"Not two but one," she read aloud. "M. S. P. R. Wych. twenty-one February seventeen eighty-five."
The Duke said nothing.
"Wych is Wychcombe," said Frances. "In Oxfordshire. Between Charlbury and Woodstock, on the edge of Wychwood Forest. Bertram was born there. The church at Wychcombe is St. Laurence; he told me so; he was christened there. Your father wrote the church and the date in his book, and then he had the date cut inside the ring." She put the glass down. Her hand, she was annoyed to see, was not steady. "Your Grace. A man may give a girl a ring because he loves her. But he does not cut the name of a parish church and a date inside it. That is what one does with a wedding ring."
"He was nineteen."
"Yes."
"He couldn't have married at nineteen without his father's consent. My grandfather would have cut off his hand before he consented to a dame-school mistress's niece. I know that much law, Miss Blakeney; every eldest son in England knows it. They tell it you at Westminster like the catechism. A minor can't marry without his father's leave."
"By licence he can't," said Frances. "By banns he can."
He stared at her.
"It is in the Act," she said. "Lord Hardwicke's Act, of 1753. I have copied it out at the front of fourteen marriage registers. If a minor marries by licence, without the consent of his father, the marriage is null and void to all intents and purposes. But if he marries by banns, called three Sundays in the parish church, and his father does not come into that church and stand up and publicly declare his dissent, then the marriage holds. Parliament reasoned that banns were public, and a father who did not trouble to find out what was being cried in church had only himself to blame. It is a great scandal among the bishops. They have been trying to mend it for sixty years." She heard her own voice, very level, the voice she used for reading out a difficult entry to Dr. Wendover, and was grateful to it. "My own sister was married by banns at eighteen, while I was shut up in Magdalen Street with the measles and forty young ladies. She wrote to me after. She said the banns had been called at St. Peter Mancroft three Sundays running and our father had not come to forbid them, because our father never went to church. That was quite true. He never did."
"And if my father," said the Duke slowly, "at nineteen, in the spring of 1785, in a village church in Oxfordshire where nobody had ever heard of him, had the banns called in his own plain name, Montague Stanier, without the title—"