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

Chapter 19

The county of Braewick talked about Rosalind Ashcroft for eleven days.

She knew this because Mrs. Digby told her, in exhaustive detail, at every meal, and because the shopkeepers on the high street began nodding to her, and because a woman she had never met stopped her outside the chandler’s and said, “My husband is a bargeman on the Kestrel, miss, and he says to thank you,” and then walked away before Rosalind could answer, which was probably for the best.

Julian Roscombe left Braewick on the fourth day.

He did not leave in a carriage with his crest on the door. He left in a hired chaise at six in the morning with two trunks, and the ostler at the Two Crowns — the same ostler who had been questioned by Sir Bramwell’s constables and who was now a small celebrity on the Braewick road — told everyone within listening distance that Lord Roscombe had paid in coin and had not looked him in the eye.

Three weeks after that, the creditors arrived.

They were not gentle. The Aldemore counting-house had been living on borrowed time for a decade, and Julian Roscombe had been living on his father’s reputation for a decade more, and when the reputation went, the money followed it out of the door. The house on the Roscombe estate was closed by Michaelmas. The hunting horses were sold. The plate went to a London auction house and was bought back, in pieces, by people who had never been invited to the Roscombe table.

Sir Bramwell’s letter to London had gone out on the Friday afternoon, with the true Lisbon originals from Senhor Peixoto’s dispatch case sewn into the packet, and by the end of the summer there was a parliamentary inquiry into the supply contracts of 1812.

Rosalind was asked to testify in it.

She went, in October, by coach, with Mrs. Digby as chaperone — a different Mrs. Digby now, awake and alert and mildly addicted to being useful — and she stood in a room in London with eleven men in front of her and read Portuguese bills of lading aloud for two hours.

When she came home, she found that the inquiry had found that the 4th Foot’s rations had been misdirected by a forged bill of carriage, and that the bill had been signed by Julian Roscombe at the age of nineteen, and that responsibility for the loss of the supply could not be attributed to any one party, which is what inquiries usually find.

But it also found — and this line was in the public report, and Rosalind cut it out of the newspaper with a penknife and kept it — that the system of unsupervised foreign contracting for the supply of His Majesty’s forces had been exploited by Mr. Aldemore’s counting-house in a manner that was, whatever the law said, entirely dishonorable.

She sent the cutting to Wrenmoor by the afternoon post.

He came the next day, and he said nothing about it, but he read it twice and folded it very carefully and put it inside his coat, and Rosalind, who had learned to read him the way she had once learned to read a Latin verb, understood that she had given him something he could not have bought with the entire canal.

The inquiry never touched Aurelia Ashcroft.

She had given her evidence to Sir Bramwell before the London packet went out, and the whole of it was recorded as the statement of a witness, and there was no prosecution, because no magistrate in Braewick could look at a widow with two daughters and no income and say, with a straight face, that she had done worse than the man who paid her.

What the county did say was that Mrs. Ashcroft had retired to her sister’s house in Bath.

She had. Rosalind had helped her pack.

“It is not a home,” Aurelia had said, folding a shawl. “It is a favor. My sister is not fond of me.”

“No,” Rosalind had said. “But she is your sister, and you have a place to go, and Cecily has a surname that has not been printed in a newspaper. That is more than Julian Roscombe has this week.”

Aurelia had stopped folding and looked at her.

“You could ruin me,” she said. “You could have stood up in that hall and said everything I said to you in nine years, and nobody would have disagreed with you, and I would have had to leave Braewick under a cloud and live in Bath forever.”

“I could have,” Rosalind said.

“Why didn’t you?”

Rosalind had thought about that honest answer for a long moment, because Aurelia deserved the honest answer even if she would not enjoy it.

“Because you came in the door,” she said at last. “I had a whole life planned around being the woman you treated badly, and you came in the door and threw it away, and now I have to find a different life. That is not forgiveness. That is laundry. I am still doing it.”

Aurelia Ashcroft had looked at her for a long moment and then had said the only true thing she had ever said to her stepdaughter in nine years, which was:

“You were always the cleverest person in this house. I think I hated you for it. I am sorry for that, at least. I am not sorry for the rest yet. I may never be. But I am sorry for hating you.”

Rosalind had nodded, and gone to help her carry the second trunk down.

And in the middle of the whole business — the inquiry, the creditors, the talk, the folding of shawls — Cecily Ashcroft came to Rosalind’s room on the fourth morning after the assembly, carrying a lavender gown, freshly brushed.