"Robin, ma'am," said Frances. "Robin Rendle."
"Robin," said the Dowager, as though she were trying the weight of it, and went out.
Frances did not sleep well. The room Mrs. Pargeter found for her was the size of the whole of her lodging in St. Giles, hung with yellow silk that had faded in stripes where the sun came through the shutters, and it had a bed so high that Robin, in the little dressing room beyond, had to be lifted into his. He fell asleep at once, with his thumb, bare now, in his mouth, which he had not done for two years. The ring was on the washstand, on its wool, where the Duke had given it back to her at the library door.
"Keep it," he had said, when she held it out to him. "It's his. My father gave it away, and Rendle gave it to the boy, and it is not my business to take it back."
"It is your family's seal, Your Grace."
"Then the boy is my family," the Duke had said, "and it is the boy's seal. Good night, Miss Blakeney."
She lay and looked at the canopy of the bed and listened to the house. A clock on a stair; a door shutting a long way off; the wind trying a loose casement. Once, very late, she heard a step go past in the corridor, slow and uneven, a man favouring one leg, and stop at the end, and after a long while go back.
In the morning the Duke was gone out before breakfast, and so was Robin.
"His Grace took the young gentleman down to the stables, miss," said the housemaid who brought her hot water, a round red girl called Jenny who seemed to find the whole affair the most interesting thing that had happened in her life. "At seven. The young gentleman was up and dressed and sitting on the stair, and His Grace come down, and the young gentleman said, Good morning, Major, and His Grace stood there on the stair like he'd been shot, Mr. Abbs says, and then he said, Good morning, Rendle, and they went off together, and nobody's seen them since."
Frances found them at half past nine in the stable yard, which was a quadrangle of red brick with a clock tower over the arch and a weathervane in the shape of an otter. The Duke was sitting on the mounting block in his shirtsleeves with his coat over his knee. Robin was standing in the middle of the yard with his feet apart and his hands cupped round his mouth, and as she came in under the arch he drew a great breath and produced, in a high, cracked, determined whistle, the first four phrases of a trumpet call.