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

Chapter 6

She did not go home.

The decision was made in the space of about four seconds, and she made it the way she had made every real decision of her adult life — alone, quickly, and with the certainty that no one would later thank her for it.

“Mrs. Digby,” she said, “would you tell my stepmother that I am detained at Wrenmoor Hall on the Duke’s business, and that I will return in the morning before the assembly?”

Mrs. Digby’s mouth opened and closed twice, like a fish being asked to choose between two ponds.

“Your mother will be—”

“My stepmother will be furious either way,” Rosalind said. “At least this way she can be furious with a duke in the sentence.”

They worked until half past one in the morning.

Wrenmoor sent for cold meat and bread and a pitcher of small beer, and then sent the servants away, and then — because he was a man who did not know how to perform gratitude — he simply worked beside her for six more hours without once telling her she looked tired.

They found nineteen alterations across seven languages.

Nineteen. Not one of them an accident.

Whoever had done it had copied phrases from real commercial documents — Portuguese bills of lading from the war years, Dutch trade schedules, a German toll table from a Rhenish customs book — and had stitched them into the annexe at exactly the points where a hurried English reading would pass over them. The forger had been fluent enough to imitate, and careless enough to misunderstand.

“Here,” Rosalind said, at two o’clock, her voice roughened with fatigue. “The Portuguese clause imitates Lisbon commercial phrasing from ten years past, but it places a German trading route in the wrong valley. That is the same mistake as in the Spanish payment schedule. And the Italian bill of carriage. And the Dutch lock account.”

“The same mistake,” Wrenmoor repeated slowly. “Then it is one hand.”

“Seven tongues, one ignorant hand, your grace. A man who has learned the words but never the country.”

Wrenmoor sat back. For a long moment he looked at the spread pages the way a soldier looks at a map of ground he lost once.

“Roscombe,” he said.

“You are certain?”

“I am seldom certain. It is an expensive habit.” She tapped the paper. “But here, yes.”

He said nothing for a while. The fire had gone to embers and the candles were stubs, and Rosalind was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware that she was a twenty-nine-year-old woman alone at two in the morning in a duke’s library, with her hair coming down in pins she had stopped bothering to fix.

Wrenmoor stood and went to the window and looked out at his own dark hills.

“My brother’s name was Roland,” he said. “He wrote to me four times from Portugal. The letters took five months to come. In the last one he asked me to send him three dozen pairs of boots, because the men had none, and I sent them, and they went into a warehouse at Lisbon in a shipment marked for the 4th Foot, and the 4th Foot had already been broken and reformed twice, and nobody ever signed for them.”

Rosalind said nothing. There was nothing to say to that. Some griefs do not want a translation; they want a witness.

“The contractor who misdirected that shipment,” he said, “was Roscombe and Company. Julian Roscombe signed the bill of carriage in his own hand at the age of nineteen and never thought about it again. And I have spent nine years trying to prove that a man who never thinks about anything made a mistake that cost me my brother.”

“And now?”

“Now I am being asked to sign a charter that has been altered in exactly the same way.” He turned from the window. “That is not a coincidence, Miss Ashcroft. That is a habit.”

Rosalind’s fingers found the velvet prayer book in her lap and held it without opening it.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said, “the magistrates will hear the English summary read aloud. It is a good summary. It is a plausible summary. Sir Bramwell Coote will nod at every clause and the German merchant will say ‘ja’ because the tariff looks normal to him, and the Portuguese agent will keep his mouth shut because he does not know whom to trust, and the charter will be signed at noon.”

“Unless you read it.”

“Unless a woman who translated a charter in a ballroom reads forty more pages in a magistrate’s chamber, and says in front of Braewick that every one of them is a lie.”

Wrenmoor looked at her.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then I will need three things, your grace.”

“Name them.”

“My father’s exercise book, which is at my father’s old schoolmaster’s house on the edge of the Cranbourne land. A witness who can put Julian Roscombe in possession of the papers he copied — and I am the only one alive who can do that, which is a problem, because my word is worth exactly nothing. And your word, given in public, that the reading you heard last night was accurate.”

He considered her.

“You are asking me to stake my name on a spinster’s translation.”

“I am asking you to stake your name on the truth. The spinster is incidental.”

At that, Wrenmoor did something she had not seen from him before: he almost laughed — one short breath through his nose, which in a man of his severity was the equivalent of applause in a theatre.

“Very well,” he said. “But if we are to go to a magistrate’s chamber tomorrow and call Lord Roscombe a forger, you will tell me the rest of what is in that velvet book first. Because I have watched you reach for it four times tonight, and you never once opened it in my presence.”

Rosalind’s hand tightened on the cover.

She opened her mouth to say something polished and safe, and the library door banged open so hard that the fire jumped, and the steward came in white-faced with a candle shaking in his hand.

“Your grace,” he said. “There is a fire at the old schoolmaster’s house on the Cranbourne road. The field hands say it started in three places at once.”