Adeline turned to Edward and spoke in flawless, rapid German. The words cracked through the library like a whip.
Edward blinked. He understood none of it, and everyone in the room saw that he understood none of it.
Adeline translated herself into English. "A man who fears a woman's accuracy often calls it vanity."
The steward choked into his sleeve.
Edward's face flushed dark red. "You have always been impertinent."
"No," Adeline said. "Only undertranslated."
For one extraordinary second, Percival's expression broke—not into laughter, into respect so clean it made her look away.
"Lord Aldemore," he said, his voice dropping into a register that emptied the room of warmth, "you will find your own way out. If you speak again of Miss Dunore's reputation, I will not require a translator to make my meaning understood."
Edward bowed with murder in his eyes and left.
Only when the door closed did Adeline realize she had been holding her breath.
Percival poured two glasses of brandy. He pushed one toward her, then paused. "Do you drink brandy, Miss Dunore?"
"Not before being insulted twice."
The corner of his mouth moved. "Then I am late."
She accepted the glass and did not drink.
"He broke your engagement," Percival said. Not a question.
Adeline 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." Her voice stayed steady because she forced it to stay steady. "In public, he discovered that a wife who corrected him would be an embarrassment. So he discarded me and kept my work."
Percival stared at the charter. "The Aldemore name is built on borrowed honor."
"That is a generous translation."
"My younger brother died in Portugal because an Aldemore supply contract was forged. The rations never reached his regiment."
Adeline saw then what held his face so rigid—not arrogance alone, not temper, but grief packed hard enough to pass for iron.
"If this charter proves Edward is altering agreements for gain," Percival said, "I will ruin his family. It is the only duty left clean enough to trust."
Adeline turned the brandy glass between her fingers. "Vengeance is a very precise translation of grief, your grace."
He looked at her sharply. She expected anger. Instead, he went still in a way that made the room feel suddenly honest.
That evening, Adeline returned to the ruined schoolhouse on the edge of the Granville estate. It had been her father's last shelter and her first kingdom. The roof leaked, the benches sagged, but no one came there to tell her to be quiet.
She set one candle on the old master's desk and opened the velvet prayer book. The first pages held prayers. The margins held another life: Latin roots, French terms, German declensions, Portuguese verbs corrected by her own younger hand.
A prayer book was safe. A woman might carry devotion anywhere.
The door creaked. Adeline shut the book at once. "Dukes do not belong in drafty schoolrooms, your grace."
Percival stepped in, carrying no hat. His hair was damp from mist, his boots muddy from the lane. "Women with your mind do not belong hiding in them."
That sounded almost like a compliment. "Take care. It may injure your reputation."
"My reputation has survived artillery. It may not survive me."
His gaze fell to the book pressed beneath her palm. "That is not merely a prayer book."
"It is exactly a prayer book with a great deal of grammar praying in the margins."
Against her will a laugh almost escaped. She swallowed it. "It is the only book a spinster may carry without men asking why she needs so many words."
Percival did not reach for it. She marked that. He looked, but he did not take.
"You wrote some of the older forms," he said.
Adeline's hand tightened on the velvet cover. "I was 19, engaged, foolish enough to think being useful would make me cherished."
"And they used your father's exercises to forge contracts."
"I suspect it. I cannot yet prove all of it."
"You can prove enough."
She lifted her head. "And then what? I stand before the county and say that the forgeries were built from papers in my keeping. They will not call me wronged. They will call me convenient. They will say I turned on Edward because he would not marry me. They will say I tried to catch a duke when I failed to catch a gentleman."
His face darkened. "I will not permit it."
"You cannot command a whisper, your grace."
The words struck harder than she meant them to. He fell silent. Adeline stood, the book clutched to her chest. In the dim schoolroom, the thorns she wore for society felt suddenly heavy.