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

Chapter 9

She went out into the hall because there was no version of staying in the library that did not look like guilt.

Julian stood in the middle of the black-and-white marble floor with his hat in his hand and his coat still on, and beside him, wrapped in a gray shawl and holding her own bonnet in both hands like a shield, stood Aurelia Ashcroft.

Rosalind’s stepmother.

Behind them, at the open front door, was a hired chaise with its lanterns still lit, and one of the servants was holding the horses.

Rosalind took in the whole arrangement in two seconds: Julian had gone to her stepmother; Julian had used the fire — the family’s danger, the family’s shame, a young woman missing from home all night — to bring her here as a weapon; and he had done it before dawn so that the streets of Braewick would see the carriage return to Grosvenor Row with the whole ugly story attached.

“Aurelia,” Rosalind said.

“Do not,” her stepmother said. Her voice was shaking. “Do not ‘Aurelia’ me. Get your things. There is a chaise. We are going home, and you will not speak to anyone before the assembly, and you will not—”

She stopped. She had seen Wrenmoor in the doorway behind Rosalind, and her face went through the same four expressions the steward’s had gone through, in a different order.

“Your grace,” she managed.

“Mrs. Ashcroft.” Wrenmoor’s bow was correct to the inch. “You are welcome in my house. You are not welcome to remove Miss Ashcroft from it against my leave.”

Julian laughed.

It was an ugly laugh, and it was aimed — Rosalind recognized the aim of it, because she had once watched him use it on a business rival across a supper table.

“Against your leave,” he said. “Your grace, do you hear yourself? A duke keeping a spinster in his house until four in the morning, and then speaking of leave?”

“Lord Roscombe,” Wrenmoor said, “I have five servants, a steward, a housekeeper, and Mrs. Digby of Grosvenor Row in that library, all of whom have been awake with Miss Ashcroft and myself since she arrived. If you would like to put your insinuation into English, I will have the whole of it written down and witnessed.”

Julian’s smile flickered.

Aurelia, meanwhile, had begun to cry — quietly, competently, the way she had cried at her husband’s funeral, where Rosalind had noticed that the tears came exactly when the neighbors arrived.

“She has ruined her sister,” Aurelia said. “That is what this night has done. She has ruined Cecily. Do you understand, Rosalind? Lord Roscombe has been kind enough to tell me everything. The charter, the ballroom, the reading — she has made an enemy of the whole county’s business, and Cecily will be the one who pays for it, because Cecily will marry into the house her sister is publicly destroying.”

“Cecily will marry into a house that has been forging contracts for nine years,” Rosalind said. “Will she? Is that what you want?”

The hall went silent.

“You dare,” Julian said, in a voice with a new edge in it. “You dare to stand there in this man’s hallway and accuse me of forgery. You, who spent four years copying documents for my father’s business. You, who know how a hand can be made to write anything.”

Rosalind felt the floor tilt very slightly.

There it was. The thing she had been dreading since the ballroom, arriving exactly as she had known it would, and arriving early, which meant he had been ready.

“Are you threatening me?” she asked.

“I am warning you.” Julian took a step closer. “If you so much as mention my name in front of the magistrates tomorrow, I will lay before them the original letters in your hand — the forms, the clauses, the drafts, the fair copies — and I will tell them the plain and simple truth: that Miss Rosalind Ashcroft wrote those documents herself, that she has been altering business papers for years, and that she is now inventing accusations against me because I would not marry her.”

“Julian,” Aurelia said. “Julian, this is not what we agreed—”

“Be quiet, madam.”

Aurelia Ashcroft went quiet.

Rosalind looked at her stepmother — gray shawl, bonnet held like a shield, tears drying to salt in the corners of her eyes — and understood with a small, tired clarity that Aurelia had not come here to rescue her, and had not come here to ruin her either. Aurelia had come because a carriage had been sent for her, and someone with a comfortable voice had told her what to do, and she had done it, the way she had done everything since her husband died: toward whichever future looked warmest.

“Lord Roscombe,” Wrenmoor said, “you will leave this house.”

“Gladly.” Julian put his hat on and turned at the door, and this time he looked not at Wrenmoor but at Rosalind, and there was something almost affectionate in his face, which was the most frightening thing about him. “Rosalind. Listen to me as a friend. You are ill. You have been ill for a long while, and everyone has been very patient with your — talents. Go home. Rest. Let the men who understand these things settle the charter, and let your sister have her wedding.”

He smiled, and the smile was gentle, and every word of it was a knife being laid on the table between them, handle outward, for her to pick up and use on herself.

“You should have married me,” he said, “when I was still charitable.”

Then he was gone, and the chaise wheels grated on the gravel, and the door closed, and the hall was cold again.

Aurelia remained where she was, bonnet in her hands.

“You may stay or go, madam,” Rosalind said, “but you will not tell me what to do. I am not a child, and I have not been your daughter since the day you told me my father’s books were taking up space that Cecily’s dresses could use.”

Aurelia flinched. It was the first true thing that had crossed her face all night.

“The carriage is waiting,” she said, and went out to it, and did not look back.

Rosalind stood in the marble hall of Wrenmoor Hall with her hands at her sides, and behind her Wrenmoor said nothing at all, which was exactly what she needed him to do.

Then the front door opened again, and the steward came in with his coat wet with mist and a paper tube in his hand, and his face was not the face of a man who had good news.

“Your grace,” he said. “The commission office. The filed copies of the annexe.”

“Yes?”

“They are not there.”