The Duke Was Desperate Without A Translator — Until A Rejected Spinster Spoke 7 Languages
Chapter 4
Wrenmoor Hall rose out of the low hills like a fortress that had never once been asked to smile.
There was no fake Gothic prettiness about it, no plaster urns, no painted shepherdesses. Dark stone, narrow windows, iron-banded doors. It had been built by people who expected to be attacked and had not been entirely wrong.
Mrs. Digby slept for the last six miles and woke only when the wheels crunched on gravel, and then she nodded off again over her basket.
Wrenmoor received her in the library, with his steward seated near the far window and both doors left open.
That detail reached her before his greeting did.
He had understood the risk to her reputation. And he had arranged the room so that no one — not the servants, not Mrs. Digby, not the county, not even herself — could pretend afterward that they had been alone.
“Miss Ashcroft,” he said, bypassing every useless flourish, “there are forty pages of foreign annexe attached to the Kestrel Canal charter. I need them verified against the English summary before the magistrates assemble tomorrow evening. Every clause. Every figure. Every margin.”
Rosalind did not sit. He had not asked her to.
“Languages are not cavalry horses, your grace,” she said. “They cannot be ridden bloody because you are in a hurry.”
For the first time, something moved along the severe line of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of one, buried immediately.
“Then set your own pace,” he said, and drew out the chair opposite his own. “But do not stop.”
They worked for three hours without ornament.
He did not interrupt her. He did not tell her what a clause ought to mean, which was the single most unusual thing any man had ever done in her presence. When she corrected a mistaken English rendering of a Latin phrase — tenere, to hold, mistranslated as to own — he crossed it out at once and asked her for the proper word, and wrote down what she gave him, and underlined it twice.
That was more dangerous than praise, and she knew it while it was happening. Praise expects gratitude in return. Trust expects only accuracy.
By late afternoon the light had thinned. The library’s tall windows gave more shadow than sun, and the lines on the page began to blur until the Portuguese seemed to swim beneath the ink.
She leaned closer to the paper without thinking about it.
She had ruined her eyes in girlhood this way — copying her father’s grammar notes beside cheap tallow candles after the household had gone to bed, because daylight belonged to other people’s business and the night was the only room she had ever owned outright.
Wrenmoor stood so abruptly that she stiffened, ready for the reprimand. Too slow. Too delicate. Too female for work that matters.
Instead he crossed to the side table, struck a taper, and lit a heavy silver candelabra.
He carried it back and set it at her left elbow — close enough to ease the page, far enough not to crowd her hand.
Then he sat down and picked up his pen and said nothing at all.
Rosalind stared at the steadier light for a moment longer than she meant to.
No one had ever altered a room for her comfort. She was accustomed to folding herself into whatever space remained — a corner of the table, a corner of the carriage, a corner of the family.
She bent over the page before the tightness in her throat could betray her.
“Where did you learn to read so many tongues with a diplomat’s ease?” he asked.
She kept her eyes on the ink. “My late father was a scholar of comparative grammar. He believed daughters could hold more than embroidery silk in their heads.”
“A dangerous belief in Braewick.”
“In any county where men fear being corrected.”
Behind them, the steward’s pen scratched once and stopped.
Wrenmoor’s gaze rested on her face a moment too long.
“You make enemies with remarkable economy, Miss Ashcroft.”
“I was economical before it was fashionable, your grace.”
This time he came very close to smiling. The warmth of it — brief as a candle flame turning in a draught — unsettled her far more than his coldness had.
They worked until the clock struck seven, and by then they had found four errors.
None of them were accidents.
Rosalind knew an accident when she saw one. Accidents were clumsy; they tripped over cases and genders and left the meaning roughly intact. These errors did not trip. They walked, calmly, from one clause to the next, and each one moved a little more money and a little more ownership out of the Duke of Wrenmoor’s hands and into the hands of strangers.
“Your grace,” she said, “these are not translation mistakes. Somebody has altered the annexe deliberately.”
Wrenmoor looked up.
“Show me.”
She turned the Spanish schedule toward him and put her finger on the sixth line.
“The English says the investors may inspect the accounts. The Spanish says they may seize them after one delayed shipment. That is not a translation. That is a trap wearing good gloves.”
His eyes sharpened in a way she had not yet learned to read. Pleasure, perhaps. Or recognition.
“You have seen this kind of phrasing before,” he said.
Rosalind’s hand paused above the page.
Beside her notes lay the small velvet-bound prayer book she had first carried at seventeen and had only recently recovered. Its cover was worn smooth at the corners, harmless-looking, almost meek. That was precisely why it had survived so long in a house where nobody thought a woman’s belongings worth opening.
“My father wrote exercises for me,” she said carefully. “Model sentences in several tongues. Commercial forms. Legal forms. Courtly forms. I copied hundreds of them before his death, and afterward—”
She stopped.
“Afterward?”
“Afterward Lord Roscombe borrowed some of my father’s papers. He said his father wished to preserve them. He did not return them.”
Wrenmoor’s jaw set. She looked at that anger and understood, with a small cold shock, that it was not for her alone. It had deeper roots than one thin girl’s humiliation.
Before she could ask, the library door opened.
Julian Roscombe walked in as though the room owed him a welcome.