She came in a hired chaise-and-four from Oxford, splashed to the windows, plainly having travelled all night. But she stepped down into the yard of the Plough as she had walked up the aisle of the church at Halvergate, as though the yard had been laid for her and was not quite up to standard, and she came straight into the parlour, where Frances and the Duke and Robin were at breakfast, and she was followed by a small, neat, elderly gentleman in black with a leather writing-case under his arm.
"Tristram," she said. "Miss Blakeney. This is Mr. Quint, of Norwich, who has managed our affairs in the county for thirty years. I sent for him on Sunday night." She looked at the table, at the eggs and the ham and the half-eaten toast, and at Robin with jam on his chin. "Has it gone? Your letter to the Chancellor?"
"Last night, ma'am. By the mail."
The Dowager closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them, and drew off her gloves, finger by finger, and sat down at the end of the table in the chair Mr. Quint held for her.
"Then I have something to tell you both," she said, "and I would rather the boy did not hear it."
Robin was sent out to the yard to look at the post horses, with the inn's boot boy to mind him. The Dowager waited until the door had shut. Then she said, to her son, quite steadily, as though it were a thing she had rehearsed all night in the chaise and had decided could only be got through by saying it fast:
"Your father wrote you a letter, Tristram. He wrote it some years before he died, and he put it in the drawer of his desk in the library at Halvergate, sealed, with your name on it and the words To be opened after my death. I found it the evening after the funeral. I opened it. I read it. It told you everything that you and Miss Blakeney have been finding out for yourselves this week: the girl, the banns, the church, the child. It said he had been a coward all his life and could not be one any longer from the grave. It asked you to find his son." She did not look away from him. "I burned it in the library grate. I did not try to find the boy. I told myself he was some sergeant somewhere who did not know and would never know, and that you had paid enough already for your father's sins, with your leg and your four years in Spain, and you should not pay for this one too. When I saw that ring in the church on Sunday I knew I had been wrong in every particular but one."
"Which one, ma'am?" said the Duke, very low.
"That I would do it again," said the Dowager. "If it would answer. That is the one particular. I am not going to pretend to you that I am sorry I tried to keep your name for you. I am sorry it was not mine to keep." She turned to Frances. "Miss Blakeney. I sent Mr. Quint to look into your family on Sunday night, because I wished to find something against you. I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. I thought you a schemer. I had hoped, I think, to find that the boy was not even Rendle's. I was wrong about that too. But Mr. Quint found something else. I would rather he told you. He can do it better. He has had the papers in his hands."