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

Chapter 8

Close to four in the morning, they carried her father’s boxes into the Wrenmoor library and laid them out like a patient on a table.

Rosalind’s hands shook for the first time that night — not from cold, not from fear, but from the simple astonishment of possession. She had spent two years believing that everything her father ever wrote was sitting in a damp room on the Cranbourne road, waiting to rot.

Now it was here, in a duke’s house, under a duke’s roof, and she had the smell of smoke in her hair and the awful certainty that it would not have survived another hour.

“Your stepmother,” Wrenmoor said, pouring water from a jug into a basin and pushing it toward her, “how much does she know?”

“Enough to be afraid of it.”

“That is not an answer.”

Rosalind washed her hands in the basin and watched the water go gray.

“My father was a schoolmaster who married beneath his family’s expectations and above his income. When he died, he left me a grammar, a daughter’s education, and a great many debts. My stepmother was his second wife. She came with nothing and married a man who left nothing. She has been trying to make Cecily’s future out of my ruin for nine years.”

“And she is complicit?”

“She is comfortable,” Rosalind said. “That is different. She knows Julian Roscombe courted me and then did not marry me. She knows that he began courting Cecily four months later, and that the arrangement is not affectionate — it is convenient — and that if Julian is destroyed, Cecily is destroyed with him.”

Wrenmoor nodded slowly.

“Then the danger to you tonight,” he said, “is not only Lord Roscombe.”

She opened Volume I on the desk between them, and the old scent came up — lampblack, chalk dust, the faint sweetness of paper that had lived a long time in a cold room — and for a moment her father was so present in the room that she could not look at Wrenmoor.

“Here,” she said, turning pages. “This is what he did. He wrote me exercises. Sentences in four, five, six languages, arranged by kind — commercial, legal, courtly, ecclesiastical. If you want to teach a child a language, you teach them the situations where the language lives. So he wrote me form after form.”

She stopped at a page densely filled with a neat, slanting hand.

“Bills of lading in Portuguese, 1798. Toll schedules in German, 1801. A Dutch insurance clause. A French deed of surrender for water rights. He wrote them all out for me to copy, because copying is how you learn to hold a language in your hand.”

Wrenmoor leaned over the page.

“And the charter’s errors match these.”

“Some of them exactly.” Her finger moved down the ink. “Look at this. My father copied a German toll table from a Rhenish customs book and made a mistake — he wrote ‘Zweiundzwanzig’ for a rate that should have been ‘Zwölf’. He copied the merchant’s mistake without knowing it was a mistake. He was a grammarian, not a merchant.”

“And the charter—”

“The charter contains ‘Zweiundzwanzig’ in the same clause, at the same place, in the same order.” She looked up. “That error has been sitting in this notebook for thirty years. Whoever built the annexe did not read a customs book. He read my father’s copy of it. He could not have found that mistake any other way.”

Wrenmoor was very still.

“A man who borrowed papers,” he said.

“A man who borrowed papers and did not give them back.”

For a long while neither of them spoke. The clock in the hall struck four, and then five, and the candles they had brought from the schoolhouse — two of them, new, still smelling of tallow and nothing else — burnt down slowly beside a second pair that had come from Wrenmoor’s store.

“There is a difficulty,” Rosalind said at last.

“There is always a difficulty.”

“I am the only living witness who can say that those papers were ever in Julian Roscombe’s hands. And everyone who hears me say it will reach the same conclusion in the same instant: that I am a woman who was thrown over, testifying against the man who threw her, using a book that conveniently appears at the precise moment it is useful.”

“The book did not conveniently appear. A man tried to burn it.”

“A man tried to burn an empty house, your grace. There is no witness to the fire but cottagers who saw smoke, and no witness to the tampering but the case latch, and no witness to any of it but me. My word for Julian. A duke’s word for me.”

Wrenmoor said, quietly: “That is, unfortunately, a fair description of how the law will hear it.”

“Yes.”

“Then we need something that does not depend on anyone’s word.”

Rosalind looked down at her father’s handwriting and felt the idea arrive — whole, cold, and perfectly formed — the way ideas sometimes do at five in the morning when the body has given up on sleep and the mind has stopped being polite.

“The annexe was copied by hand,” she said. “From other documents. Hand-copied documents have owners. The German toll schedule my father copied was printed — a customs book, a real one, and printed books have printers and dates and editions. If the theft is in the selection of documents, then the same documents must appear in Julian Roscombe’s own hand somewhere. His father’s business papers. Bills of lading. Correspondence.”

“Which are in his house.”

“Which are in his house,” she agreed. “Or in his father’s counting-house. Or in the hands of his solicitor.”

Wrenmoor’s eyes had gone hard and bright.

“You are proposing,” he said, “that we break into a lord’s business papers on the morning of an assembly we may not survive.”

“I am proposing,” Rosalind said, “that we ask. Your grace, you have a title, a parliamentary seat, nine years of grievance, and the ear of every magistrate in the county. Send for the Kestrel Canal’s own records — the copies that were filed with the commission at the outset. Not the summary. Not the annexe. The filed documents.”

A slow breath went out of him.

“The commission holds originals,” he said.

“Every charter of this size is filed twice. Once with the parties, once with the commission. If the annexe has been altered, then the two copies will disagree — and a disagreement between the duke’s copy and the county’s copy does not require any witness at all. It requires only a magistrate with eyes.”

Wrenmoor turned to the door and called for his steward before she had finished the sentence.

The steward came in with his coat half on and his hair flat on one side, and Wrenmoor said six sentences to him, and the man’s face went through four expressions in as many seconds, and then he was gone — out to the stables, out through the dark, out toward the commission office in Braewick, which opened at eight.

Rosalind sat down in the chair opposite the desk, and the fire came up, and Wrenmoor looked at her across forty pages of lies and one worn notebook of her father’s exercises.

“You did not have to stay,” he said.

“I know.”

“You could have gone home at midnight and let the charter be signed and let me be ruined in peace.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She thought about it honestly, because he had earned honesty, and because the truth was smaller and uglier than he would expect.

“Because I have spent my whole life being safe,” she said. “And it has cost me everything I ever wanted. If I am going to be ruined either way, your grace, I would rather be ruined reading something true.”

Wrenmoor looked at her for a long, unguarded moment.

Then the front door of Wrenmoor Hall slammed open, and a man’s voice came up the hallway — high, furious, familiar — and Rosalind’s stomach dropped through the floor.

Julian Roscombe had arrived, and he was not alone.

“Miss Ashcroft!” he shouted. “Come out here. I have brought the man who owns you.”