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

Chapter 18

The schoolhouse looked worse in daylight.

The stable was a black rectangle of ash. The woodpile was a wet smear. The eastern window had fallen in, and the roof sagged over the box room like the back of an old animal, and the whole building had the particular, obscene nakedness of a house that has been opened to the weather and cannot close itself again.

Rosalind stood in the doorway for a long time.

Wrenmoor stood behind her, and did not say it can be rebuilt, and did not say I will pay for it, and did not say anything at all, which she was beginning to understand was the most expensive gift he knew how to give.

“The floor,” she said finally.

“What about it?”

“The floor is intact.” She stepped inside over the blackened threshold. The floorboards creaked and held. “He built the floor himself. In 1799. He said a schoolhouse is only a floor and a roof and the belief that somebody will come.”

She walked to the corner where the master’s desk had stood. There was a dark rectangle on the boards where it had been, protected from the damp.

She knelt down and put her hand on it.

“I was eleven,” she said. “He put a Greek primer under my elbow and a Latin one under my other elbow and told me that if I learned them both he would teach me Arabic, and I said, what use is Arabic in Braewick? And he said, none at all, which is precisely the point — a thing you learn for its use is a tool, and a thing you learn for its own sake is a country. And then he wrote in the margin: a girl’s mind is a country with no customs houses.”

She was crying, and she was annoyed at herself for crying.

“I have not said that sentence aloud since he died.”

Wrenmoor knelt down beside her — the Duke of Wrenmoor, on a burned floorboard, in the wet ash of a schoolhouse on the bad end of the Cranbourne road — and he did not put his arm around her, and she was grateful, because she would have come apart.

“The fire,” he said. “On Tuesday night. It was set in three places, and the man who set it was hired by Roscombe’s solicitor, and the solicitor will be found, and he will speak.”

“You are certain?”

“I am seldom certain.” The corner of his mouth moved. “It is an expensive habit. But here — yes.”

Rosalind laughed, wetly, and wiped her face with the back of her hand like a child.

“There is one thing I have not told you,” she said. “About the fire.”

“Tell me.”

She reached into her reticule — a practical thing now, not a fashionable one; she had long ago given up the little silk bags that could not hold a book — and drew out the velvet prayer book, and opened it at the inner face of the cover, where the velvet had been split and pressed back.

“When my stepmother gave that receipt to Sir Bramwell,” she said, “she did not say where she had kept it. She said she kept it in a locked drawer for nine years.”

“Yes.”

“She did not say which drawer. She did not have a locked drawer, your grace. She never did. She kept it in this book, in this place, because it was the only object in the house that no man in nine years ever thought to open.”

Wrenmoor looked at the empty fold in the cover.

“How did you come by the book?”

“She gave it to me on the morning of the ball,” Rosalind said. “At breakfast. She said she had found it in my father’s things and I might as well have it, since it was only prayers, and since I had so little else. And I took it, and I did not open it, because I had carried it once before and lost it — I thought I had lost it — and I did not want to look inside and find the years I had written in it all missing.”

She turned the book in her hands.

“She gave it back to me on the very morning,” she said slowly, “that a duke walked into a ballroom with a forged charter. She knew. She had known since 1809 that Julian Roscombe had taken my father’s papers and used my own handwriting against me. And on the morning when it was going to matter, she gave me back the one book in England that could prove it.”

Wrenmoor was silent.

“She did not do it out of love,” Rosalind said. “She gave it to me because she was afraid, and because a coward’s conscience is a strange animal that bites at the worst possible hour. But your grace — a coward’s conscience is what saved us. Not courage. Not mine, not yours. A guilty woman handing back a book she never had the nerve to burn.”

She closed the prayer book and held it against her chest.

“That is the thing I have never been able to say to anyone,” she said. “My father taught me that a woman’s mind is a country with no customs houses. But he also taught me to sit in the corner and be useful, and I was a very good pupil in both lessons. I have spent my whole life waiting for someone to open the door for me. And nobody ever did. And she — Aurelia — she gave me back my own words and shoved me through it.”

Wrenmoor said, quietly: “And what will you do with the country?”

Rosalind stood up and looked around the burned room.

“I want it back,” she said. “Not the house. The room. He was a schoolmaster, and he taught one girl for eleven years, and he never once had a paying pupil, because nobody in this county would send their sons to a man who taught daughters for free.”

She turned to face the duke.

“There are nine farms between here and the village. In nine farms there are eleven girls between the ages of six and fourteen, and I have counted them because I have walked home past their gates for nine years, and two of them can already read and nine of them cannot, and the reason nine of them cannot is that there is no desk in this county at which a girl may sit.”

Wrenmoor looked at the burned floor for a long moment.

Then he said, in the flat voice of a man reading a clause aloud.

“The east wing of Wrenmoor Hall has been empty since my mother died. It has two rooms with tall windows, a good floor, and no furniture. It also has a fireplace that my brother and I used to hide behind when we were boys.”

Rosalind stared at him.

“The charter is approved,” he said. “The Kestrel Canal is built. The commission will want its annexe translated into English and filed, and they will want a reviewer. And there is no man in Braewick qualified to review a translation in seven languages, which I have now proved in front of the entire county at considerable cost to my dignity and my morning.”

“Your grace—”

“Miss Ashcroft,” he said. “Do not thank me. I have not finished. If I put a school in my house, the county will say I did it out of charity, or out of sentiment, or out of something worse. And when the county says that, the eleven girls will come for a season and then stop coming, because their fathers will not have them live on a duke’s charity.”

“Then how?”

“Then,” Wrenmoor said, “we do it the way your father did it. With wages. The commission has funds for the review of the annexe. You will be paid for the review. You will then, as a paid person, lease that room from me at a rent we will both sign, and hire whom you please, and buy books with your own money.”

He paused.

“You taught me on Thursday night, Miss Ashcroft, that gratitude is less useful than a wage. I have been trying to learn the lesson ever since. It is a difficult grammar.”

Rosalind looked at him, and at the burned floor, and at the ruined eastern window with the county beyond it and the wet green field going down toward the road.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Yes, your grace. I accept the review, the room, the rent, and the eleven girls.”

And then — because this was the moment, and she knew it was, the way she had known it in the ballroom — she said the other thing.

“But I will not take it as charity, and I will not take it as a gift, and I will not take it from a man who is trying to buy his brother back. If you are standing in my schoolroom, your grace, you will be standing there as the man who asked me to read, and not as the man who is owed.”

Wrenmoor’s face changed very slightly.

“That,” he said, “is not a sentence I have heard before.”

“Then learn it,” Rosalind said. “It is the only one I have.”

Out on the Cranbourne road, a cart went past with a boy driving it, and the boy looked at the burned schoolhouse and at the two figures standing in the ruin of it, and touched his hat, and drove on.