"I'm told I take after the Horncastle side," said the Duke gravely.
"Then God help you," said Widow Gotobed, "for they were thieves to a man." But she let him sit on the bench beside her, and after a while she let him hold one of the geese, and after a longer while she told him how many she had, and what they brought at Huntingdon market at Christmas, and how much of her rent that paid, and what she would do if the common were cut up into allotments and the allotment given to a cottage she did not own, and the cottage owned by a man who lived in Peterborough.
"I'd go on the parish," she said. "At eighty-three. After keeping myself since I was a widow at thirty. That's what I'd do." She looked at him sidelong. "Your man Quarrendon says if I'll put my mark to his paper, I'll have my rent let down at Michaelmas, by His Grace's particular kindness. Is that so?"
The Duke opened his mouth. Kezia looked at him. He shut it again.
"Go on, ma'am," he said.
So she went on, and he did not interrupt her, and he did not interrupt Joseph Lacey the thatcher, who told him in very broad language indeed what he thought of dukes who sold horses while men's children went without, nor Mrs. Pell with her seven children and her one pig, nor old Simeon Fairweather who had been hayward of the common for forty years and who said, with his hat twisting in his hands, that Mr. Quarrendon had told him in August that the stint on the common was one beast to a cottage and not two, as it had always been, and that he was to count them at Michaelmas and pound any over.
"On whose authority?" said the Duke. It was the first question he had asked all morning that was not go on.
"On yours, sir. Your Grace. Mr. Quarrendon said it was by the custom of the manor." Simeon's face worked. "I said I'd never heard that custom in forty year. He said it was in the rolls, and I'm no scholar, and who was I to say different."
The Duke turned his head and looked at Kezia.
"It is not in the rolls," said Kezia.
* * *
Bet Sowerby's cottage was the last on the row, a low thatched place with a scrubbed step and a cow in the paddock behind it—a mild, fawn-coloured, long-lashed cow with one crumpled horn, who looked at the Duke with the same expression as the geese, only slower.
"That's Duchess," said Mrs. Sowerby, who had come out drying her hands on her apron and had then stood quite still on her own doorstep at the sight of who was with Miss Thorley. "Begging Your Grace's pardon for the name. My husband named her, God rest him. It was before we knew there'd be a new one."