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

Chapter 11

Sir Bramwell Coote arrived at Wrenmoor Hall at half past eight in a hired fly, wearing a coat that had been new in a different decade and a face like a man who had not slept either.

He was seventy-one years old, and he had been a magistrate in Braewick for forty of them, and he had buried two sons and one wife and had a reputation for being unable to be bought by anyone — which was not quite the same as being honest, but was close enough to matter.

He looked at Rosalind for a long moment before he sat down.

“You are the woman who read the charter at the Cranbourne ball,” he said.

“The charter, sir. Yes.”

“I was told last night, by a very reasonable gentleman, that you are unwell.”

“I am often told that when I am right.”

Sir Bramwell’s eyebrows went up a fraction. He looked at Wrenmoor, then back at her, and said: “His grace’s note says you have read seven tongues since you were a girl. Is that true?”

“It is true.”

“Name them.”

“French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Latin, Spanish, Italian. And enough Greek to be ashamed of.”

“Read me something.”

Rosalind looked at the charter lying on the table and opened it to the Portuguese annexe, and read him a paragraph aloud — slowly, in the original, with the sense of it landing underneath, and Sir Bramwell listened with his eyes half closed like a man listening to music he had not heard since childhood.

Then he said: “And the English summary, on the facing page?”

She read that too.

Sir Bramwell sat back and said nothing for nearly a minute.

“Well,” he said at last. “Those are not the same document.”

“No, sir.”

“No.” He rubbed his jaw. “His grace’s note further claims that the filed annexe at the commission office was signed out to a solicitor three weeks ago and has not been returned.”

“That is correct, sir.”

“That is a very serious claim.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you wish me to open the assembly this morning by reading a document aloud that accuses a lord of forgery, on the strength of a girl of nine-and-twenty and an old man’s exercise book.”

“I wish you to open the assembly by ordering the return of the filed annexe,” Rosalind said. “The reading will do the rest itself.”

Sir Bramwell stared at her.

Then he laughed — a short, dry, unpracticed sound, like a door opening in a house where nobody had entered in a while.

“Your grace,” he said to Wrenmoor, “where did you find her?”

“She found me,” Wrenmoor said.

Sir Bramwell rose, and the three of them went out through the mist toward the assembly hall in the center of Braewick, and along the road Rosalind saw the county gathering — carriages at the corners, tenants at the fences, women with baskets standing where the road bent so they could watch the gentry arrive.

She looked for the Ashcroft carriage and did not see it.

She looked for Julian Roscombe and did not see him either. And it was the not-seeing that frightened her more than a public scene would have. Julian in a room was a known quantity. Julian out of sight was a man arranging something.

The assembly hall had been built for corn disputes and county rates, and it smelled of chalk, damp cloth, and too many men in wool. There was a long table at the front with the Kestrel Canal charter upon it under a green ribbon, and a signing pen laid beside it like a wedding ring waiting.

Julian Roscombe was standing at the table when they walked in.

He had been there all along. He had simply chosen to stand in the corner where the light fell, so that when he moved it would look as though he had arrived.

He saw Rosalind on Wrenmoor’s arm, and his face did not change at all.

That was the worst thing she saw that morning: not the fury she expected, but the stillness — the calm of a man who had already planned for the possibility that she would come and had decided, long before she arrived, exactly what he would do about it.

“Miss Ashcroft,” Julian said pleasantly. “How well you look. I had heard you were in delicate health.”

“You hear a great many things, my lord,” Rosalind said. “Most of them from my stepmother.”

The room filled. Magistrates took their chairs. The German merchant found his place with a notebook. The Portuguese agent stood at the back with his dispatch case against his chest. The pews behind the table filled with farmers and shopkeepers and a score of women who had come to see the spinster who read seven languages get what was coming to her.

Sir Bramwell did not sit at first.

“Before we begin,” he said, “I require the filed copy of the annexe to be set beside the duke’s copy. After receiving His Grace’s note, I sent two constables to Mr. Ashby’s office before dawn. They recovered the commission copy there under the outstanding receipt and brought it directly to this building. The clerk may fetch it from the room next door, where it has remained under lock.”

Rosalind’s head turned.

Sir Bramwell had heard the word forgery and had not waited for the assembly to protect the evidence.

Julian Roscombe laughed.

He laughed lightly, almost warmly, hands open, and said: “With respect, Sir Bramwell, this is a very touching arrangement — but before we compare documents, I think the county deserves to know whose eyes it will be trusting. Might I ask where the reading will come from? From a woman, I hear. Miss Rosalind Ashcroft, who has been residing at Wrenmoor Hall these two days.”

His voice was pleasant. His eyes were not.

“I have here,” he said, lifting a thin portfolio in a dark leather cover, “letters and forms in Miss Ashcroft’s own hand. Business clauses. Draft contracts. Some of them for my own family’s affairs, which she copied at my request years ago, in a happier time. Others — and this grieves me deeply — others that touch on matters she had no business touching at all.”

He laid the portfolio down on the table beside the charter.

“I am not accusing her of anything,” he said gently. “I am only asking that Braewick consider, before it hears her read, whether a woman who has spent nine years copying commercial documents might know exactly how to alter one.”

The hall went silent in a way Rosalind had only ever heard once before, in a ballroom, when a duke walked in.

Sir Bramwell looked at the portfolio.

Then he looked at Rosalind.

“Miss Ashcroft,” he said. “Do you wish to respond before we proceed?”

Rosalind reached into her reticule, and took out her father’s exercise book, and set it on the table beside Julian’s portfolio, and the whole room saw the worn brown cover and the faded spine.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I do.”