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

Chapter 24

The letter from Liverpool came in the spring of the fourth year, and Rosalind read it standing up in the hall and then read it again sitting down in the schoolroom, and then put it in the folio with the contract in her own name, where she kept the small number of documents in the world that had been given to her rather than taken from her.

Dear Madam,

You will not want a long letter and I will not write one. Craven and Lowe have kept me in the counting-house since November, on trial, at twelve shillings a week. I read Portuguese and Dutch for them and I do not sign anything. There is a woman here named Mrs. Ellery who is the chief clerk and who checks my work against hers every Friday and she has never once told me that I am clever. It is the most useful thing that has ever happened to me.

The bill of carriage I signed in 1812 has been found in the Lisbon warehouse books. It is in the packet I have sent by the same post, to be given to the committee if anybody in London ever wants it. I do not know if it helps. I am sending it because it is accurate, and because you once told me, in a hallway, that you would stop being accurate when I stopped being careless, and I have not yet stopped being careless, so I am sending it anyway.

I am not asking for anything.

J. Roscombe

Rosalind read that last line four times.

I am not asking for anything. Nineteen years of that voice, and the first honest sentence it had ever produced in her presence was a sentence declining to ask for something.

She sent the packet to the committee in London the same week, with a covering letter in her own name, and in the autumn the Board of Trade issued a short report on the supply contracts of 1812. It was six pages long. It named the Aldemore counting-house. It did not name the nineteen-year-old clerk who had signed it, because that clerk was now in Liverpool at twelve shillings a week, and Rosalind read the six pages in the schoolroom with the fire lit and thought about the word accountability, which in English means both the keeping of accounts and the bearing of responsibility, and which her father had once told her, at the age of twelve, was the most dishonest word in the language because the two meanings have nothing to do with each other and are constantly used to pretend that they do.

She wrote that down. She wrote it in the margin of a blank page at the back of a book of English grammar she was using with the older girls, and under it she wrote:

This is why we teach the accounts and the grammar in the same room.

The school grew.

That was the thing nobody had predicted — not Rosalind, who had built it for eleven, and not Wrenmoor, who had written it into a minute for the sake of a legal form, and not Sir Bramwell Coote, who had died in the winter of the second year, peacefully, at home, having outlived his two sons and both his objections.

The school grew because of the bargemen first. A canal needs clerks, and clerks need to read a Dutch insurance clause, and a Dutch insurance clause needs a person who can be trusted with it, and the cheapest place to find such a person turned out to be a room in the east wing of Wrenmoor Hall, where the daughters of the canal’s tenants were being taught to read, write, keep accounts, and — for those who wanted it, which was most of them, once they discovered that Latin was the language in which the law pretended to be logical — parse a Latin verb.

Then the farmers came, because a farmer who cannot read a bill of sale is a farmer who is being robbed slowly, and a farmer with a daughter who can read a bill of sale is a farmer who is being robbed less.

Then, in the third year, the boys came, which nobody had planned for at all. They came because their sisters came home with slates full of sums and talked about Mrs. Ellery’s counterpart in Braewick, and because a boy of eleven does not like to be outdone by his sister, and because the master Rosalind had hired for the boys’ class was a young man who had been invalided out of the navy and who taught arithmetic by making them calculate the displacement of a ship.

By the fourth year there were forty-one children in the east wing.

And in the fifth year, on a bright cold morning in February, Rosalind Ashcroft, Duchess of Wrenmoor, stood in a doorway at the back of a classroom and listened to a girl of sixteen named Hattie Wren — a bargeman’s daughter with ink on both sleeves and her hair pinned up with a nail — explain to a room of thirty children the difference between the two Portuguese words for ownership, and why one of them means to hold and the other means to have, and why every contract in the world depends on someone knowing the difference.

Hattie Wren had learned Portuguese at fourteen.

She had learned it because Rosalind had needed someone to check her own work, and had begun teaching her on Tuesday evenings, and Hattie had been so fast and so angry and so hungry that Rosalind had sometimes had to stop in the middle of a sentence and just look at her.

“Your Grace,” Hattie said, from the front of the room, “is ‘tenir’ the verb that comes from the same root?”

“Yes,” Rosalind said. “Now tell them why that matters.”

“Because a deed of surrender that uses the wrong one gives away the water rights forever,” Hattie said, “and nobody catches it for nine years, and then a woman reads it in a ballroom and the whole county has to sit down.”

The children laughed, because they had all heard the story. It was the county’s story now, and by the fourth year it had grown a few ornaments — a version in which Rosalind had stood on a chair, a version in which the duke had drawn a sword, a version, told in the village, in which she had read the charter upside down.

Rosalind did not correct the ornaments. She had learned that a story with ornaments is a story that gets told, and a story that gets told is a door that stays open.

She stood in the doorway, and looked at the room — forty-one children, four languages on the wall, a fire in the grate, a master in the boys’ corner, Hattie Wren at the front with her sleeves inked, Cecily at the back desk where she had sat every Thursday for four years writing in a book nobody had told her to write, and now and then looking up and just watching the room as though she could not quite believe she was allowed to be in it.

And Rosalind thought: this is what my father meant.

Not the grammar. Not the seven languages. Not the Latin primers and the Portuguese verbs and the Dutch insurance clauses.

A girl’s mind is a country with no customs houses.

He had meant that there is no wall, and no gate, and no inspection, and no duty. He had meant that a mind cannot be taxed at the border, and that this is why every small man in every small county has always tried to keep half the population from finding out that they have one.

Rosalind Ashcroft, who had spent twenty-nine years being told that her mind was a scandal, stood in a doorway in her own house in the fifth year of her own school and listened to a bargeman’s daughter teach thirty children the difference between holding and having.

Then she went in and took the lesson.