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

Chapter 21

He came in without knocking, which he had never done before, and stopped just inside the doorway, and looked at the eleven girls with the particular blankness of a man who has never in his life been in a room with eleven children and has no idea how long they are supposed to stay.

Two of the girls stood up and curtsied. One of them curtsied the wrong way and had to be corrected by the girl beside her.

“Your grace,” Rosalind said. “We are in the middle of a lesson.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The middle of a lesson, your grace, is where a school always is. You may come in or you may go out. You may not hover in doorways like a ghost with a title.”

Several of the girls made a small sound that they instantly suppressed.

Wrenmoor came in.

He sat down on the end of the last bench, which was too short for him, and stayed there for the remaining forty minutes of the lesson while Rosalind took eleven children through a page of English grammar and the difference between shall and will, which is a distinction that the whole of Braewick had stopped bothering with and which she taught anyway, because her father had taught it to her and because it was hers.

When the girls had gone — out into the wet lane with their slates under their arms, in twos and threes, one of them singing something tuneless — Wrenmoor stood up and did not say that the lesson had been good.

“You did not bow,” Rosalind said. “When I told you to come in or go out. You did not bow.”

“I do not bow in a room I am paying rent to visit.”

Rosalind laughed.

She had begun to laugh more often. It had taken her by surprise. Twenty-nine years of holding her face still, and now there were whole afternoons when she came to herself and found that she had been smiling at nothing at all.

“I have something for you,” Wrenmoor said.

“You sent candles last month with no note. I told you that was ostentatious.”

“This is worse.” He drew a folio from under his arm and laid it on the nearest desk. “The Kestrel Canal Commission has approved the translation bureau. Nine hundred pounds a year, drawn on the commission account, with a clerk and a copying allowance. The reviewer’s post is yours, in your own name, and the money is yours, not mine, and if you leave the school in five years it does not follow you and if you leave it in twenty it does not follow you either.”

Rosalind opened the folio and looked at the contract for a long time.

Contracts, seal, terms. Not a favor disguised as kindness. Work, properly named.

“There is also,” Wrenmoor said, “a second item.”

“I can see it.”

“The commission has an interest in the east wing’s schoolroom because the canal will need clerks who can read a Dutch insurance clause, and a county that has no such clerks is a county that will be cheated again. That is a business interest. It is written down. In the minutes. Where the county can read it.”

Rosalind looked up at him.

“You wrote the school into a public minute.”

“I wrote the training of clerks into a public minute,” Wrenmoor said. “It also says the school is to be open to the daughters of the canal’s tenants, and to the daughters of any household in the parish, and that the choice of pupils rests solely with the schoolmistress whose name is written there.”

He pointed.

Her name was written there.

Rosalind Ashcroft, Reviewer of Foreign Correspondence, Kestrel Canal Commission.

She read it four times.

Nobody in England, she thought, had ever handed her a document with her name in it that she had not copied with her own hand.

“Your grace,” she said. “You have learned that gratitude is less useful than a wage.”

“I had an excellent instructor.”

“Severe. Terrifying.”

“I have been told that before.”

She looked up and found warmth in his face where, in the beginning, there had been nothing but the cold of a man at war with a dead man. Not softness. He would never be soft. But he was no longer using coldness as proof that he had survived something.

“The school,” she said. “The roof. The desks. The books.”

“The commission has approved the roof, because the commission cannot file documents in a burning room. The desks are secondhand from a school in Braewick that closed in 1816. The books, Miss Ashcroft, are your problem.”

“Then it will take me a year.”

“You will need two.”

“Three,” Rosalind said, and smiled, and Wrenmoor watched her smile, and something in his face was very wide open and very carefully guarded at the same time, the way a door is when it is standing in a frame with the paint still wet.

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

“Now that your future is secured from me, I have a question.”

Rosalind’s heart did something undignified.

“That is a grave opening, your grace. I advise translation before panic.”

“I require a partner.” His voice lost its military edge entirely, and what was underneath it was a man of six-and-thirty standing in a schoolroom with his hat in his hands. “Not a translator. Not an ornament. Not an obligation. A woman who will tell me when grief has made me cruel, and when duty has made me blind, and when I have been in a doorway for five minutes deciding whether to come in.”

Rosalind stood very still behind the desk.

He did not come closer.

He did not take her hand. He stood on the far side of the desk like a man who had finally learned the difference between asking and claiming — which was, she thought, the only grammar that mattered, and the only one no one had ever taught either of them.

“I love you, Rosalind,” he said. “I should have begun there. I planned to begin there. And then I thought of you telling me that a woman who is protected cannot testify, and I thought that if I came in here with your wages and my feelings in the same sentence you would not be able to tell which one was the collar.”

“So you brought the wages first.”

“I brought the wages first.”

Rosalind’s throat tightened.

“That,” she said, “is the least poetic proposal I have ever heard.”

“I can attempt French.”

“Do not. Your accent wounds the language.”

Wrenmoor laughed. It was the first full laugh she had ever heard from him, and it changed his face — took it apart and put it back together as something she had never been shown, and Rosalind had to look down at the folio to keep from giving him everything too fast.

“I will not be your consolation prize,” she said, to the contract. “For a lost war. For a brother. For nine years of grief that you have been carrying like a musket you forgot to put down.”

“No.”

“I mean it, your grace. If you marry me because I am the woman who finally made the world behave the way it should have behaved when Roland died, then in five years you will look at me and see a verdict, not a wife.”

Wrenmoor came around the desk at last.

He did not take her hand. He put his own hand flat on the folio, over her name, and said:

“You are not the verdict. You are the peace I did not know how to ask for.”

Rosalind Ashcroft looked at the hand on the paper, and at the snow beginning on the window, and at the east wing of Wrenmoor Hall which she had, in three months, filled with desks and slates and eleven girls and one writing sister.

Then she reached across the desk and took his hand.

“Yes,” she said.

Afterward, she could never remember which of them moved first, and it did not matter, because the schoolroom door was open and Mrs. Digby was coming up the corridor with the tea, and the two of them stepped apart like guilty children, and Mrs. Digby looked at both of their faces and said, with immense satisfaction:

“Well. Finally.”