The Duke Was Desperate Without A Translator — Until A Rejected Spinster Spoke 7 Languages

Chapter 1

The champagne had gone warm in her hand an hour ago, and Rosalind Ashcroft was still holding it, because a woman holding a glass is a woman who is occupied, and an occupied woman is not asked to dance, and a woman not asked to dance is not pitied.

That was the arithmetic of her life now. She had learned it the way other women learned the pianoforte — by practice, and by humiliation, and by the particular hush that fell over a room when she entered it.

Somewhere behind her, Julian Roscombe was telling a story.

She could hear the shape of it without the words. The pause before the punchline. The little lift at the end, the way he turned his shoulder so his audience would have to lean in. She had once loved that turn of his shoulder. She had once sat beside him in a cold library at two in the morning, translating his father’s foreign correspondence by a candle stub she was too proud to replace, and she had believed — God help her, she had believed — that being useful was the same as being cherished.

“Miss Ashcroft’s talents,” Julian said, and the room went pleasantly quiet to receive it, “are always safest when silent.”

The gentlemen laughed. Two girls behind their fans laughed harder, because the joke had not fallen on them, and relief is always louder than cruelty.

Rosalind did not blink.

A flinch was an invitation. A sharp answer was a scandal. Silence, she had discovered, was the only blade a woman could keep under her tongue without being searched for it — and she had sharpened hers over seven years until it cut inward more often than out.

Her half-sister Cecily touched her sleeve. Just the sleeve. An apology with no words in it, which was the only kind Cecily had ever been allowed to give.

Rosalind looked down at her own hands and thought, with the flatness of long practice: I am twenty-nine years old, I am wearing lavender muslin that was fashionable two seasons ago, and I know nine ways to say “the ship has not arrived” in Portuguese.

Then the music died.

It did not fade. It failed — the pianoforte thinned into a scatter of wrong notes as the doors at the far end of Lady Ottilie Cranbourne’s ballroom opened and three men came in as though the room were a map and they had already been assigned their positions on it.

The first was Alaric Thorne, Duke of Wrenmoor, and he did not walk so much as occupy. He wore black evening dress with no jewel anywhere on him, and his cravat was tied with the severity of a bandage. Campaign discipline hung on him harder than scent hung on the ladies. He did not plead with the room for attention. He did not flatter it. His eyes moved across the crowd once, slowly, and every whisper in the room suddenly felt like something that could be held against it.

Behind him came three anxious county magistrates, and a German merchant in travel-worn black, and a Portuguese agent clutching a dispatch case against his chest the way a man clutches a beating heart.

The hired translator had not arrived.

Rosalind knew this before anyone said it, because she had watched Lady Ottilie’s steward sweating by the door for half an hour, and because the charter had been lying on the long table under a green ribbon since before supper — forty pages of foreign paper, unread, in a room full of men who had been educated precisely enough to be dangerous.

One magistrate cleared his throat and jabbed a nervous finger at the French clause.

“Shared right of northern lock passage. Your grace.”

Plain enough.

Rosalind saw the lie at once, the way she saw a dropped stitch in lace.

The French did not promise shared passage. It surrendered the northern locks — outright, without condition, without term — to a private company of investors.

It is forfeit, she thought. And then her mouth, which had spent seven years being careful, opened without permission from the rest of her.

“That is not a shared right,” she said quietly. “It is a forfeit.”

She had not meant to be heard. But Wrenmoor had the hearing of a soldier who had survived broken branches and dark roads in Portugal, and his head turned, and the ballroom froze around her like ice closing over a pond.

“Translated,” he said. His voice held no warmth in it. It held something worse — a belief that a truth, once located, must obey him.

Rosalind lifted her gaze to his, and behind him Julian had gone still as ash, and behind her she heard her stepmother make a small sound of horror.

She understood exactly what the next minute would cost her.

If she spoke, the county would not say she was learned. It would say she was unnatural. It would ask why Julian Roscombe had ended their engagement, and Julian would be ready with an answer, and it would not be a true one.

But if she stayed silent, the carters and the widows and the tenants promised winter wages on the Wrenmoor Canal would pay for one pretty lie told by a man who had never in his life loaded a barge.

Cecily’s fingers tightened on her sleeve.

Rosalind Ashcroft lifted her chin, and opened her mouth, and the whole ballroom leaned forward to hear a spinster be ruined.