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

Chapter 27

Her father’s desk came home in the sixth year.

Not the schoolhouse — the schoolhouse was a shell and remained a shell, because Rosalind had decided, after a great deal of thought, that she did not want it rebuilt. She had walked out to it one Sunday with Wrenmoor and had stood in the ruin of it in the wet grass and had said: leave it. Let the roof come down. Let the boys from the village take the beams for their mothers’ fires. It is not the room that matters.

But the desk — blackened on one side, with a scorch mark in the shape of a leaf near the corner — she had the carpenter carry up to the schoolroom in the east wing, and set it by the window with the good light coming in, and there it stayed for the rest of her life.

It was an ordinary desk. That was the point of it. It had a drawer that stuck in damp weather and a knot in the wood on the left side where the grain turned in a whorl, and if you ran your thumb over the knot it felt like a small country with a border that could not be crossed.

Her father had taught her to read at that desk. He had put a Greek primer under her elbow. He had said a girl’s mind is a country with no customs houses and then gone back to his notes, because he was a scholar and scholars do not make speeches.

She had never once, in twenty-nine years of being told she was unnatural, heard him say he was proud of her. He had said, instead, that the dative case in Latin is the case of the indirect object, which is to say the case of the person for whose benefit a thing is done; and he had said it in a tone that made her understand, without any words at all, that he considered the dative case the most important case in the world.

She had thought about that a great deal in the seventh year, when she was teaching a class of nine-year-olds.

Wrenmoor came into the schoolroom one evening in the late autumn of that year — the seventh year; the year the north extension opened; the year Cecily’s third edition went to a fourth printing; the year Hattie Wren turned twenty and was asked to give evidence before a select committee in London and refused on the grounds that she had a school to run and London could come to her.

He put a small parcel on the desk.

“What is this?” Rosalind said.

“Open it.”

She opened it.

Inside was a leather folio, new, unmarked, with a lock on the clasp and a small brass key tied to it with a green ribbon — not a green ribbon from a charter; just a green ribbon, the color of the door on the high street.

“Your father’s book is falling apart,” Wrenmoor said. “You refused to have it rebound. So this is not a rebinding.”

Rosalind opened the folio.

The first pages were blank. Ruled pages, good paper, waiting.

“You said it needs more pages,” Wrenmoor said.

Rosalind looked at the blank book. Then she looked at the worn velvet prayer book lying on the corner of the desk, with its split cover and its margins crowded with a girl’s cramped handwriting and a duke’s imperfect French and four years of school attendance figures written in a woman’s steady hand.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“No.” She picked up the prayer book and held it. “The prayer book has lasted thirty years and it will last another thirty. It is not falling apart. It is holding, which is a different thing, and I have told you that before.”

“Then what is the folio for?”

Rosalind looked at the new book on the desk, with its lock and its key and its three hundred blank pages, and she thought about a girl of twelve in a schoolroom on the high street with a page of figures and a fury she could not yet spell.

“The school,” she said. “The school’s own record. Started now, in a locked book, in a house with a green door, and every year a new page: who came, what they learned, what they were paid, who was cheated and who noticed. So that in forty years, when somebody in a hat comes to close us down, there is a book with dates in it and three copies of everything.”

Wrenmoor looked at the folio, and then at her.

“You want to write the school’s accounts in it.”

“I want to write the school’s life in it. Accounts in the front, and at the back, in the margins, the things that do not fit in a column.”

“What sort of things?”

Rosalind turned the folio to the last page and wrote, in her own hand, slowly, with the good light coming in over her father’s blackened desk:

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

This school is the map of it.

Then she closed the folio, and locked it, and put the small brass key on the ring with the key to her father’s desk drawer, and hung them both on a nail by the window.

Wrenmoor watched her do it and said nothing.

“You are quiet,” she said.

“I am counting,” he said.

“Counting what?”

“The number of times in seven years that a woman has told me she does not need anything I have to give her.”

“And what is the number?”

“I have lost track,” Wrenmoor said. “Which I believe is the point.”

Rosalind laughed and sat down at her father’s desk, and outside the window the light was going off the low hills of Braewick, and down in the lane a girl was running with a slate under her arm, and in the counting-room below Cecily Ashcroft was balancing a ledger by the light of a wax candle that had been bought with her own wages, and in the village the bargeman’s wife who had once stopped Rosalind outside the chandler’s was telling her daughter, for the fourth time, the story of the duchess who read the charter in the ballroom.

There was a version of that story in which Rosalind Ashcroft was rescued.

There was a version in which she was revenged.

There was a version, told in London to this day, in which a clever woman saved a duke’s fortune and was rewarded with a coronet, which is the version that men prefer, because it means the ending belonged to the duke.

None of them was the true one, and Rosalind had long since stopped correcting them, because the true one could not be told as a story at all.

The true one was this: that a woman who had spent twenty-nine years being told she was useless in English had gone into a room, and read, and in reading she had not been saved and had not been avenged and had not been rewarded. She had simply been believed. And that one small alteration — a county that believed her, a stepmother who laid a receipt on a table, a sister who said no, a bargeman’s daughter who learned Portuguese on a Tuesday — had been enough to open a door in a wall, and behind the door there had been a room, and in the room there had been a desk, and at the desk there was now, on a bright cold morning in the eighth year, a queue of children from the town of Braewick waiting to be taught what a dative case is for.

Rosalind Ashcroft, Duchess of Wrenmoor, who had once believed that silence was the only blade a woman could keep under her tongue without being searched for it, put down her pen on a scorched desk in a schoolroom she had built out of a fire, and looked out at the green field, and the canal going silver in the distance, and the road down to the village where the second school now stood with its green door open to the street.

“Your grace,” Wrenmoor said from the doorway, “the girls are coming up the lane.”

“Then let them come,” she said. “I have a lesson.”

She reached for the prayer book, and put it in her reticule, carried openly, as she always did, with the ribbon marker in the middle and the margins full and one line of imperfect French inside the cover, and went down the stairs of her own house to meet them.

THE END