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

Chapter 14

The entire hall leaned forward.

“I know whose boot it was,” Julian said.

Sir Bramwell did not move. “Do you.”

“I know it because the man who wears that boot is in my employ,” Julian said, and his voice had the sorrowful steadiness of a man who has rehearsed a confession until it fits him like a coat. “Mr. Thomas Ashby, my solicitor, of Braewick. He signed out the filed annexe three weeks ago at my instruction, for inspection in relation to a private canal matter — a perfectly ordinary thing, sir, which I will produce receipts for.”

A whisper ran the length of the hall.

“And last night,” Julian went on, “Mr. Ashby came to me, greatly distressed. He told me he had been approached — approached, Sir Bramwell — by a person who wished him to arrange for the filed copy to disappear. He refused, and he came to me, and I told him to say nothing until I had spoken with you. I am grieved to say that I underestimated the danger. He must have gone ahead without my knowledge. I have no notion why a man of his standing—”

“My lord,” Rosalind said.

“—would throw away a career—”

“My lord.”

“—unless he had been paid,” Julian said, and turned, and looked at her, and his face was full of a regret so perfectly formed that half the hall would have sworn it was real. “Miss Ashcroft. Forgive me. But I must ask you. Did my solicitor ever approach you?”

The room turned.

Rosalind felt a hundred pairs of eyes on her — farmers and magistrates and women with baskets and Sir Bramwell Coote’s grave old face — and she stood at the front of the assembly hall with her father’s notebook on the table beside her and she did not answer at once.

Because the question was not a question. It was a door opening in a wall behind her, and if she went through it — no, he never approached me — she was accepting that the accusation existed, and once you accept the shape of an accusation, you spend the rest of your life arguing inside it.

“Sir Bramwell,” she said, “Lord Roscombe has just named his own solicitor as the thief. I would like that written down and read back to the hall, in his own words.”

Julian’s expression flickered.

“It is a very useful thing,” Rosalind went on, “to accuse a man who is not in the room, before the room has finished looking at the mud.”

“Miss Ashcroft,” Julian said, “I am trying to spare you—”

“You are trying to place me,” she said. “You have been placing me since I was nineteen. You placed me in your father’s counting-house with a candle and a pen, and you placed me in a breakfast room with a cruel joke, and this morning you placed me in your portfolio, and now you are placing me in a ditch on the north side of a building I have never entered.”

The hall was silent.

“And there is one thing you have not thought of, my lord,” she said. “Because you have never in your life been a woman alone in the dark. You have never had to know who is behind you. You have never learned to notice, the way a woman notices, because being overlooked means being invisible, and invisible means you see everything.”

She turned to Sir Bramwell.

“The clerk says the thief wore a boot with a spur scar on the inner heel. Let the landlord of the Two Crowns be sent for. Let the ostlers at every inn on the Braewick road be sent for. A man who hires a horse at four in the morning has to leave a name, and a man who leaves a name leaves a witness. My word is worth nothing in this hall, Sir Bramwell. I understand that. But an ostler’s word is worth something, and there are nine ostlers between this building and the Roscombe estate.”

Sir Bramwell Coote looked at her for a long moment.

Then he looked at Julian Roscombe, and then at the assembled county, and said:

“Lord Roscombe. You have just informed this hall that the thief is your own solicitor, acting against your instruction, on a matter concerning a document that was in your interest. I have known you since you were a boy. I have signed contracts with your father. And I will tell you now, plainly, in front of everyone: if you leave this hall before I have heard from every ostler in Braewick, I will have you brought back.”

Julian’s face did not change.

But his hand — the hand that had been resting on the portfolio of Rosalind’s handwriting — closed slowly around the edge of the table, and his knuckles went white.

And then, from the back of the hall, a woman’s voice said:

“He hired the horse from the Two Crowns under my husband’s name.”

Every head in the room turned.

Standing in the doorway, in a plain brown bonnet with her hands gripped together and her face gray as ash, was Aurelia Ashcroft.