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

Chapter 22

They were married in the small chapel on the Wrenmoor estate in the last week of March, before the first of the spring rain, and it was not a society wedding and it was not intended to be.

There were no foreign agents. There were no magistrates. There was no ballroom, and no one laughed at anyone, and the only person in the church who was at all nervous was the vicar, who had never before married a duke and had spent three weeks worrying about the order of the procession.

Rosalind wore ivory muslin and no jewels except her mother’s thin gold chain.

She had thought about that for a long time — whether to wear the chain, whether it was a lie to wear something from a mother she had lost at four years old and barely remembered, whether it was sentimental, whether sentiment was permitted to a woman who had built her whole adult life on refusing to be moved by anything she could not read.

In the end she wore it because her father had kept it in the false bottom of a box of chalk for twenty-five years, and because if he had thought it worth smuggling through seven moves and three creditors, it was worth one morning.

Cecily stood beside her as witness, in a simple blue gown, and held the velvet-bound prayer book during the vows.

That had been Cecily’s own idea. She had come to Rosalind two weeks before the wedding and said, “I want to hold the book. Not your bouquet. I am not good at flowers. I want to hold the thing that saved you,” and Rosalind had had to go out of the room for a moment.

Mrs. Digby wept through the entire ceremony, which she did with enormous dignity and in complete silence, her handkerchief folded into a square.

Several tenants crowded the open door at the back of the chapel, and a few of the canal men, and the bargeman whose wife had thanked her outside the chandler’s, and one girl of about twelve who stood at the very edge of the porch with a slate under her arm and watched, without moving, the whole time.

Rosalind saw her, and did not point her out to anyone, and filed her away with the eleven names.

The vicar got through the vows. Wrenmoor’s voice was steady and quiet, and when he put the ring on her hand his fingers did not shake, and Rosalind thought, with an inward flash of amusement, that he had probably practiced.

When she knelt at the altar, the prayer book fell open in Cecily’s hands.

It fell open at the ribbon marker, which was where she had left it, which was where it had been since the night of the assembly — a page in the middle, where the margins had stopped being margins a long time ago.

But there was something new beneath her father’s tight pencil notes.

A line had been written in careful, imperfect French.

“Vous n’étiez jamais le prix de consolation.”

— You were never the consolation prize.

Rosalind’s breath caught.

She looked sideways at Wrenmoor, kneeling beside her at the altar rail with the vicar still speaking, and whispered: “You conjugated it correctly.”

“I had a terrifying instructor,” he whispered back.

“There is an error in the gender.”

“There is not.”

“There is. Prix is masculine. You needed—” She stopped, because she had seen his face, and because the correction she had been about to make was being offered to her, and he had put the line there specifically so that she would find it and correct it, and he had done it in a book nobody else in the world was permitted to write in.

“You wanted me to correct you,” she said.

“I wanted the first sentence in that book that was not written by your father to be one you would have to fix,” Wrenmoor said. “Anything else would have been sentiment.”

Rosalind Ashcroft, Duchess of Wrenmoor, bent her head at the altar rail of a small chapel in Braewick and did not hide her smile, and the vicar, who had lost his place, diplomatically began the blessing again.

Afterward the chapel doors stood open to the fields.

The rain had held off. The road down to the village was full of pale green light, and the tenants had put out a table with bread and beer on it in the churchyard, and the village girls had gathered near the path to whisper over the sight of the new duchess with a book in her hands instead of a bouquet.

One of them — the smallest, five or six years old, with a smear of jam on her chin — broke away from the others and walked right up to Rosalind in the churchyard.

“Are ladies allowed to write in prayer books?” she asked.

Rosalind looked down at her.

“Only if the margins are too empty,” she said.

The child considered this with great seriousness.

“Are mine too empty?”

“I do not know,” Rosalind said. “What have you written in yours?”

“I do not have one.”

“Then come to the schoolroom on Monday,” Rosalind said. “You may borrow one. Bring a slate. I will teach you how to fill it up.”

The child ran back to the other girls, and there was a flurry of whispering, and by the time Rosalind reached the churchyard gate three of them had already appointed themselves the delegation.

Wrenmoor was standing by the gate with his coat over his arm, watching her.

“That is four,” he said.

“Four?”

“The eleven. That one is four. She will bring two friends and a cousin. By Michaelmas you will have nineteen.”

“Then I shall need more desks.”

“Then I shall need more rent.”

“You are a profiteer, your grace.”

“I am a man who has learned,” Wrenmoor said, “that the only way to give you anything is to sell it to you.”

Rosalind took his arm, and they walked out through the churchyard gate into the wet green field, and behind them Cecily came down the path with the prayer book held against her chest like something she had been entrusted with and intended to deserve.

The duchess’s schoolroom had begun informally that February with eleven girls and one sister; on the first Monday in April, after the wedding, it was formally established under the commission’s new arrangement.

By the end of the first year it had nineteen.

By the end of the third it had forty-one, and a master for the boys who paid a fee, and a copying office where two of the older girls were employed at wages to transcribe the canal’s Dutch insurance clauses, and a clause in the commission’s minutes, added in a later year, requiring that all foreign correspondence be reviewed by two persons, one of whom must sign in their own hand.

And in the fourth year, in a room in London, a young woman of about two-and-twenty stood up before a committee of the Board of Trade and read a Portuguese bill of lading aloud, in the original, without a note, and when the chairman asked her where she had learned Portuguese, she said:

“At a school in Braewick, sir. The schoolmistress is my aunt.”