Nobody spoke. Out in the yard, very clear through the window, Robin was whistling the Walk for the boot boy, and getting it wrong, and starting again.
"I could still stop it," said the Dowager.
They both looked at her.
"Your letter, Tristram. It went by the night mail. It will be at the General Post Office by nine this morning and on Lord Eldon's desk by noon. Mr. Quint has an express waiting in the yard. A clerk from your solicitor's could be on the Chancellor's doorstep before it is opened and ask for it back in your name, as written in error. Lord Eldon is a discreet man. He has kept the King's secrets for twenty years. He would hand it back and never speak of it." She leaned forward. "Listen to me, both of you. Nothing turns on it now. Nothing. Tristram is Duke whether the world knows of 1785 or not. The only thing your letter will do now, if it is read, is to tell all England, in a committee room of the House of Lords, with the newspapers in the gallery, that my husband was a coward and a liar, which is no news to me; and that this child's mother perjured herself before a surrogate at eighteen, and that the boy is nobody's son in the eyes of the law. Miss Blakeney. I am not your enemy. I was, on Sunday. I find I am not any longer. Let me stop it. Let him grow up Robin Rendle, a sergeant's son, with a ring his father left him and an uncle who will see to everything, and let nobody ever stand up in Westminster and call him a bastard."
It was, Frances thought, the kindest thing anybody had said to her in a very long time; and the Dowager meant every word of it; and it was wrong.
She looked down at the papers on the cloth. Kitty's age, in the surrogate's copperplate. Kitty's lie, in her own head, in Kitty's own round hand, written to her sister in Magdalen Street with the measles going round. She thought of Phoebe Rendle, Phoebe Stanier, under the grey stone by the yew, with wife cut on it in letters that no one in this family had come to read for thirty-four years. She thought of Bertram, in the ditch under the French lancers, digging his brother out with his hands, and never once telling him why.
"No," she said.
"Miss Blakeney—"
"No, ma'am. Thank you. I know what you're offering, and I know what it costs you to offer it, and I thank you. But no." She lifted her head. "That's how it began, don't you see? Somebody deciding it was kinder not to know. A frightened boy of nineteen, deciding his son would do better as a Rendle in a dame school than as a Stanier with a quarrel round his cradle. And then a widow, deciding a letter would do better in the fire. And then my sister, deciding I'd do better believing it was banns. Every one of them meant it kindly. Every one of them was trying to spare somebody. And Bertram lived thirty-three years believing himself nobody's son, and he wasn't; he was the only one of us who was anybody's son at all. I won't do it to Robin. I won't have him find these papers in a box when he's twenty and know that the people who loved him best decided he couldn't bear the truth." She put her hand on the allegation. "Let it go to the Chancellor. All of it. Let them say what the law says. He'll be what the law says he is, and he'll know it, and he'll know his father was a duke for eleven weeks and never asked for a thing, and he'll know that his grandmother was a wife and that it's cut on her stone. That's worth more than a name in Debrett. I'd rather he had that."