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

Chapter 23

There is one more thing, and it belongs to a winter afternoon in the third year, in the east wing of Wrenmoor Hall, when the snow was coming down steady and the fire was good and Rosalind was alone in the schoolroom sorting a pile of slate rubbings that had been made by a nine-year-old of a Latin declension chart.

A footman came in and said there was a gentleman at the door who would not give a name and would not go away.

Rosalind went down.

He was standing in the hall with his hat in his hand and his coat collar turned up, and he had aged in three years more than a man of thirty-five ought to age — thinner, grayer at the temple, in a coat that had been very good once and had been repaired twice in the sleeve.

“Rosalind,” Julian Roscombe said.

She did not answer for a moment. She stood on the marble floor of Wrenmoor Hall, in the same hall where he had shouted at her at four in the morning three years ago, and looked at the man who had once been able to make her hands cold with a single sentence.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Five minutes.”

“No.”

“Rosalind—”

“No, my lord. You may say what you have come to say from where you are standing, and then you will leave, and I will have the footman watch you to the gate, because you have a history of setting fires on this property.”

He flinched. It was real. She had spent four years learning his face and she knew it was real, and she did not care, which was the thing she had waited nine years to feel.

“I am not here to threaten you,” he said.

“I did not think you were. I think you are here because you have run out of money and out of friends and there is a woman in this house who was once grateful to you.”

Julian’s jaw worked.

“That is a very accurate translation,” he said.

“Yes.”

He looked around the hall, at the black-and-white floor and the portraits and the iron-banded doors, and said, quietly:

“I have been in Antwerp. I have been in Lisbon. I did not find what I thought I would find. I thought I would find that it was … an accident. That the bill of carriage was copied wrong by a clerk and that I had signed it at nineteen and never—”

“And?”

“And it was not an accident.” He looked at the floor. “I knew the shipment was misdirected. Not the consequences. I did not know men would die. I told myself at nineteen that a misdirected shipment was an accounting problem, and then I spent the next fifteen years telling myself the same sentence, and I got very good at saying it, and I never once said the other sentence, which is that I could have written one letter to a warehouse in Lisbon and a captain would have received boots.”

Rosalind stood in the hall and let him say it.

She had, once, in the middle of a bad night, imagined this scene. She had imagined herself standing in a warm room while Julian Roscombe confessed, and she had imagined saying something that would take the skin off him.

What she actually felt, standing in the marble hall of her own house, was a mild and almost clinical surprise — the surprise of a woman who has carried a stone in her pocket for nine years and has just taken it out and found it weighs exactly as much as it weighs and no more.

“What do you want?” she said again. “You said five minutes. Here is your chance to want something.”

“Work,” Julian said.

“Work.”

“I can read four languages. I can keep accounts. I can—”

“You cannot read four languages, my lord. You can read two, badly, and I have proof of it in a portfolio somewhere in the county records. And accounts are precisely the work that you were unable to do honestly for a decade and a half.”

Julian looked at her with something in his face that might have been hate and might have been relief.

“You are going to send me away,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You could have me ruined further. You have the ears of half the men in London now.”

“I could.” Rosalind folded her hands. “But here is the thing, my lord, and I want you to listen carefully, because it is the last sentence I will ever say to you. I did not spend nine years learning to be accurate so that I could spend the next twenty years being vengeful. Vengeance is a very precise translation of grief — I have said that before, and I have thought about it a great deal since — and I have decided that I do not want to spend my life translating my own hurt backward and forward between two languages that were never mine.”

“Then what—”

“Go to Liverpool,” Rosalind said. “There is a shipping house there called Craven and Lowe. They employ clerks who can read Portuguese, and they audit every bill of carriage twice, because their chief clerk is a woman, and she is not sentimental, and she will find out within a month whether you can do honest work or only the appearance of it. I will write you a letter of introduction. It will say what I know and nothing more. It will not say you are forgiven and it will not say you are a monster. It will say that you can read a Portuguese bill of lading when someone is watching you, and that nobody should ever trust you with a document that nobody is watching.”

Julian stared at her.

“Why?” he said.

“Because I have eleven girls in my schoolroom,” Rosalind said, “and I have taught all of them that accuracy is not the same thing as cruelty, and if I send you out of this house without a word and let you starve on the road, they will hear about it eventually, and they will be right to ask me what the difference is.”

She went to the writing table in the corner of the hall, and wrote the letter, and sealed it, and held it out.

Julian Roscombe took it, and stood there with it in his hand, and did not leave.

“I did love you,” he said, at the door. “In the beginning. That is the thing I have carried. Not the guilt about the boots. I have never been able to be sorry about the boots, because it is too large. But I have been sorry about the candlelight. You used to sit in my father’s counting-house with a stub candle at two in the morning and translate his letters, and you would look up when you finished a page, and I would praise you, and you would look so grateful, and I knew — I knew even then — that the praising was cheaper than the candle.”

Rosalind looked at him.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. Go to Liverpool, my lord.”

He went.

The footman watched him to the gate, as instructed.

Rosalind stood in the hall for a while after the door closed. Then she went back upstairs to the east wing, where a fire was burning and a Latin declension chart was lying half-sorted on a desk, and she sat down and finished sorting it, because it was Thursday, and on Thursday the girls came.