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

Chapter 20

“It is your gown,” Cecily said. “I brushed it. There is a mark on the sleeve that will not come out. I am sorry. I think it is from the smoke.”

Rosalind looked up from mending a hem by the window. The light was good that morning, and she had stopped ruining her eyes by candle since Wrenmoor had sent a case of wax candles to the house with no note, which was the most ostentatiously restrained thing she had ever seen a man do.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I am sorry,” Cecily said.

“For the gown? It has survived worse than apologies.”

“No.” Cecily’s chin came up, and then went down again, and she stood in the middle of the room in a plain blue morning dress with her hands gripped in front of her, and Rosalind saw with a small shock how young she was. Nineteen. Exactly the age Rosalind had been when Julian Roscombe first asked to see her handwriting.

“I am sorry for using you as shelter,” Cecily said. “Without seeing that you were being left in the rain.”

“Cecily—”

“No. Let me finish, or I will not.” Her voice trembled. “I knew. Not everything. But I knew that Julian came to this house to see you, at the beginning. I knew that he stopped. I knew that he began to pay me attention in the September after he stopped, and I knew that our stepmother was glad, and that everybody told me I was lucky, and I let them tell me I was lucky, because I was nineteen and frightened of being nobody, and I wanted to be somebody’s wife in a house with a carriage.”

“That is not a sin,” Rosalind said. “That is arithmetic. Every girl in Braewick does it.”

“But not you.”

“No.” Rosalind set down her needle. “Not me. Because I was never offered it. If an offer is made, it is easy to be brave. I was never brave, Cecily. I was simply never tempted, and then I was told I was brave for not being tempted, and I believed it, and I have been insufferable about it ever since.”

Cecily let out a wet little laugh.

“You are not insufferable.”

“I am extremely insufferable. Ask your mother.”

“She is in Bath.”

“Ask your mother by post. She will write back.”

They looked at each other across the room, and then Cecily said the thing she had come to say.

“He wrote to me,” she said.

Rosalind went very still.

“Three days ago. Through his solicitor. He says the engagement is dissolved, which I knew, and he says he wishes me well, which is a lie, and then he says—” She stopped.

“Say it.”

“He says that if I will meet him privately — one meeting, one conversation — he will show me letters in your hand that prove you have been forging documents for nine years, and that the whole business at the assembly was a lie, and that he will clear everything up if I will just listen to him.”

The room went cold around Rosalind, the way it had in Wrenmoor’s library.

“You have the letter,” she said.

“I burned it.”

“Cecily—”

“I burned it,” Cecily said, and her voice was suddenly fierce in a way Rosalind had never heard. “I burned it in the kitchen fire before breakfast, and I have not told our stepmother, because she would have said I should have gone to him, and she would have been right, Rosalind, that is the horror of it — she would have been perfectly right, because that is what women in this county are for, listening to men who hold the letters.”

She lifted her chin.

“I did not go. And I am not going to go. And I want you to know that the only reason I did not go is that I was standing in an assembly hall three weeks ago, and a woman in an old lavender gown told the whole county that she was done being placed.”

Rosalind’s eyes stung.

“That is not—”

“It is exactly that.” Cecily crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed, and for the first time in nine years the two of them were in a room together without a stepmother in it. “What will you do now? Wrenmoor’s wing. The school. Mrs. Digby told the whole kitchen that you are going to teach girls to read Latin.”

“To read, at least. Latin if they want it.”

“Do girls want Latin?”

“One of them will,” Rosalind said. “And I am building it for her.”

Cecily looked at her for a long moment.

“Teach me,” she said.

“What?”

“Not Latin. I do not want Latin.” She smiled, and it was a small, crooked, honest smile that made her look almost nothing like the girl who had set out to marry a lord in the September of her nineteenth year. “Teach me letters. Teach me to write like a person instead of a bride. I can write a shopping list and my own name and a thank-you note, and I have been in this world nineteen years, and I cannot write down a single thing I actually think. My own mother’s name is Mrs. Ashcroft, and I do not know what I think about her.”

Rosalind looked at her sister.

“Then you will have to come to the schoolroom,” she said. “On Thursdays. After the girls have gone. Because I will not have my students see me teaching my own sister badly.”

“Badly?”

“You are nine years behind. It will be humiliating.”

“Good,” Cecily said. “I would like to be humiliated by someone who is not a man.”

And that, in the end, was how it began: with a burned schoolhouse, and a lavender gown, and a nineteen-year-old girl who came on a Thursday in a plain blue dress and sat at a plain desk in the east wing of Wrenmoor Hall and learned, for the first time in her life, to write down a sentence that nobody had told her to write.

By the following February, on a wet afternoon, Rosalind Ashcroft stood at the front of a room with eleven girls in it and a fire in a grate behind her, and looked at the shape of what she had built, and found that the thing she had been sure she would feel, on the day the school opened, was the exact opposite of what she did feel.

She had expected triumph.

What she felt instead was tired, and satisfied, and utterly unremarkable — as though she had walked into a room that had always been there and found the door had never been locked at all.

That was when Wrenmoor came in.