He did not say anything else in the church. When the blessing had been given and the curate had retired and the parish began to file out, slowly, with a great deal of looking back, he stood, and opened the door of the pew, and held it for her; and when she had come out with Robin, he said, in a perfectly ordinary voice that could have been heard by anyone, "You will do me the kindness of coming up to the house, ma'am. My mother's carriage is at the gate. It is a mile, and it is going to rain."
"Thank you, Your Grace. We will walk."
"You will ride," he said, "or I shall walk beside you the whole mile, in front of every tenant on this estate, and they will talk of nothing else until Michaelmas. I leave the choice to you."
Frances looked at him. He looked back. His eyes were grey, and tired, and not at all as cold as his voice.
"We will ride," she said.
The Dowager did not ride with them. She said, in a low, clear voice, that she would walk back by the park gate, as she always did, and that Lorimer would attend her; and she went out by the priest's door with her veil let down, and a thin young man in spectacles, who must be Lorimer, went hurrying after her with an umbrella. So Frances sat in the Dowager's barouche, with the hood up and the rain beginning, opposite the Duke of Halvergate, with Robin pressed against her side looking out of the window at the park, the deer under the oaks and the long grey front of Halvergate Hall coming up out of the wet like a ship. It had a hatchment over the door too, the twin of the one in the church.
Robin said, "Is that all yours?" and the Duke said, "It belongs to the estate," and Robin said, "What's an estate?" and the Duke said, "A great deal of trouble," and then nobody said anything again until they were in the library, a long room on the garden side, lined with books nobody had read since the first George. A fire had been lit. The Duke sent a footman for chocolate and bread and butter for the boy, and when it came he sent Robin with it to the window seat at the far end, where there was a great globe on a stand that could be turned, and then he came back to the hearth and stood in front of it with his hands behind him, and looked down at her.
"Now, madam," he said. "Who are you?"
"My name is Frances Blakeney. I am a spinster of the parish of St. Giles in Norwich. I am the boy's aunt. His mother was my sister Catherine, who died three years ago of a putrid fever. His father was Bertram Rendle, who was a sergeant in your troop of the regiment from 1811 to 1816, and who died in February of this year of the wound he took at Waterloo, which never properly closed. I have been keeping house for them both since my sister died. That is who I am."
She had practised it a dozen times in the coach from Norwich.