"Think of it? I have been thinking of nothing else since the church. I thought of it all yesterday afternoon in the park. I thought, there is a book in a vestry in Oxfordshire, and nobody knows it's there but she and I, and she doesn't want it found either. I thought, I could go alone. I could go before her. Old registers get damp. Pages come away." He said it quite flatly, as he might have said what a horse had cost. "And then I thought about Rendle in the ditch. Digging. With his hands. And I thought, I am not going to begin my life as the man who owes his brother everything by stealing from his son. I'd rather be a younger son. It's not so very bad. I was one for about four hours yesterday and I find I didn't mind it as much as I'd been brought up to."
"You will mind it very much, when the newspapers have it."
"Very probably. I minded the French very much too." He turned his head from the window and looked at her directly, not in the glass. "What will you do? If it is there?"
"I don't know," said Frances. "Fight them for him. Petition the Lord Chancellor. Lose."
"You won't lose."
"You don't know Chancery."
"No," said the Duke. "But I know this much. The next heir is never given the custody of the child. It's the oldest rule there is. You don't put the lamb in the care of the wolf who inherits if it dies. If Robin is the Duke of Halvergate, then I am his heir presumptive, and no Lord Chancellor in England will let me be his guardian, or my mother, or anybody of my blood, because we all stand to gain if he dies of the croup. They will want somebody who loves him and gains nothing by it." He looked down at the boy. "That is you, Miss Blakeney. That has always been you. I'll swear to it before Lord Eldon myself, and so will my mother, if I have to carry her there."
Frances could not speak. She turned her face to the window, where there was nothing to see, and the carriage swung into the yard of the posting house at Bedford with its lamps flaring on wet cobbles, and a waiter came running out with an umbrella, and the moment was over, except that it was not over at all; it went on lying between them on the seat all evening like the sleeping boy, warm and heavy, and neither of them knew quite how to move it.
They came into Wychcombe at a little after two the next afternoon, by a lane so narrow that the postboys had to fold in the near horses' traces to get round the corner by the pound. It was a village of grey stone and grey slate on the side of a valley, with the dark edge of Wychwood Forest along the hill above it and a little river at the bottom, and the church stood at the top of the street with a squat tower and a yew tree in the churchyard that must have been there when the Normans came. Frances had heard Bertram describe it so often that she knew the way. The dame school was the cottage with the bow window opposite the lych-gate; there was a cobbler in it now, tapping, who looked up at the chariot and dropped his last.
The vicar of Wychcombe was also vicar of two other parishes and lived in none of them, and the curate was at Charlbury, burying somebody. But the parish clerk was at home, in the cottage beside the churchyard wall: a very old man called Tuckwell with a face like a walnut and a voice that had been leading the responses in St. Laurence's for fifty-one years and had worn itself to a whisper doing it. He looked at the Duke's black coat and the hatchment on the carriage door and the boy, and said, "You'll be wanting the books."