The vestry of St. Laurence's was a little stone room with a fireplace that had not been lit since Michaelmas twelvemonth and a smell of damp and mice and old candle. The parish chest stood against the wall, an ancient thing of black oak bound with iron, and Farmer Pratley and Mr. Hine the miller and Mr. Tuckwell each put a key into a lock, in silence, like men at a sacrament, and turned them one after the other, and lifted the lid.
The registers were wrapped in a green baize cloth. Frances knew them before Tuckwell had them out: a fat old parchment book, bound in limp vellum, for the baptisms and burials; and a tall, narrow book bound in calf, with the printed forms that Lord Hardwicke's Act had ordered every parish in England to buy, for the marriages. She had handled thirty-one like it.
"Seventeen fifty-four to the year 'twelve," said Tuckwell, laying it on the table. "Then the new books come in, under Mr. Rose's Act. My father kept that one, and me after him."
Frances sat down at the table. She took off her gloves, and put them beside the book, and opened it.
Her hands were quite steady now. It was work; it was only work. She turned the leaves, past the long dull list of the farmers and labourers of Wychcombe and their brides, each entry on its printed form, the names written in by the curate and the signatures or the marks below; past 1780 and 1781 and 1782, past a Pratley and two Hines and a great many Tuckwells; past 1784.
She found it on the twenty-third leaf, the second entry for the year 1785, and she did not say anything. She only moved her hand away from the page, so that the Duke, standing behind her, could see.
No. 47. Montague Stanier of the Parish of St. Aldate in the City of Oxford, Bachelor, and Phoebe Rendle of this Parish, Spinster, were married in this Church by Banns this Twenty-first Day of February in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-five, by me, William Ashe, Curate. This Marriage was solemnized between Us: Montague Stanier. Phoebe Rendle. In the Presence of: Dorcas Rendle. John Tuckwell.
"That's my father," whispered old Tuckwell, putting a crooked finger beside the last name, not quite touching it. "That's his hand. He was clerk afore me. He stood up at all of 'em."
The Duke did not speak. He was looking at the first signature. It was a young man's hand, quick and slanting, with a flourish to the S, the hand of the verses in the green commonplace book. It was also, older and slower, the hand that had signed the last will and testament of the fourth Duke of Halvergate in the November of last year. Frances saw him know it.
She turned to the other book, the vellum one, and found the baptisms for December 1785, and the burials beside them. They were where she knew they would be. Phoebe Stanier, buried the seventeenth of December, aged twenty-two. Bertram, son of Montague Stanier and Phoebe his wife, baptized the eighteenth of December, privately, the child being weakly, and received into the church the second of February following.