The Dowager looked at her for a long time. Then she looked at her son.
"Tristram?"
"Miss Blakeney is Robin's guardian, ma'am," said the Duke. "In fact, if not yet in law. It's her decision." And then, quietly: "But it would have been mine too."
The Dowager sat back in her chair. She had been carrying that letter for ten months, Frances thought, and before that, perhaps, something else for thirty years.
"Very well," she said. "Then I shall go to London with you, Tristram, and wait upon Lord Eldon myself, and tell him that I burned your father's letter. He had better hear it from me than from a clerk. I have done one thing in my life that I am ashamed of. I shall not do a second by sitting at Halvergate while other people clear up after the first." She turned to Mr. Quint. "Pay off the express."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"And Miss Blakeney," said the Dowager, rising, and drawing on her gloves again finger by finger. "You will do me the honour, I hope, of telling me something about my husband's son. Not today. I find I am not equal to it today. But at some time. I never met him. I should like to know whom I wronged."
It was a long winter, and a public one. The Morning Chronicle had a paragraph by the first week of November, and the Courier had a column by the second, and by Christmas there was not a drawing room in London where it had not been explained, at length and incorrectly, how the Duke of Halvergate had very nearly not been the Duke of Halvergate, and why. Lord Eldon wept, it was said, which he did easily, and took until Candlemas to do anything, which he did always. The Attorney General was consulted. Garter King of Arms came down to Wychcombe in person, in a hired gig, and sat in the vestry for two days with the registers and Mr. Tuckwell, and went away again and altered the pedigree of the house of Stanier in the books of the College of Arms in his own hand, so that it read, against the name of Bertram, de jure fifth Duke, and against the name of Tristram, sixth. A caricature appeared in a print-shop window in the Strand, of a duke in a ditch being dug out by a sergeant, captioned Which is the Coronet? The Duke bought it for the estate office.
The Dowager went to Lord Eldon, as she had said she would, in her weeds, and told him about the letter in the grate, and came home and did not leave her rooms for a week. When she came down again she sent for Robin, and gave him his grandfather's Latin grammar, and asked him to tell her about his father. He told her about the trumpet calls. She listened to all of them.