the Anchor. Nobody came from Ashdown Park.Two weeks later, the transport ship finally sailed for India, and Grace went with it. Officers' wives did in those days, if they were brave enough.The voyage took 5 months round the bulge of Africa, through storms off the Cape that sent waves crashing across the deck, and across the long, hot, empty miles of the Indian Ocean. Grace was seasick for the first 3 weeks. Then she got her sea legs and found her way into the ship's galley, and by the time they crossed the equator, the whole regiment was eating better than it had ever eaten in its life.There was one night on that voyage that Grace remembered all her life. They were off the Cape of Good Hope in the worst storm the captain had seen in 20 years, with the ship lying over so far that the sea came green across the deck, and the masts groaned like living things. The passengers huddled below in the dark, praying.Grace found Frederick in their tiny cabin sitting on the floor with his back against the bunk and his face white, because he had never been to sea before and was more frightened than he had ever been on any battlefield. She sat down beside him on the wet floor and took his hand, and because she did not know what else to do, she began to tell him very calmly exactly how to make her father's oyster pie: the pastry, the oysters, the nutmeg, the way you had to crimp the edges with a fork.