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

Chapter 3

Wrenmoor did not look at him.

“Continue, Miss Ashcroft.”

It was not a kindness. It was a command. But it was also, in that room, the first permission she had ever been handed in public that did not come with a price attached to the other end of it.

Rosalind let her finger move down the page.

“The German margin doubles the timber tariff after the first year. The Dutch schedule confirms the same rate under a different heading — ‘Handelszoll’ rather than ‘Handelsabgabe’, so an English clerk reading quickly would take one for a toll and the other for a duty and never notice they are the same money twice. And the Portuguese clause—” she turned the sheet, and the wax seals brushed her sleeve, and she smelled the old paper, dust and something faintly of salt — “—transfers ownership of the lock accounts to the Lisbon agents upon any failure of delivery. Any failure, your grace. Not a grave failure. Not a willful failure. Any.”

She closed the charter and held it out to him.

“The English summary is not a summary,” she said. “It is an advertisement.”

For a moment, nobody in the Cranbourne ballroom breathed.

Then the magistrates broke into a murmur like water finding a crack, and the German merchant said something short and bitter in his own tongue, and the Portuguese agent took one involuntary step toward the table before he remembered himself.

Julian’s expression had not changed. That was the terrible thing about him — he was too well made for panic. But his glass had stopped halfway to his mouth, and Rosalind, who had spent four years learning his silences, knew exactly what that meant.

He had not known that she would read it.

He had known she could.

He had simply counted on her not daring to.

She handed the charter back to the Duke and did not wait to be thanked. Gratitude from a powerful man could become a collar if one stood too close while he fastened it. She stepped back toward the edge of the ballroom, where she had stood at the beginning of the evening, spine straight, chin lifted, invisible again.

“Miss Ashcroft.”

She stopped.

“Tomorrow,” Wrenmoor said, “you will not read the French clause only. You will read all forty pages. My steward will call for you at nine.”

He said it as if the matter were already recorded in a ledger somewhere.

“Your grace,” her stepmother said, before Rosalind could answer, and Aurelia Ashcroft had crossed the floor faster than a woman of her dignity usually permitted herself, “my daughter is not—I mean, my stepdaughter is in delicate health, and the season is scarcely—”

“She read seven languages in ninety seconds, madam,” Wrenmoor said. “I did not notice her health interfering with any of them.”

He turned and walked out. The magistrates followed him like gulls after a plough.

The ballroom did not dissolve; it melted, the way rooms do after a scandal, everyone pretending to have other business. Rosalind stood alone on the waxed floor with a hundred small wounds of attention passing across her face, and then she turned to go, and Julian was there.

“A word,” he said.

“I have given you all of them,” she said. “That is what you came to mock me for.”

His smile thinned. He leaned in, close enough that she could smell the brandy and the bergamot, close enough that anyone watching would think he was speaking tenderly, which was his favorite way of being cruel.

“You should have stayed quiet,” he said. “You could have had the rest of your life as harmless little Miss Ashcroft, mending her sister’s hems. Now the Duke has noticed you. Do you know what men do with a woman they notice for a talent, Rosalind? They use her, and then they put her back.”

“You would know,” she said.

Cecily was waiting by the carriage, white to the lips. Aurelia did not speak to Rosalind the entire ride home, which was its own kind of sentence.

Rosalind slept badly, and dreamed of her father’s pen.

She woke to the smell of scorched toast and, beneath it, the sharper smell of her stepmother’s fear.

The letter was on the table. It had the Wrenmoor crest pressed into the wax, and Aurelia had dropped it onto the cloth as if the seal had burned her fingers.

“A carriage,” she said, in the tone of a woman reading out a death warrant, “for you. To Wrenmoor Hall. A private summons to an unmarried woman. The Duke may be desperate, but he has no right to stain this family because you read above your station.”

Rosalind took the letter. In the corner of the room, Julian Roscombe — who had arrived early, with a bouquet in one hand and the expression of a man wounded in public — stood rigid by the hearth.

“The Duke requires a translator, madam,” Rosalind said. “Not a mistress.”

Cecily choked into her teacup.

Julian found his voice. “Rosalind. You embarrassed the county last night. You should decline. It is what any woman of sense would do.”

She looked at him over the rim of the cup — the cup where, once, she had translated his father’s correspondence while he praised her cleverness in the dark and apologized for it in daylight, and she remembered exactly how small that praise had made her feel when she finally held it up to the light.

“I embarrassed the county,” she said softly, “or I read the Portuguese before you could hide it?”

Julian’s jaw tightened.

It was not irritation.

It was fear — and Rosalind saw it the way she saw everything men hoped women would be too well-bred to notice.

“You will receive an answer by noon, your lordship,” she said, and left the room, and behind her she heard him set the bouquet down on the table harder than a bouquet needed to be set.

By half past eleven she was in the Wrenmoor carriage.

By noon, so was Mrs. Digby — her stepmother’s ancient companion, installed in the opposite corner seat, sent to protect the family name.

Sent, Rosalind suspected, to number her breaths.