"Will you take me?"
She looked at him. "Do you want to come?"
"I want to sit in the carriage," said Ivo, "and let you do it."
Fleetwick Hall was a square red house with a great many urns. Ivo sat in the carriage on the sweep with the window down and listened to the rooks and did not go in. She was gone a quarter of an hour.
He heard, afterward, how it had gone—not from her, but from Cordelia, who told Mrs. Allard, who told Pask, who told him. That Her Grace had stood in the middle of Sir Digby's library and declined a chair. That she had read Jethro Scarth's statement aloud to him from beginning to end, in a voice that the footman in the hall could hear through the door. That she had said that to tamper with a witness in a cause before the King's courts was a misdemeanour at common law, and that the Lord Lieutenant dined at Ellerholt on Thursday, and that if Mr. Tench were seen on Sallow Fen again for any purpose whatever, the Lord Lieutenant would hear the statement read after dinner by the Duke himself. That Sir Digby had gone purple and said she would not dare. That she had said, "Sir Digby, I came to my own wedding in black. You should not presume to know what I would dare."
And that Sir Digby had said, at last, that Tench was dismissed in any case, for unrelated reasons—and that he would see her in the Prerogative Court, and the court would decide.
"Yes," Her Grace had said. "I expect it will."
She came out and got into the carriage and sat down opposite him with her hands folded very tightly in her lap, and he saw that they were shaking.
"Well?" said Ivo.
"He's keeping his caveat. Mr. Lusk says it will be a year. Perhaps two. Doctors' Commons moves like a glacier." She drew a long breath. "But Tench is gone. And he didn't once ask whether you knew where I was."