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

Chapter 12

“In 1806,” Rosalind said, “my father—”

“One moment, Miss Ashcroft,” Julian interrupted smoothly. “Forgive me. But I think the county would prefer to hear from me first, since it is my character that has been called into question by an accusation nobody has yet put into words.”

“Nobody has accused you of anything, Lord Roscombe,” Sir Bramwell said.

“Not in words, sir. In a carriage ride. In a note delivered at dawn. In the presence of Miss Ashcroft, who is very clever, and who has been seen — by many people now — going into and out of the Duke of Wrenmoor’s house at all hours.”

A murmur went around the hall.

“There is a document on this table,” Julian said, “that Miss Ashcroft wishes to read. Before she reads it, I would like the county to know exactly whose hands prepared it. She copied it. She will deny it, but she copied every clause of the Kestrel annexe at my request, in my father’s counting-house, during the years of our engagement — years in which she was kind enough to help me with my family’s correspondence, and I was foolish enough to trust her.”

He opened the portfolio and laid pages on the table one by one, slowly, so the county could see the handwriting.

And Rosalind’s handwriting was there.

Her own careful slanting hand, at nineteen, on paper that had once been in her father’s study. A Dutch insurance clause. A French deed of surrender for water rights. A Portuguese bill of lading. Dozens of them — clean copies, tidy productions, the work of a girl who was proud to be asked.

“You see,” Julian said. “The very forms she will accuse me of stealing are written in her hand.”

The hall was very quiet.

And Rosalind Ashcroft stood at the front of it and felt the floor of her life drop away, exactly as she had known it would, exactly as she had spent the last twelve hours preparing for — and, because she had prepared for it, she did not flinch.

“Sir Bramwell,” she said, “might I ask Lord Roscombe one question?”

Sir Bramwell’s eyes moved from the pages to her face.

“Ask it,” he said.

Rosalind looked at Julian.

“My lord,” she said. “Those copies. The ones in your portfolio. Did you obtain them from my father’s folios, or from my own hand directly?”

Julian’s smile did not falter, but something behind it shifted, the way a chess player’s attention shifts.

“From your own hand, of course. You gave them to me.”

“All of them? Every page?”

“Every page.”

“Then please turn to the Portuguese bill of lading and read me the third line.”

The silence that followed had a texture to it.

“I hardly think—”

“It is in English, my lord,” Rosalind said. “You can read it. It is your own family’s business. Read the third line aloud, and the county will see that I did indeed write it.”

Julian looked at the page. Then he looked at the hall.

“This is a distraction.”

“It is one line, my lord.”

“Sir Bramwell, I object—”

“Read the line, Lord Roscombe,” Sir Bramwell said.

Julian’s jaw tightened. He picked up the page and held it, and Rosalind watched his eyes move down the paper, and she watched them stop, and she saw the exact moment he understood.

He had never read it. Not really. He had taken the page and put it in a portfolio and counted it as evidence, and he had never once read it, because to Julian Roscombe a document was not a thing to be read; it was a thing to be held over someone’s head.

“The third line,” he said, “reads—”

He stopped.

“It pauses, does it not,” Rosalind said quietly. “At the fourth word. Because my father, in writing the exercise, made a small error — he began the clause in the Dutch manner and corrected himself into the Portuguese. There is a crossed-out word in the fourth position. Any copy made from that page will contain the crossing-out, because one copies what is on the page.”

She turned to the hall.

“Lord Roscombe’s portfolio contains that crossing-out. On every page. On pages he says I gave him. And yet I have never in my life given any man a page with a correction still visible on it, because my father taught me that a fair copy is a fair copy, and I was a proud and tidy girl.”

She opened her father’s Volume I and turned it to face the room.

“Here is the original. Here is the error. Here is the corrected word above it in my father’s hand. Lord Roscombe’s pages are not copies of my fair copies. They are copies of my father’s working drafts — drafts which have never left my possession, which were in the schoolhouse on the Cranbourne road until four o’clock this morning, and which somebody tried to burn last night.”

A sound went through the hall like a wave breaking.

Julian Roscombe took one step back and struck the signing table with his hip, and the green ribbon slid off the charter and fell at his feet.

“That proves nothing,” he said, and for the first time his voice had a flaw in it. “You could have—the drafts could have been—”

“They could have been taken from me by a man who borrowed my father’s folios and never returned them,” Rosalind said. “Which is what I have said from the beginning. And the man who borrowed them is the man standing beside you, Sir Bramwell, holding a portfolio of the theft in his own hand and calling it evidence.”

The hall was on its feet before she finished the sentence.

Sir Bramwell Coote rose, gray and enormous and slow, and brought his hand down on the table so hard that the signing pen jumped.

“Sit down,” he said, “all of you. Sit down and be silent, or I will clear this hall and take no evidence from anyone.”

They sat. Slowly, like water subsiding.

Sir Bramwell looked down at the two documents on the table — Julian’s portfolio and Rosalind’s exercise book — and then said, in a voice the whole hall could hear:

“The clerk will now fetch the filed copy of the annexe from the commission, which I had brought to this building at dawn and which has been in the clerk’s keeping in the room adjacent. We will compare it, clause by clause, against the duke’s copy.”

The clerk — a thin, frightened young man — went out through the side door.

He was gone a long time.

When he came back, his face was the color of a tallow candle, and his hands were empty.

“Sir Bramwell,” he said, “the room has been entered by the window. The filed copy is gone.”