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

Chapter 16

Sir Bramwell unwrapped the green cloth with the slow, deliberate care of a man who had decided that nothing else in this hall would be hurried.

Inside was a leather dispatch case.

The Portuguese agent at the back of the room made a sound like a man being struck.

“That is mine,” he said, in English worn thin by years of business. “That is Senhor Peixoto’s case. I have carried it since Lisbon. It contains the duplicate originals of my government’s correspondence concerning the Kestrel Canal — the copies I was instructed to bring to England in case the charter should ever be questioned.”

He came forward, took the case, and opened it with hands that shook.

“It was taken from me at the Cranbourne ball,” he said. “On the night of the ball! I set it down upon a table while I spoke to the German gentleman, and when I turned, it was gone. I told no one, because I was ashamed, and because I thought the English would laugh, and because I did not know whom to trust.”

“You told no one,” Sir Bramwell repeated.

“No one but his grace.” Peixoto looked at Wrenmoor. “I told the Duke. He told me to say nothing and to wait.”

Sir Bramwell turned his head.

Wrenmoor, standing beside Rosalind with his hands behind his back, said: “I thought it best. A missing case, in a ballroom, on the night the charter was introduced — I did not know what the case contained, only that a man who loses something important in a room where the country’s business is being signed is either careless or set up. I preferred to find out which before I accused anyone of anything.”

Sir Bramwell grunted.

Then he looked at the case again, and at Peixoto, and said: “And what is in it that matters?”

Peixoto drew out a bundle of papers tied with cord, and laid them beside the charter, and said the sentence that ended everything.

“These are the true originals of the annexe, as filed in Lisbon with the Portuguese Board of Trade. Every clause. Every figure. And I will tell this assembly now what I did not dare to tell them before: the annexe in this hall is a forgery. I knew it at the Cranbourne ball, when the young lady read the Portuguese aloud. I knew it, and I said nothing, because I am a foreigner in your country and I was afraid.”

Rosalind closed her eyes for one moment.

Barely two days. Barely two days of a man standing at the back of rooms holding the truth against his chest like a beating heart and being too frightened to open his mouth. She knew exactly what that was. She had been holding her own version of it since she was nineteen.

“Read it,” Sir Bramwell said to her. “Read both. The filed annexe and the true original — where they differ, say so. Aloud. So that every person in this room hears it in the order it was written.”

And so, in the assembly hall of Braewick, before eleven o’clock in the morning, with the rain dripping off the eaves and the county packed into every bench, Rosalind Ashcroft read.

She read the Portuguese clause and she read what Lisbon had actually filed, and they were not the same clause. She read the Dutch lock account against the Dutch original, and it was the same clause with the numbers reversed, which is the oldest trick in the counting-house and the easiest to catch and the easiest to miss if nobody reads Dutch. She read the French surrender clause and showed that the word cessation had been changed to cession, one letter, and that one letter moved the ownership of the northern locks out of the Duke of Wrenmoor’s hands forever.

She read for nineteen minutes.

Nobody moved.

When she finished, she looked at Sir Bramwell and said, “Sir, may I say one more thing that is not translation?”

“Say it.”

Rosalind turned to the hall.

“Thirteen years ago,” she said, “a woman named Marianne Voss of Coblenz sold a German toll table to a London printer. The printer released it in 1801, in an edition of four hundred copies. My father bought one. My father copied one clause of it into an exercise book for a nine-year-old girl who was learning to read German. That clause contains a printing error — the rate for felling timber was set at twenty-two instead of twelve, and the error was not corrected in the second edition.”

She held up the charter.

“That error is in this annexe. In the clause that determines the Duke of Wrenmoor’s timber tariff for the next forty years. Which means the man who altered this document did not work from the original German. He worked from a copy of a copy — from my father’s copy of a printer’s mistake.”

She laid the charter down.

“You asked, Sir Bramwell, how a woman could be trusted to read a document in which she has no interest. I have no interest in this charter. I have no shares in this canal. I have no land on it, no rent from it, no contract with it, and no hope of any of those things. All I have is a dead father’s exercise book, and an alphabet I was taught in a cold room, and the fact that for nine years nobody in this county ever thought I was worth silencing.”

She looked at Julian Roscombe.

“They were wrong.”

The hall did not shout. It did something worse, from Julian’s point of view.

It went quiet, and it stayed quiet, and it looked at him.

And Sir Bramwell Coote, who had buried two sons and one wife and had never in forty years been bought by anyone, rose to his feet and said:

“Lord Roscombe. I am bound to tell you that in my judgment, on the evidence of this morning, there is a case to answer. I shall be writing to London.”

Julian Roscombe looked around the room once, at every face, as though taking inventory.

Then he picked up his hat, and walked out, and no man in the hall moved to make way for him.