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The Duke Sent Her His 3 Old Aunts for Winter — By Easter His Duchess Begged a Seat at Their Table

The Duke Sent Her His 3 Old Aunts for Winter — By Easter His Duchess Begged a Seat at Their Table

Chapter 3

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Maud put the money back in the tin. "Well then," she said to the fire, "you'll stay."In the morning, the eldest was sitting up in the bed with her hair in a long gray plait over her shoulder, and she introduced them all as properly as if they were in a drawing room."I am Dorcas Fane," she said. "I am sixty-four. That is my sister Honoria, who is sixty-one, and my sister Winifred, who is fifty-eight and was always the pretty one. Our brother was the late Duke. His son has married a young wife with a great deal of taste, and it seems the dower rooms are wanted for her dressing. We are to be 'off the books' by Lady Day. He said it in the hall in those words, with the footman by.""Off the books," said Honoria from the washstand. She was small and dark and quick, with ink on her middle finger. "As though we were a bad debt. I kept that house's accounts for thirty years. I know to the farthing what his wife's taste costs."Winifred, plump and pink and still very pretty, was already at the window, rubbing the smoke stain off the glass with her handkerchief and humming.Maud stood at the foot of her own bed with the kettle in her hand. "I can't give you what you had," she said. "I have a smoking chimney, and a leaking roof, and a farm that's nearly done. You'd be better off with almost anyone."Dorcas looked at her for a long time. "My dear," she said at last, "we have been better off with almost anyone for forty years. We should like, for once, to be of use."So Maud showed them the farm: the kitchen with its cracked flags and its black beam; the bread oven in the wall with a crack across its floor so wide you could lay a finger in it; the back room, its window stuffed with a sack where the pane was gone; the bench by the table with one leg shorter than the others, propped on a stone; the thatch over the back kitchen slipped so that the rain came through onto the flour bin; the empty hooks in the beam where the bacon should have hung; and the copper in the washhouse, green and cold.Honoria went round after her, touching things and saying nothing. And at the end, she sat down on the short-legged bench, and it tipped, and she caught herself on the table, and all four of them laughed at once.
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The Duke Sent Her His 3 Old Aunts for Winter — By Easter His Duchess Begged a Seat at Their Table

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