"I am afraid I can. I have been doing it for some minutes. It is not difficult."
"Ma'am, that is the Duke's pew."
"Yes. That is why I chose it. I have written to the Duke twice, and both letters have come back to me with a note from a gentleman called Lorimer to say that His Grace does not receive applications of this nature. I have not got the money to write a third time and wait another fortnight. So I have come to the one place in Norfolk where I know he must sit still for an hour and a half and cannot ring for a footman." She smiled at him. "I shall not make a scene. I promise you that. I shall not say a word until the service is over. And if he wishes to have me carried out of his pew by the churchwardens in front of the whole parish, he may do so, and you will not be blamed."
The verger had looked at her, and at her grey gown and black gloves, which were half-mourning and said so plainly, and at the small boy beside her in a black jacket that had been cut down from a man's coat and dyed, and he had gone away again without a word. Frances had seen him at the vestry door afterwards, talking urgently to a young man in a clergyman's bands, and the young man had looked at the pew, and shrugged, and gone in to put on his surplice.
Now the bell stopped. In the silence after it she could hear the rooks in the churchyard elms, and her own heart, which was behaving disgracefully.
She was twenty-seven years old. She had been earning her own bread for nine of those years, first as an under-teacher at a school for young ladies in Magdalen Street in Norwich, and then for six years as amanuensis and copyist to the Reverend Dr. Wendover, antiquary, who had been compiling a history of the Hundred of Blofield since before she was born and had died in March with the history unfinished and his hand, as the doctor said, still moving across the counterpane as if it were writing. She had transcribed for him the registers of thirty-one parishes. She could read secretary hand and court hand and the particular kind of drunken italic favoured by curates in the reign of the first George. She knew to the year when a parish had begun to bury its dead in woollen and when it had stopped. She had stood in thirty-one damp vestries with a clerk breathing beside her, and had never once been afraid in any of them.
She was afraid now.
The south door opened, and the whole church turned round.
Two people came up the aisle. One was a woman of perhaps fifty-five, tall and very straight, in the deep weeds of a widow: black bombazine without the smallest gloss, a black crape veil turned back over her bonnet, a widow's cap of white lawn showing beneath it, and black gloves. She walked as though the aisle had been laid down for her particular use and she was not entirely satisfied with the workmanship. The other was a man, and he was a pace behind her, and he was in black too, black coat and black breeches and a black band on his hat, which he had taken off as he came in and now held against his side. He was tall, and lean in the way of a man who has been leaner, and had brown hair cut short and a face that the sun had got at for several years and not entirely let go of. He limped very slightly with the left leg. He was looking at the floor, and then he looked up, at the pew, and saw her.
He did not stop walking. That was the second thing Frances had not expected. She had thought he would stop, and stare, and perhaps say something, and that the whole parish would hear it. He only came on, at the same pace, and handed the lady into the front pew of the nave, opposite, which was clearly reserved for the household; and the lady, as she sat down, turned her head and looked at Frances with an expression of such perfect, chilly, well-bred surprise that it was as good as a speech. Then the man opened the door of the ducal pew, came in, shut it behind him, and sat down at the other end of the bench, with Robin between them.