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

Chapter 17

The aftermath of a victory is quieter than anyone expects.

There was no cheering. There was a great deal of talking, and a great deal of not-looking, and then, slowly, the assembly hall of Braewick emptied into a wet Friday noon, and Rosalind Ashcroft stood at the long table beside a signed charter, a forged annexe, a stolen dispatch case, and her father’s worn brown notebook.

Her hands began to shake about four minutes after Julian left.

She sat down on the edge of a bench, and Wrenmoor sat down beside her without saying a word, and they stayed like that while the hall emptied.

“Sir Bramwell will write to London,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“There will be an inquiry. It will take a year, perhaps two.”

“Yes.”

“And the Roscombe estate will contest everything. They will drag your name through every court in the country. They will print it in newspapers. They will say you were a spinster who—”

“Yes,” Rosalind said. “I know.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“You could have let it go,” he said. “You could have gone home on Thursday night and let the charter be signed and let me be ruined in peace. Nobody would have blamed you. Nobody would ever have known.”

Rosalind looked at the charter, and at the green ribbon lying on the floor where it had fallen when Julian struck the table.

“I know,” she said.

Aurelia Ashcroft was standing twenty feet away, near the door, with her bonnet in both hands, waiting to be told whether she was permitted to leave.

Rosalind looked at her for a long moment.

Then she stood up and walked over, and her stepmother flinched — actually flinched, one small backward movement of the shoulders, like a woman expecting a blow — and Rosalind stopped, and did not touch her.

“Aurelia,” she said.

“I know what I did.”

“I know what you did.”

“I am not asking forgiveness.”

“Good,” Rosalind said. “Because I do not have any to give you today. Perhaps in a year. Perhaps never. But you came in this morning when you did not have to, and you laid that paper on the table, and there is a version of this day in which you did not, and you know what that version looks like as well as I do.”

Aurelia’s eyes filled.

“Cecily,” she whispered. “What will become of Cecily? She is engaged to him. She has been engaged for six months. The fixtures are ordered, the banns—”

“Then she will be engaged no longer,” Rosalind said. “Which is a better fate than being married to him, and she will know it in about ten years, and she will hate me for the next two, and then she will not.”

Aurelia gave a small, wet, broken laugh.

“You have grown hard,” she said.

“No,” Rosalind said. “I have grown audible.”

She turned and went back to the table, and Wrenmoor was standing there holding his hat, and behind him Sir Bramwell Coote was speaking to the constables, and beyond the window the rain had stopped and the county of Braewick was going about the business of being a county of Braewick — carts in the square, a boy chasing a dog, a woman hanging out washing on a wet Friday as though a lord had not just been ruined an hour ago.

“Your grace,” Rosalind said. “I should go home.”

“There is something I would like to show you first,” Wrenmoor said. “If you will permit it.”

“What is it?”

“The schoolhouse.”

She looked at him.

“The roof will need replacing,” he said. “The eastern wall is standing but it is not sound. The desks are gone — they were gone before the fire, sold off by a creditor in 1815, which I discovered from your stepmother’s accounts this morning. It is a shell, Miss Ashcroft. It is a burned shell on the Cranbourne road that nobody has looked at in two years.”

“I know what it is,” she said. “It was my father’s house.”

“Yes,” Wrenmoor said. “And it stands on the corner of my land.”

Rosalind did not answer, because she did not know what the answer was.

She went out of the assembly hall into the wet square with the Duke of Wrenmoor beside her, and the whole of Braewick watched them cross it — a duke in black and a spinster in lavender muslin with a velvet book under her arm — and for the first time in her life, nobody laughed.