"My father's letters home from Christ Church," said the Duke. "Seventeen eighty-four to 'eighty-five. He went up at eighteen and came down very suddenly, just after his twentieth birthday, without his degree. I always understood it was because he'd been sent down for gaming. There's a letter from his tutor which very carefully does not say so." He drew out a chair for her. "Sit, please. And there's this." He opened the commonplace book at a page marked with a slip. "It's mostly verses. He fancied himself a poet at nineteen; they are very bad. But look at this one."
Frances bent over the page. It was a young man's hand, quick and slanting, the ink gone brown, and it said:
On a Ring. Feb. 1785.
Not two but one, the posy saith,
And so we'll prove it, love, till death.
Underneath, in the same hand but more carefully, as if it had been copied from somewhere, was written: Wych. S. Laur. xxi Feb. And then a line drawn under it, very hard, so that the nib had caught and spattered.
"I thought," said the Duke, "that it was a love poem to some girl. I have been thinking so since six o'clock this morning. And then I thought: but why would he copy out the name of a church?"
Frances did not answer at once. She had already taken the ring out of her reticule, where she had carried it down that morning wrapped in her handkerchief, and she took up the reading glass and held the ring under the light from the window and turned it, slowly, so that the inside of the hoop came round into the glass.
She had looked at it a hundred times in Norwich. She had looked at the outside, the otter and the fish. It had never occurred to her to look at the inside, because Bertram wore it on a cord round his neck for years and then on his little finger, and it was black with use, and she had thought the marks inside were merely wear.
They were not. Under the glass, in the window light, very faint, worn almost smooth by thirty-four years against a man's skin, there were letters cut inside the hoop. She tilted it and breathed on it and rubbed it with the corner of her handkerchief and tilted it again.