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

Chapter 5

“Your grace,” Julian said, bowing with a polish that had once persuaded her he was made of better material than other men.

Wrenmoor’s steward followed him in, wearing a face full of apology and no explanation, which told Rosalind everything about how far Lord Roscombe had walked through a duke’s house without being stopped.

“Forgive the intrusion,” Julian went on. “I came out of concern for Miss Ashcroft. Society is beginning to talk.”

His gaze slid across the papers on the desk — slowly, taking inventory — and then across her.

“A spinster spending whole days in a duke’s library,” he said, “may feel flattered. Others may think she exaggerates her small accomplishments to catch a desperate man’s notice — having failed to catch mine.”

The insult had been arranged with care. It made her sound hungry. It made her father’s years of teaching sound like bait on a hook. It set the old rejection down in the middle of the room and waited to see whether she would bleed on the carpet.

Rosalind felt her hands go cold where they lay on the desk.

Wrenmoor rose.

The air in the library changed immediately, as though a window had opened onto December. Something in the man’s face had gone from discipline to danger, and Rosalind — who had spent her whole life reading the weather of other people’s tempers — watched him prepare to cut Julian Roscombe down so thoroughly that no man in Braewick would be able to identify the remains.

Then he stopped.

His gaze came down to her hands.

They were white against the dark wood of the desk. But they were not trembling.

He understood.

She saw the exact second he understood: if he answered for her, Julian would win the shape of the accusation. Poor ruined Miss Ashcroft, pulled out of the fire by the great man whose interest she had schemed for. Every word Wrenmoor spoke in her defense would be entered into evidence as proof.

He stepped back. He remained standing. He gave her the floor.

Rosalind turned to Julian and spoke to him in flawless, rapid German.

“Herr Roscombe, wenn Ihr Verstand so scharf wäre wie Ihre Zunge, hätten Sie die portugiesische Klausel selbst gelesen.”

(If your mind were as sharp as your tongue, you would have read the Portuguese clause yourself.)

The words cracked across the library like a whip.

Julian blinked.

He understood none of it. And everyone in the room saw that he understood none of it.

She translated herself into English with the flat courtesy of a woman reading a tradesman’s bill.

“A man who fears a woman’s accuracy,” she said, “usually calls it vanity.”

The steward coughed into his sleeve. Mrs. Digby, who had woken at the raised voices, sat bolt upright in her chair and looked gratifyingly pleased.

Julian’s face went dark red. “You have always been impertinent.”

“No,” Rosalind said. “Only under-translated.”

For one extraordinary second, something in Wrenmoor’s expression broke open — not into laughter, into a respect so clean and unguarded that she had to look away from it, because looking at it any longer would have felt like being seen entirely, and she had no equipment for that.

“Lord Roscombe,” Wrenmoor said, and his voice dropped into a register that emptied the room of warmth. “You will find your own way out. And if you speak about Miss Ashcroft’s reputation again in my hearing, I will not require a translator to make my meaning understood.”

Julian bowed with murder in his eyes, and left.

Only when the door closed did Rosalind realize she had been holding her breath since the moment his shadow crossed the threshold.

Wrenmoor moved to the side table and poured two glasses of brandy. He pushed one toward her, then paused.

“Do you drink brandy, Miss Ashcroft?”

“Not before being insulted twice.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Then I am late.”

She took the glass and did not drink from it. He did not drink from his either. For a while the only sound was the fire pulling apart in the grate.

“He broke your engagement,” Wrenmoor said.

It was not a question.

Rosalind looked at the amber liquid. “He praised my mind in private. He liked what it gave him — translations, letters, graceful foreign turns for his father’s business. In public he discovered that a wife who corrected him would be an embarrassment. So he discarded me, and kept my work.”

Her voice stayed steady because she made it stay steady.

“The Roscombe name,” Wrenmoor said, staring at the charter on the desk, “is built on borrowed honor.”

“That is a generous translation.”

He did not answer at once. When he did, his voice had a different grain to it — flatter, older, like a road that had been worn down by something very heavy passing over it many times.

“My younger brother died in Portugal because a Roscombe supply contract was forged. The rations never reached his regiment. Fifty-one men and one captain who had survived four years of war died of a clerical error in a warehouse that nobody ever audited.”

Rosalind sat very still.

And then she saw what held his face so rigid. Not arrogance alone. Not temper. Grief, packed down hard enough to pass for iron in a room where nobody was permitted to touch it.

“If this charter proves that Julian Roscombe is altering agreements for gain,” he said, “I will ruin his family. It is the only duty left to me that is clean enough to trust.”

Rosalind turned the brandy glass slowly between her fingers.

“Vengeance,” she said at last, “is a very precise translation of grief, your grace.”

He looked at her sharply. She expected anger — men generally preferred their grief unexamined.

Instead he went quiet in a way that made the whole library feel suddenly honest, as though someone had opened a door in a wall she had assumed was solid.

Boots sounded in the corridor. The steward reappeared at the door with a letter on a tray, sealed and still damp at the fold.

Wrenmoor broke the seal, scanned it, and his face changed.

“Miss Ashcroft,” he said. “We are out of time. The magistrates have moved the assembly forward. To tomorrow morning.”

Rosalind set the brandy down, untouched, and looked at forty pages of lies still waiting to be read.