"Let the Widow Eat in the Kitchen," Her In-Laws Said — The Duke Carried His Plate Down to Join Her
Chapter 7
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Frederick Ashdown died an hour later at sunrise, with the light coming gold through the shutters and his wife's hand in his. He was 28 years old.Grace did not cry, not then. She washed him and dressed him in his red coat and sat beside him while the regiment's carpenter made the coffin. She stood at his grave in the military burial ground the next morning in the white heat without a bonnet, with Nicholas on one side of her and Muthu on the other.That night, she fell ill herself.For 9 days, she hung between life and death in the bungalow under the tamarind tree. Muthu's wife nursed her with the same rice water Grace had carried to the hospital. On the third day, the surgeon told Major Fane to prepare himself. On the fifth, he told him there was no hope.On the ninth, Grace opened her eyes and asked for water.But Nicholas Fane was not there to see it. On the sixth day of her illness, his regiment had been ordered north to fight in the war against the Maratha princes in the hills of central India. He had no choice. He went to her bedside before he left, and she did not know him. For a long time, he stood there. Then he went out to the veranda and wrote a note for her and left it with Muthu, and rode away north with the letter from her husband still sealed in his pocket. He could not leave it with a woman who might die before morning.Muthu never gave Grace the note. Muthu could not read English, and it was lost somewhere in the chaos of the cholera summer along with so much else.So when Grace Ashdown rose from her bed 3 weeks later, thin as a ghost, she found that her husband was dead and her friend was gone. And she did not know whether he was alive or dead himself.The regiment's paymaster told her with great embarrassment that a captain's widow was entitled to a passage home and nothing more. Frederick's pay had all gone on the bungalow and the servants. There was nothing left.She sailed for England on an East Indiaman in November alone, with her husband's red coat and his sword folded in a trunk, and 11 shillings in her purse.She landed at Portsmouth in April 1819 in the rain. Up Broad Street she walked from the quay with her trunk on a hired barrow to the Anchor.The sign had been taken down. The windows were boarded. A notice on the door said that the premises were to be let and gave the name of an attorney in the High Street.Grace stood in the rain in front of her father's inn for a long time. Then she turned round and sold Frederick's sword to a dealer on the Point for £4 and bought a seat on the coach to Winchester. And from Winchester, she walked the last 9 miles to Ashdown Park in the rain in her black dress, with her trunk on a carrier's cart behind her.She had nowhere else to go.