"Let the Widow Eat in the Kitchen," Her In-Laws Said — The Duke Carried His Plate Down to Join Her
Chapter 6
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He became their closest friend. He was there when Frederick was promoted to captain in 1816 and drank his health on the veranda under the tamarind tree. He was there the night the letter came from Portsmouth to tell Grace that her father was dead and that the Anchor had been sold to pay his debts. He sat with Frederick on the veranda steps saying nothing while Grace cried in the kitchen house with Muthu's wife holding her hands.And he was there in the summer of 1818 when the cholera came to Madras.It came up the coast from Bengal like a fire through dry grass. Nobody knew where it came from or how it spread. Men who were laughing at breakfast were dead by supper. In the barracks at Fort St. George, the soldiers of the 49th went down by the dozen, and the regimental surgeon, who had been bled white by fever himself, could do nothing but write their names in a book.Grace did not wait to be asked. She went into the hospital the first morning with Muthu and his wife beside her and two great copper pots of rice water and salt and sugar that Muthu's grandmother had sworn by. The surgeon told her to go home. She ignored him.For 3 weeks she spooned it into the mouths of dying men hour after hour, day and night, wiping their faces, holding their hands, writing their last letters home for them when they were too weak to hold a pen. More of them lived than anyone expected. The surgeon could not explain it. The soldiers could. They called her the Captain's Lady, and the ones who lived would never forget her.And then, in the fourth week, Frederick fell ill.He came home at noon complaining of a headache. By 3:00 he could not stand. By midnight his face had gone gray and sunken and his voice was a whisper, and Grace knew. She had seen it a hundred times in 3 weeks.Nicholas Fane came at once. He sat on the other side of the bed all through that long, hot, terrible night while Grace held her husband's hands and spooned the rice water between his lips, and the insects sang outside in the dark garden.Toward dawn, Frederick opened his eyes. He looked at his wife and smiled and asked for a pen. Grace fetched one. He could barely hold it, but he wrote slowly on a single sheet of paper propped against a book on his knees while she held the candle. When he had finished, he folded it and sealed it with a drop of wax from the candle. Then he wrote on the front eight words in a shaking, sloping hand.He did not give it to Grace. He gave it to Nicholas."Keep it," he whispered. "Don't give it to her here. Give it to her in England when she's home, when she's safe." His fingers closed round his friend's wrist. "Promise me, Nick, into her own hands.""I promise," said Nicholas Fane.