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

Chapter 15

“Ma’am,” Sir Bramwell said. “You are in an assembly. Do you have business here?”

Aurelia Ashcroft walked down the center aisle of the hall, and Rosalind watched her stepmother do the bravest thing she had ever seen a coward do.

She had dressed plainly. No shawl, no ribbons, no mourning silk. Just a traveling cloak and a bonnet, as though she had meant to be invisible and had decided, at the last minute, not to be.

“I have business,” Aurelia said. “I am Rosalind Ashcroft’s stepmother. I am the wife of the late Mr. Edmund Ashcroft, schoolmaster of this county. And I have come to tell this assembly something that I have kept in a locked drawer for nine years.”

Julian Roscombe said: “Mrs. Ashcroft, I would think very carefully—”

“Do not speak to me,” Aurelia said.

The hall went absolutely still.

“Do not speak to me, my lord,” she said, and her voice shook, and she did not stop. “You have spoken to me twice in nine years, and both times it was in a carriage, and both times you told me exactly what a woman like me ought to think. And I did it. God forgive me, I did it both times.”

She came to the table, and set her hand on it, and looked Sir Bramwell in the face.

“Sir Bramwell. In the year my husband died, Lord Roscombe’s solicitor paid me two hundred pounds. It was paid as ‘advice on a family matter’. The family matter was my stepdaughter.”

A sound went through the hall. Rosalind heard it from a long way off, the way one hears weather.

“He told me,” Aurelia said, “that Rosalind had been copying documents for his father’s business, and that her handwriting was known in certain counting-houses, and that if it were ever discovered, the family name would be ruined and my daughter Cecily would never marry. He told me he could make the whole matter disappear for two hundred pounds. I took the money. I took it because I was a widow with two girls and no income, and I have told myself a hundred times that I did it to protect my daughter.”

Her hand tightened on the table edge.

“That is a lie, and I know it is a lie, and this morning I decided I would not die with it. I took the money because I was frightened of being poor and I was tired of being nobody. And then, when it was done, he did not disappear the matter. He used it. He kept my stepdaughter’s copies — every page — and he kept the knowledge of what I had done, so that whenever he needed me, he could send a carriage, and I would come, and I would say exactly what he had told me to say.”

“Mrs. Ashcroft,” Julian said, “is this a confession of extortion or a confession of slander? Because I cannot tell—”

“It is a confession of receipt,” Aurelia said, and she reached inside her cloak and drew out a folded paper — thin, yellowed at the edges, folded three times — and laid it flat on the table in front of Sir Bramwell Coote.

“His solicitor wrote me a memorandum of the arrangement,” she said. “I kept it because I have spent nine years being terrified of him, and terrified people keep everything.”

Sir Bramwell took the paper, unfolded it, and read it in silence.

When he finished, he did not put it down. He held it up.

“This document is written on Aldemore and Company paper,” he said, to the room. “It is signed by Mr. Thomas Ashby, solicitor, of Braewick. It records a payment of two hundred pounds to Mrs. Aurelia Ashcroft, in consideration of her cooperation in a matter concerning Miss Rosalind Ashcroft, and it refers to her stepdaughter as ‘the party whose handwriting may be required’.”

The hall broke into noise.

“Sir Bramwell,” Julian said, “this is a private domestic matter — the resentments of a woman who has clearly been unwell—”

“Lord Roscombe,” Sir Bramwell said, “there is a document in a ditch, a boot with a spur scar, and a solicitor who hired a horse in the dark. And now there is a receipt. I am not a clever man, my lord. But I have been a magistrate for forty years, and in forty years I have never once seen four things line up so neatly unless somebody made them line up.”

He turned to the constables at the door.

“You will find Mr. Thomas Ashby. You will bring him here. Gently, if he comes gently.”

The constables went out.

And Julian Roscombe — Lord Roscombe, of the Aldemore counting-house, of the estate that had fed on borrowed honor for nine years — stood at the front of the assembly hall of Braewick with the whole county watching him, and did the only thing left that a man like him knew how to do.

He looked at Rosalind.

“You did this,” he said. It was quiet. It was almost intimate. It was the same voice he had used in her stepmother’s breakfast room, the same voice he had used in Wrenmoor’s hall. “Nine years of work. You did all of this because I did not marry you.”

Rosalind looked back at him.

“No,” she said. “I did this because you forged a contract that killed fifty-one men in Portugal and blamed the arithmetic.”

Julian Roscombe’s face went white, and then very still, and then — for the first time in her life — Rosalind Ashcroft saw him look at her. Not over her, not past her, not at the useful surface of her.

At her.

And in that instant, at the far end of the hall, the double doors opened again, and a footman in Cranbourne livery walked in carrying something wrapped in a green cloth.

“Sir Bramwell,” he said, “a message from her ladyship. Lady Ottilie Cranbourne begs you to receive this, which was found this morning in the Cranbourne garden, in the hedge beneath the window where the ball was held.”