Hannah Sedge walked up to the front door of Corvedale because she had been turned away from the back one, and she had four shillings and a bag and nowhere whatever to go.
She said what she had rehearsed on the road: that she was not asking for charity, and wanted a bed for two nights until she could find work.
The Duke of Corvedale looked at her for about four seconds—at the bag, at the boots, at a woman of six-and-twenty who was not begging, and was not trying to impress him, and was simply extremely tired.
And then he said the thing nobody in England would have expected, on his own doorstep, in front of two servants.
Her great-aunt had died in the March, and Hannah had been out of that house by the end of April. She was not turned out. That was the thing she found hardest to explain to anybody afterward, because everybody assumed a cruel relative, and there had not been one. There had simply been a will, and a house that went with it, and a great-nephew of about forty who came down from London and was perfectly civil for four days, and then said at breakfast that he supposed she would be going to her cousins.
Hannah had said that she supposed she would.
She had kept that house for nine years. She had come to it at seventeen when her father died, and she had run the whole of it: the books, the servants, the garden, and latterly her great-aunt herself through about four years of failing, and two of not knowing anybody. There had been no wages. There had never been any question of wages. She was a relation, and she had a home, and that was the arrangement, and it had suited everybody. And Hannah had not once thought about it until she was standing in a hall in April, watching a man of forty count the plate: nine years of work, and no wages, and no character—because you cannot have a character from a house where you were family.
The cousins had her a fortnight. They were not cruel either. They were a family of six in a house that suited five, and they had assumed—everybody had assumed—that old Mrs. Ballard must have left the girl something. And when it turned out that she had not, the whole shape of that fortnight changed inside about three days. Nothing was said. There was simply a good deal of talk about how difficult it was to find a place at this time of year, and how fortunate it was that Hannah was so capable. And on the twelfth day, her cousin's wife mentioned a lady at Marlborough who wanted a nurserymaid, and had said she would take somebody without a character if they were not particular about the wage.
Hannah Sedge understood exactly what she was being told, and thanked her, and went the next morning.
She was three weeks on the road in the end, and she never told anybody the whole of it. The place at Marlborough was gone. There was a house at Devizes that wanted a woman, and did not want one who arrived on foot with a bag. There was a fortnight of lodgings at fourpence and sixpence a night, and a woman in a lodging house at Chippenham who was kind to her, and gave her a name at Bath that turned out to be four years out of date.