The Duke Was Desperate Without A Translator — Until A Rejected Spinster Spoke 7 Languages
Chapter 26
The second school opened in the spring of the sixth year, on the high street in Braewick, in a building that had been a wool merchant’s counting-house and had stood empty for eleven years because nobody in the town could think what to do with a room that already had shelves in it.
It had a door on the street.
That was the first thing Rosalind had insisted on, before the roof, before the desks, before the money: a door on the street, painted green, with a brass knob worn smooth by sixty years of wool merchants, so that a child could walk in off the pavement without passing a gate, a lodge, a footman, or a duke.
Hattie Wren was the headmistress and she was nineteen years old, and on the first morning she stood in the middle of the floor with her sleeves rolled and her hair pinned up with the same nail she had used when she was fourteen, and said to Rosalind, in front of the whole staff:
“I want it in the deed that the girls learn accounts before they learn Latin.”
“Why?”
“Because a girl who can keep accounts can leave a bad house,” Hattie said. “And a girl who can read Latin but not accounts is a girl who will be very clever in a room she cannot afford to leave.”
Rosalind looked at her for a moment, and then said: “Draft it.”
Cecily Ashcroft was the school’s clerk, and had a counting-room behind the green door, and had learned more arithmetic in three years than most of the men on the canal commission had learned in a lifetime of being trusted with figures they did not check.
She had also, in the fifth year, written a book.
Nobody had asked her to. She had started with the Thursday exercises — the sentences nobody had told her to write, which had begun as single lines and had grown, over four years, into pages, and then into a slim manuscript that Rosalind had read on a winter evening with the fire lit and had then sat very still for a long while afterward.
It was a book of accounts.
Not arithmetic. Accounts, in the older sense: the plain record of a life, kept honestly, of a woman who had been raised to be a bride and had learned at nineteen to write down what she actually thought. It had the stepmother in it, and the carriage, and the ball, and the moment in an assembly hall when she had been pulled forward by the wrist and had said no — and it had, on the last page, one sentence that Rosalind had copied into the back of the prayer book and had not shown to anyone, including Wrenmoor:
I was taught that a woman’s life is a thing that happens to her. I have written this book to prove that it is a thing that can be kept.
The book was published, quietly, by a printer in Braewick, in an edition of three hundred, with no author’s name on the title page — By a Lady of the County — and it sold out in nine months, mostly to women, and mostly by word of mouth, and a copy of it reached London and was read by a woman in a house in Bloomsbury who wrote a letter about it, and then another, and by the eighth year there was a third edition and everyone in the county knew who had written it.
Cecily was, at first, furious about this, which surprised everyone except Rosalind, who understood precisely why.
“They know it is me,” she said. “Now they will read everything I wrote about our stepmother and they will look at me in the street and think, oh, that is the girl whose mother took two hundred pounds.”
“Yes,” Rosalind said.
“You are supposed to say something comforting.”
“I am not. You wrote a true book and you will now be read truly. That is the price. You could have written a false one and been read falsely, and you would have been safe, and you chose otherwise.”
Cecily had looked at her for a long moment and then said, with the small crooked smile she had grown into:
“You are the worst sister in England.”
“I am the most useful sister in England. They are different.”
And Cecily Ashcroft had laughed and gone back to her counting-room, where she kept the school’s books and her own notebooks and, in a drawer under the ledger, a copy of the burned engagement letter; she had copied it out first, in her own hand, into the back of her account book, because she had learned, from a stepmother with a locked drawer that never existed and from a sister with a prayer book full of grammar, that the true record of a thing is often the only weapon anyone ever gets.
That was, in the end, the whole of what the school taught.
Not Latin. Not Portuguese. Not the difference between tenir and avoir, though all of those were taught, thoroughly, by a woman who could not help herself.
What it taught was that a record kept honestly is a kind of prayer, and that a girl who can keep her own accounts cannot be quietly stolen from by anyone — not by a husband, not by a lord, not by a stepmother with a carriage waiting outside, not by a county that has decided to consider her harmless and then forget her.
There was a day, in the seventh year, in the second school on the high street in Braewick, when a girl of thirteen came to Rosalind with a page of figures and said, in a voice that was already hoarse with fury:
“The canal company is paying the bargemen in shillings and the tariff in guineas, and I think they are doing it on purpose.”
Rosalind looked at the page.
They were doing it on purpose.
“Who taught you to notice that?”
“Hattie did. She said never trust a man who changes the unit in the middle of a page.”
“Do you know what to do about it?”
“Write it down,” the girl said. “Correctly. In a book with a date in it. And then make three copies.”
Rosalind Ashcroft, Duchess of Wrenmoor, chief reviewer of foreign correspondence for the Kestrel Canal Commission, stood in a schoolroom on the high street of Braewick and looked at a thirteen-year-old girl who had been born in a bargeman’s cottage with one room and no books, and she thought about a candle stub in a counting-house at two in the morning, and about a velvet-bound prayer book with grammar in the margins, and about the sentence her father had written in a Greek primer when she was eleven years old.
Go and make the three copies, she said.