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

Chapter 13

For one full second, nobody in the assembly hall breathed.

Then the room came apart into noise — magistrates on their feet, the German merchant shouting something about his government, the Portuguese agent going white and pressing his dispatch case to his chest, farmers in the back benches standing on the benches themselves to see.

And in the middle of it, Julian Roscombe began, very quietly, to smile.

Rosalind saw it.

She saw the smile and she understood, with a cold that went down to her fingertips, that they had lost — not the truth, but the moment. Because whatever happened next, the missing document would be the story. A missing document is a story that can be told a hundred ways, and in every version of it, the woman who read seven languages is a woman with an interest.

“The window,” Sir Bramwell said, over the uproar. “When was the room last locked?”

“At eleven last night, sir, by me,” the clerk said. “And I unlocked it at a quarter past seven this morning, and it was as I left it.”

“And the filed copy came in when?”

“Before dawn, sir. Two constables brought it from Mr. Ashby’s office. I put it on the inner table and locked the door and kept the key on my person.”

“Then someone entered between eleven and a quarter past seven.” Sir Bramwell’s face was stone. “Somebody knew the document was there. Somebody knew it mattered.”

“Yes, sir.”

Julian’s voice cut in, smooth as ever, and every syllable of it landed. “Sir Bramwell, I must respectfully suggest that we consider who knew all of those things. Very few people knew the filed copy had been brought to this building. His grace the Duke knew. His steward knew. And Miss Ashcroft, who has been lodged in his grace’s house since Thursday, knew.”

He turned to the hall with a small, sad, generous gesture of the hands.

“I do not say she took it. I say only that a county which is asked to convict a lord on a woman’s word should first ask why the woman would have a key to a locked room.”

“There is no key,” Rosalind said.

“There is always a key, Miss Ashcroft, for a woman who has spent three days in a duke’s confidence.”

The hall murmured.

And Rosalind — standing there in her two-seasons-old lavender muslin, with her hands shaking at her sides and her father’s notebook open on the table — felt something inside her settle. Not calm. Something more useful than calm. The flat, focused steadiness she remembered from the night her father died, when she had been seventeen and had organized a funeral and a household and a creditor’s visit in a single day.

“Sir Bramwell,” she said, “might I ask a question about the room?”

The old magistrate turned to her.

“Ask.”

“The inner table. Is it beneath the window?”

The clerk answered, before anyone could stop him. “No, miss. The inner table is against the wall, on the far side of the room. The window looks out onto the yard.”

“Then a man who climbed in through the window would have had to cross the room in the dark, find a document on a table he could not see, and leave without disturbing anything.”

“He must have known where it was,” the clerk said.

“It was in a plain paper wrapper on a plain table in a room full of plain tables,” Rosalind said, “and he found it in the dark. Sir Bramwell, whoever entered that room had been told exactly where the document lay. Which means that whoever entered that room was sent there by someone who had seen the room before.”

Sir Bramwell’s eyes narrowed. “Who has seen that room?”

“Anyone who has done business with the commission,” Julian said. “Myself. My solicitor. Half the men in this hall.”

“Then half the men in this hall should be glad that the room has a window,” Rosalind said, “and that the ground beneath it was soft.”

Silence.

“What?” Sir Bramwell said.

“It rained in the night, sir. I have been out in it. If a man climbed in through that window, he left prints in the yard — and if he climbed in and out again, he left prints going both ways. And if he took the document, he was carrying something that would have weighed on him, and he would have set his hand on the sill coming down, and the sill is wood, and wet wood holds a mark better than a page holds an ink blot.”

Julian Roscombe stopped smiling.

Sir Bramwell turned to the room and said, in the flat voice of a magistrate who has just decided something irreversible:

“The clerk will go with two constables to the yard behind this building and examine the sill and the ground beneath it. No man leaves this hall.”

The doors were shut and barred.

It took twenty minutes. The assembled county sat in a silence so complete that Rosalind could hear the rain clearing off the roof and dripping down the outside of the windows.

She did not look at Julian. She had learned, in nine years, that looking at him was a way of letting him lead.

She looked at the table instead — at the charter under its ribbon, at the signing pen, at the portfolio of her own nineteen-year-old handwriting lying open like a wound — and she thought of her father, and of a line he had written in a Greek primer when she was eleven.

A girl’s mind is a country with no customs houses.

Sir Bramwell sat with his hands folded, and did not look at anyone either. He was waiting with the patience of an old man who had spent forty years watching people decide how much truth they could bear.

The doors opened.

The clerk came back with wet boots and a face like a man who had seen something he could not believe, and in his hands, wrapped in a strip of muslin cut from a petticoat, he carried a document.

“Sir Bramwell,” he said. “Not in the yard.”

“Then where?”

“In the ditch on the north side of the building, sir. Wrapped in cloth and weighted with a stone. It had been thrown, not carried away.”

“Thrown.”

“Whoever took it, sir, meant to come back for it.” The clerk swallowed. “And I found a bootmark under the sill, sir. A boot with a spur scar on the inner heel. And sir — there is a mark in the mud by the ditch, where a horse stood.”

Julian Roscombe had gone completely white.

Rosalind turned and looked at him for the first time that morning, and what she saw in his face was not guilt and not fear.

It was calculation. The look of a man counting the cost of one door closing and looking for another.

And then he said, very quietly, into the silence of the hall:

“Sir Bramwell. I must confess something.”