"He signed nothing on Thursday," she said at last. "Jethro was at the church on Thursday. He would have had to go straight from the church to Tench."
"Or Tench came to him."
"He can't read." She turned from the window. "Jethro Scarth cannot read. He signs with a mark. Anything could have been read to him. Anything could have been written down." Her voice was rising; she stopped it. "He was there. He was in the room on the eleventh of September. The Duke asked after his boy's chest, by name. He knew him. He knew everyone. Jethro cried when he made his mark, because he said nobody had ever asked him to witness anything in his life, and the Duke told him he was the most important witness of the three, because he was the one who would be there after the rest of us were dead. Jethro would not say that. Not of his own will. Something has been done to him."
"What would you do?"
"I would go to Lode End," she said, "now, and ask him."
Outside, the rain ran down the long windows in sheets. Beyond the park the fen lay shining under a sky the colour of lead, and somewhere beyond it, out of sight, the river was rising.
"Then I'll come with you," said Ivo, and rang for the gig.
VII.
It was nearly six miles to Lode End by the causeway, and dusk came down on them halfway.
The causeway was a raised road of gravel and rammed chalk laid along the top of the Lode bank, with the broad straight drain on one side, brim full and dimpled with rain, and on the other a dyke and then the black fields running away level into the murk. There were no hedges and no trees except the pollard willows that marked the drove ends, and they came up out of the dusk one after another like old men waiting by the road. Rosamund drove. She had taken the reins before Ivo could ask for them, as though it had not occurred to her that he might, and he let her, and sat with his collar up and watched the light go.
It went fast in the fen. There was nothing to hold it. One moment the sky was a long pale bar along the west, laid flat on the land; the next it had narrowed to a line, and then to nothing, and the world was a grey blur in which the white chalk of the road was the only thing he could make out at all.