It was a great ducal funeral, because he had ordered one. There were mutes with black staves at the park gates and a hearse with eight black horses plumed in ostrich feathers. The fen people lined the causeway road the whole length of the avenue, holding rush-lights, a thousand small trembling flames in the wet dark. Ivo walked behind the coffin as chief mourner, with Sir Digby a pace behind him. Women did not attend funerals; it was not thought they could bear it. Rosamund stood at a window of the house and watched the torches go down the avenue, and then, when the last of them had turned out of the gates, she put on her bonnet and walked to the church by the field path and stood in the dark at the back of the nave, against the west wall, where no one would see her. Ivo knew she was there. He did not turn round. He found it steadied him to know.
She was not the only woman to break the custom. Afterward, in the churchyard, with the torches hissing in the drizzle, Cordelia Rendell came out of the dark porch, where she too had stood unseen through the service, and found her.
Ivo, standing apart with Mr. Lusk, could make out very little in that smoky, wavering light: two dark shapes, one short and one tall, coming together by the yew. Mr. Lusk, who had sharp eyes behind his spectacles and a lawyer's curiosity, told him the rest in an undertone. Cordelia had taken something from her reticule and pressed it into Rosamund's hand, and closed the fingers over it, and held them closed. Then Sir Digby called his wife's name across the wet grass, sharply, and she went.
It was a letter, Rosamund told him in the carriage. A letter the old Duke had written to Cordelia in September, in his own failing hand, half a page long.
"She said I was to have it. She said she couldn't stop Digby, she'd never been able to stop Digby, but she would not have it said in any court that her uncle didn't know his own mind, because she had this in her desk and she knew he did." Rosamund unfolded the paper in the light of the carriage lamp and read it aloud, without being asked.
"'My dear Cordy. I am going to make a great fool of myself next month, and Digby will tell you I am mad. I am not mad. I am only in a hurry. When it is done, be kind to her, and be kind to the boy, if he comes; he will come. You were always the kind one. God bless you. Your loving uncle, A.'"
She folded it again. Neither of them spoke for the rest of the drive.
At the house, in the study, Mr. Lusk took a second letter from his case and laid it on the desk in front of Ivo.
"His Grace's instructions," he said, "were that this should be given into your hands after he was in the ground, and not before. It was sealed in my presence on the eleventh of September, the day the codicil was executed." He hesitated. "I don't know what is in it. I should like you to know that I don't know. Good night, Your Grace. Your Grace."
When he had gone, Ivo sat looking at the letter for a long time. It was thick, folded in three and sealed in black wax with the old man's own seal, and addressed on the outside, in that wavering downhill hand, To my nephew Ivo. The candles stood on either side of it. He broke the seal and unfolded the sheets and bent close over them, and then held them aside and looked slantwise, and then tilted them to the light.