They were through Norwich before the shops were open and at Thetford by nine. Frances had never posted in her life. She had gone everywhere by the stage, inside if she was lucky and on the roof if she was not, with her feet in straw and a farmer's elbow in her ribs. Posting was like being fired out of a gun at the rate of eleven miles in the hour. Every stage the chariot swung into an inn yard, and the ostlers ran out with fresh horses before the wheels had stopped, and the postboys swung down and swung up again, and the Duke put his head out and paid, so many shillings for so many miles and threepence a mile to the boys, and they were off again almost before Frances had got her breath. At Cambridge Robin was sick in the yard of the Hoop, and then wanted pie.
He was perfectly happy. He had never been so happy in his life. He knelt up on the seat with his nose against the glass and named every horse in every field, and asked the Duke questions without stopping for six hours, and the Duke answered them all. Yes, he had been in Spain. No, he had never seen a bear, but there had been wolves in the Sierra de Gata in the winter of 'twelve. Yes, Papa had been there. Yes, Papa had been very brave. No, Papa had never been afraid of anything that the Duke had seen.
"Papa said he was afraid all the time," said Robin, "but he did it anyway, because the horses would know otherwise."
The Duke was silent a moment.
"Your papa," he said, "was a great deal wiser than I was."
By Bedford it was dark, and Robin was asleep across both their laps with his boots on Frances's knee and his head on the Duke's greatcoat, and there was nothing to be seen out of the window except the reflection of the carriage lamp, and their two faces in the glass. The Duke had taken his hat off. He had a way of sitting, she had noticed, with the bad leg stretched out at an angle and his hand resting on the knee of it, as if to keep it company.
He looked at her in the dim glass. "May I ask you something, Miss Blakeney?"
"You may ask."
He smiled faintly at that. "In the muniment room, yesterday. When you said nobody would have known. Did you think of it? Of not going? Of simply putting the ring in your reticule and taking the boy back to Norwich and never saying another word?"
"Yes," said Frances. "I thought of it last night for four hours. I packed a bag on the strength of it. You saw." She looked down at Robin's sleeping head. "I am not a very good woman, Your Grace. I am only a tolerably honest one, and there is a difference. Did you?"