"No," she said.
"Miss Blakeney—"
"No. I didn't come here for that. I did not bring him here for that. I brought him so that somebody would know him if I died. I didn't bring him to be—" She could not say it. She put her hand on the table. "Do you know what happens to a duke of six years old? I'll tell you, because I have copied out the wardship papers of three baronets and a viscount for Dr. Wendover's appendix. He becomes a ward in Chancery. The Lord Chancellor appoints his guardians. They will be lawyers and bishops and great men who have never seen him, and his estates will be managed by a receiver, and he will be sent to Eton at eight and to some nobleman's house in the holidays to be taught how to be a nobleman, and he will be taken away from me. They will not leave a duke with a copyist in a lodging over a chandler's shop. They won't let me near him. A maiden aunt of no family, earning her bread? They'll give me a pension to go away. And they'll be right to. That's the worst of it. By their lights they'll be right."
The Duke had risen too. He came round the table, and stopped, a yard from her.
"And you," said Frances, more quietly. "You. You'll be nothing. Lord Tristram Stanier, heir presumptive to his nephew. You'll have to give up this house to his receivers. You'll have to give up the name. Every newspaper in England—" She pressed her hand against her mouth. "I am sorry. I am so sorry. I should have looked inside the ring in Norwich. I should never have come."
"If you hadn't come," said the Duke, "I should be sitting in a dead man's pew for the rest of my life without knowing it. I'd rather know." He was very pale, but his voice was steady. "We don't know yet. It's a verse in a book and some letters in a ring. It may not be what we think. Somebody must go and look."
"Yes," said Frances. "Somebody must."
They looked at each other across the muniment room table, among the black deed boxes with the names of all his lands on them, and neither of them said what each of them was thinking, which was that it would be very easy for nobody to go at all.
She packed that night. She did it very quietly, by one candle, so as not to wake Robin: the two gowns, the shawl, the nightshirts, the tin soldier with no head, the bundle of Bertram's letters, the ring in its handkerchief. She told herself she was not running away. She told herself that a register was only a book, and books were damp and mice got into them and curates spilled their port on them, and that the chances were very great that the page for February 1785 was gone, or illegible, or had never existed, and that there was no reason in the world why she should stay in this house and wait to find out whether the boy asleep in the dressing room was to be taken from her by the Lord Chancellor of England. She told herself that the Duke would be glad of it, in the end, and would never have to stand before a committee of the House of Lords and hand his name to a child.
At half past four she lifted Robin, still asleep, and carried him down the back stairs in his coat, with the bag over her arm. The kitchen door was bolted, but the bolts were well greased, and the yard outside was grey and cold and smelled of wet straw.