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

Chapter 7

Rosalind ran.

She was not aware of deciding to. She was aware only of the gravel biting through the thin soles of her evening shoes, of Mrs. Digby’s voice behind her calling her name, of Wrenmoor’s groom running past her to the stable, of a lantern swinging in the darkness and the smell of smoke arriving before the sight of it, sharp and resinous and wrong.

The schoolmaster’s house — her father’s house — stood in a field on the bad end of the Cranbourne road, and it was burning at the edges like a page curling in from four corners.

Three places at once. That was the detail she could not get out of her head while she ran. Three places at once did not happen to houses with leaking roofs. Three places at once belonged to men who intended it.

“Rosalind.”

Wrenmoor’s hand caught her elbow just short of the fire line, and she rounded on him with a fury that had nothing to do with him.

“My father’s papers are in there.”

“I know.”

“Forty years of his work. Nine languages. His—”

“I know, Rosalind.”

She stopped.

He had used her name. She noticed it in a distant way, the way one notices a bell in another street.

The fire had been started at the woodpile, the stable, and beneath the low eastern window. The stable was already gone. Two cottagers were throwing buckets of water that evaporated before they landed. The roof — the old, sagging, beautiful roof she had known all her life — was holding, for now, because it had been built by her father out of cheap beams that had never been asked to be anything but honest.

“The window is the weak place,” she said. “If the eastern window catches, it goes into the box room, and the box room is where he kept them.”

Wrenmoor was already moving.

She watched him go, and what she felt was not admiration. It was a strange, sideways rage — of course he went in. Of course he would not let a woman run into a burning house. Of course his body was the one permitted to be spent.

He came out four minutes later with his coat smoking at one shoulder and a leather case under his arm, and behind him a boy from the stables carrying two wooden boxes she had never seen before.

“The desk,” Wrenmoor said, coughing once, “and the shelves. All the paper. The box room hasn’t caught.”

Rosalind took the case from him with both hands.

Her father’s handwriting was on the spine, faded to a ghost of ink. Grammatical Exercises, Comparative. Vol. I.

She sat down on the wet grass with it in her lap and had to look at the sky for a while before she could feel anything at all.

“Miss Ashcroft.” Wrenmoor crouched beside her. His hair was blackened with soot on one side. “Who knew the house was empty tonight?”

“Everyone,” she said. “It has been empty for two years. I go there alone. Nobody knows when I go there because nobody thinks it worth knowing.”

“Someone thought it worth knowing tonight.”

She turned the case over. The latch had been forced — bent, not broken — and one corner of the leather was torn, which is what happens when a man tears at a case he is in a hurry to carry away.

“Your grace. Look.”

The case had been opened and closed again before the fire started.

Nothing was missing. She counted twice: all four notebooks, the loose folios, the two folded maps of the Lisbon roads. Nothing missing, and yet the latch was mangled, and one bundle of folios had been pulled halfway out of its sleeve and shoved back crooked.

“He came for something he did not find,” Wrenmoor said.

“Or he came for something he did not recognize when he found it.”

They sat in the smoke and the steam and the noise of the sparks dying, and above them the eastern window of the schoolhouse cracked all at once and fell in with a sound like a shot.

Rosalind looked at the house where she had learned every language she knew, where her father had written a girl’s mind is a country with no customs houses in the margin of a Greek primer when she was eleven, where she had once been the ruler of a kingdom that had four walls and a leaking roof and no one in it who told her to be quiet.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said, “I will stand in front of the magistrates and the county and my stepmother and the man who just tried to burn my father’s work out of the world, and I will read.”

“Yes,” Wrenmoor said.

“And they will destroy me for it. I want you to understand that I am walking into it with my eyes open. They will say I lied to protect a duke. They will say I lied out of spite. They will say I was in your library at two in the morning. They will whisper all of it in the same breath.”

He was silent.

“Say something,” she said, and hated the small crack in it.

Wrenmoor looked at her across the ruined grass, and he did not offer her comfort, and he did not offer her his name as a shield, which she would have refused and which he seemed to know she would refuse.

“If you want my protection,” he said, “you have only to ask. But I do not think you will ask, and I will not force it on you, because a woman who is protected cannot testify. And I think you intend to testify.”

Rosalind stared at him.

“You are the most infuriating man I have ever met,” she said.

“So I am told.”

She laughed. Soot, wet grass, a burning house, and Rosalind Ashcroft laughed for the first time in a year.

Then the wind turned, and the smoke came over them both, and Wrenmoor rose and put out his hand, and she took it, and neither of them was thinking about the fire anymore.

Two fields away, where the road dipped out of sight, a man on a hired horse watched the flames for a while, and then turned back toward Braewick, and rode hard.