"Yes. Tell me about that." He came and sat down, finally, in the chair across the hearth from hers, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, as soldiers sit. "Tell me about the ring."
So she told him. She told him that Bertram Rendle had grown up in the village of Wychcombe in Oxfordshire, in the house of his mother's sister, a widow called Rendle who kept a dame school; that his mother had died when he was born; that he had been told when he was fourteen, by that aunt, that his father was a gentleman of great family who had been at Oxford, and that there was money paid in every quarter by an attorney in the Turl so that Bertram should be fed and taught his letters; and that when the aunt died, in 1803, she had left him a ring she said had been his mother's, and the name of the gentleman, which was Stanier. "He enlisted," said Frances, "in your father's county, and in your regiment, on purpose. He told my sister that. He said he wanted to see what kind of man the duke's son would turn out to be, before he made up his mind about the duke. He made up his mind about you in about a year. He said you were a good officer and a bad singer and that you didn't know a thing about it, and he wasn't going to be the one to tell you, because it would only make you unhappy and do nobody any good."
"Know about what?"
"That he was your brother," said Frances.
The Duke sat back.
"I am sorry," she said. "I thought that—from the boy's face, in the church—I thought perhaps you'd guessed."
"No," he said. "No. I hadn't got so far. I was still at Rendle." He put up a hand and rubbed it across his eyes. "My father's natural son. My father. Good God."
"He never wanted anything from your family, Your Grace. I want you to understand that. He didn't want it then, and he didn't want it at the end. But he was a soldier, and he could count. He knew he wouldn't see the spring. And he knew there was no one in the world for Robin except me, and that I've got eighty-four pounds in the Norwich bank and a situation that ends at Michaelmas. So he taught Robin your name, and what you looked like, and about the horse. He made him say it every night, like his prayers. And he put the ring on his thumb with the wool round it, in the last week, and he said to me, If anything happens to you, Fan, he's to go to Tris. Not to the family. To Tris."
The Duke had gone very still.
"Nobody called me that," he said, "except my nurse, and my tutor at Westminster. And once, at Waterloo, in the ditch, somebody shouted it in my ear. Tris, you damned fool, give me your arm. I thought I'd dreamt it. I was out of my head with the leg." He looked across the room at the boy at the globe. "It was him."