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

Chapter 10

The fire in the Wrenmoor library had gone out, and nobody had thought to light it again.

“Not there,” Wrenmoor repeated.

“The commission clerk was very apologetic, your grace.” The steward was a careful man who had served the house for twenty years, and Rosalind watched him choose his words the way a man chooses his footing on wet stone. “The filed annexe was signed out three weeks ago to be consulted. There is a receipt. The receipt bears the name of Mr. Thomas Ashby, solicitor, of Braewick — acting on behalf of the Aldemore interest. It has not been returned to the commission office.”

“The Roscombe interest,” Rosalind said.

“He said the Aldemore interest, miss. It is the same office. The old lord’s business is run under the name Aldemore and Company to this day. It was Aldemore before the present lord’s father changed the family name to Roscombe, and the counting-house was never renamed.”

Wrenmoor sat down slowly in the chair behind his desk, and it struck Rosalind — seeing him do it, seeing the great severe frame fold into a chair like any tired man — that he had not sat down in front of her all night.

“Three weeks ago,” he said.

“Before the ballroom,” Rosalind said. “Before anyone in the county knew I could read a paragraph of French. Your grace — the annexe was taken out of the commission’s files three weeks before the charter came to the Cranbourne ballroom.”

“Which means the alteration was planned for this assembly. The assembly was always going to be the moment.”

“And my reading it aloud in the ballroom did not spoil the plan.” She was thinking fast, and the thinking felt like falling. “It advanced it. Because now the annexe has been tested — publicly, with the Duke of Wrenmoor as its reader’s patron — and no man in the county can say that the Duke signed a charter he never questioned. Julian wanted the lie verified. He wanted the county to watch it survive scrutiny.”

Wrenmoor looked at her.

“Miss Ashcroft,” he said, “if you are right, then the assembly tomorrow was never the danger. The assembly was the instrument.”

“Yes.”

“And if the filed copy is gone, we have no comparison.”

“We have a comparison.” Rosalind pulled her father’s Volume I toward her and put her hand flat on the cover. “The comparison is a thirty-year-old exercise book that a man tried to burn last night. But we cannot prove intent with a book. And we cannot prove authorship with a book. All we can prove is that certain errors describe the same footprints. The magistrates will say: two men can make the same mistake.”

“Or one man can make a mistake twice.”

“Yes.”

The clock in the hall struck six.

Wrenmoor said: “Then we must find who signed the copy out, and we must find where it went, and we must do it before ten.”

“We must do something better than that,” Rosalind said.

He looked at her.

“Your grace, I have spent my whole life being underestimated, and I have learned that there is one advantage to it.” She turned the prayer book over in her hands, and did not open it, though he was watching. “No one bothers to hide things from a woman they have already dismissed. Julian Roscombe has told me — twice now — exactly what he means to do. He told me in a breakfast room. He told me in your hall an hour ago. He has told the county he intends to produce letters in my hand.”

“Letters you wrote.”

“Letters I wrote,” she agreed. “Copied from exercises. Forms and clauses and drafts, all in my own writing, all from the years when I believed translation by candlelight was a way to be loved.” Her voice did not waver, which pleased her. “Do you see, your grace? He means to prove that I forged contracts — using papers I copied from my father’s lessons — and if he does that, then the very existence of my father’s exercises is turned against us. Every page I brought out of the fire would only convict me.”

Wrenmoor’s jaw worked once.

“Then he will produce the letters,” he said. “And when he does—”

“When he does,” Rosalind said, “he will have produced in open court the one thing in the world that proves what we cannot otherwise prove.”

Silence.

“Say it,” Wrenmoor said.

“He will have produced papers copied from my father’s lessons. And the only person alive who could have supplied him with those lessons — the only person who ever took my father’s folios away — is him. He is not merely going to convict himself of forgery, your grace. He is going to convict himself of theft. All we need is a magistrate with enough courage to ask how he came by them.”

Wrenmoor stood up.

He crossed the room in four strides and pulled the bell rope hard enough that the ring echoed down the corridor, and then he turned, and Rosalind saw that his face had changed — not softened, exactly, but lit — and she thought, with a strange pang, that this was what he must have looked like on some Portuguese hillside at nineteen, before his brother died.

“Fenwick,” he said to the steward. “The carriage. And a rider to Sir Bramwell Coote’s house before he leaves for the assembly, with a note in my hand. He is the senior magistrate and he is an honest man, or he has been for forty years, and I intend to find out which.”

“Tonight, your grace?”

“Now.”

“And what shall I say the note contains?”

Wrenmoor looked across the desk at Rosalind.

“Tell him,” he said, “that the Duke of Wrenmoor begs the favor of a private reading before the assembly opens the floor. A reading of the annexe, in the original seven tongues, by the only person in Braewick who can read all of them.”

The steward’s eyes flicked to Rosalind and away.

“And tell him,” Wrenmoor added, “that the reader is a woman, and that she will be reading a document in which she has no interest, no property, and no advantage — and that everyone in the county who wishes her to be silent has spent the last twelve hours trying to arrange a fire, a scandal, or a carriage to prevent it.”

The steward went out.

Rosalind found that she was standing too.

“Your grace,” she said. “There is one more thing. Something I have not told you.”

“I know,” Wrenmoor said. “The velvet book.”

She opened it.

Not to the front. To the middle, where the margins had stopped being margins a long time ago — where the pages were crowded to the edges with a young woman’s cramped, careful hand, Latin roots, French terms, German declensions, Portuguese verbs corrected against the printed text by her own nineteen-year-old fingers.

And at the back, on the inner face of the cover, where the velvet had been split and pressed back down, there was a single sheet folded small — different paper, different ink, different decade.

“My stepmother’s handwriting,” Rosalind said. “Dated the year my father died. It is the record of a payment made by Lord Roscombe’s solicitor to her. Two hundred pounds. It says she was paid for advice on a family matter.”

Wrenmoor took the sheet in his hand and read it twice.

“What family matter?” he asked.

Rosalind closed the prayer book and held it against her chest.

“The one in which her stepdaughter was taught to read seven languages,” she said, “so that a clever man could use her, and then be rid of her, and then marry the younger sister who could not read him at all.”