The duke graciously and sincerely apologized to everyone for his unkindness to Mariana in the sitting room that night. Everyone generously forgave him.
“I expect writing a book would make anyone go a little mad,” Delacorte said sympathetically, later, in the smoking room.
The duke fixed him with a level stare.
Bolt and Hardy just smiled.
The duke half wished he could get Delacorte to write his own memoirs, which the duke would then submit to his publisher as The Untold Story of the Duke of Valkirk.
“We’ve all been . . . churlish . . . a time or two,” Lucien said slyly.
One and all beamed approvingly upon the new accord between the duke and Miss Wylde, which so far consisted mostly of the duke doing what he normally did in the sitting room, and Miss Wylde doing what she normally did in the sitting room, and the two of them not talking much to each other at all, really, but not in a rude way.
“Miss Mariana Wylde is a spirited girl and very talented, and I do feel she has been hard done by,” Madame LeCroix told the London Times. “I found her to be responsible and kind, and if a girl has plenty of work, why, she won’t have time to get into mischief, will she? I think the gossip is exaggerated and that young men are always underfoot when you’re a pretty opera singer. A little champagne never killed anyone. I hope we’ll have many chances to hear her beautiful voice for years to come. She is not to blame for anything. She’s certainly not a harlot. That nonsense must be forgotten.”
Suffice it to say, it was not quite everything they’d dreamed of when it came to reputation repair. And Mariana wasn’t precisely thrilled at seeing the “h” word printed in the newspaper yet again.
And reading gossip was one thing, some of which was made up out of whole cloth and designed to titillate and inflame.
This was undeniably the truth, and it still was just a trifle wince inspiring.
What did that say about her?
Though she was actually rather touched that she’d made an impression on the great diva at all. She would send a little message of thanks over.
“I’m concerned that ‘spirited’ is code for ‘likes gaming hells,’” she said to Mrs. Hardy and Mrs. Durand and Lord Bolt and Captain Hardy, who had gathered around in the reception room to read it.
“Nonsense,” said Lord Bolt, who suspected the same thing.
They would just have to wait to see if her name finally disappeared from the gossip page. Lord Kilhone’s and Lord Revell’s families would have liked to see the end of the matter, of a certainty. They’d scraped the blame off on her the way one might scrape their boots and diverted everyone with the exciting word “harlot.” Perhaps their work was done.
She sighed and closed the newspaper, only to be confronted by another article on the front page.
Valkirk Blesses Charity with Generous Donation
Well. It seemed the duke had donated two hundred pounds to the Society for the Protection of the Sussex Poor.
She goggled. Imagine having two hundred pounds to just give away.
“His contributions will feed the hungry and keep the desperate in their homes,” said a certain Mrs. Sneath in the article. “We are singularly blessed in our patron, one of England’s greatest heroes, whom we can never hope to fully repay.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
Nevertheless, it was a rather lovely thing to do with money, considering the kinds of debaucheries that could be purchased for two hundred pounds. Gambling, mistresses, high flyers, champagne, all of which she knew about because—how had Madame LeCroix put it?—fast young men were always underfoot when one was a pretty opera singer.
But the plans for the Night of the Nightingale continued apace. Delilah and Angelique approached it doggedly, and with a determined optimism.
Mr. Delacorte, whose work selling remedies to apothecaries took him into London’s nooks and crannies both bright and dark, happened to know the owner of a stationer, who, after a bit of haggling, agreed to part with a large quantity of silver paper in exchange for a discount on some of the rice papers the Triton Group was importing. They would use this to fashion into roses for their garlands and urns—some of which would be gently colored with watercolors to hues of red and pink—and to fold into little puffy stars that they would then affix with a small quantity of silver spangles and hang from fishing line from the ceiling. The spangles could always be pried off and reused should the day arrive when they wanted spangled gowns or shawls instead of ceiling stars. No one felt that day would arrive soon.
“The effect will be haunting. Haunting!” Mrs. Pariseau declared.
Although they still hadn’t decided how they would make the ceiling appear like a night sky, as they certainly didn’t intend to paint it black, and they weren’t quite sure how they were going to hang all those stars, Mariana was admittedly quite pleased with it.
Then Mrs. Hardy presented an idea that enchanted all of them speechless.
“Commemorative handkerchiefs,” she said on a hush. “Can you picture it? Embroidered with the initials of The Grand Palace on the Thames. Because there won’t be a dry eye in the place when Miss Wylde sings!”
It was a deucedly clever and profoundly impractical notion. Plain linen handkerchiefs cost about four shillings each, and they fervently hoped to sell one hundred tickets, which made the cost outlandish.
“Perhaps providence will step in,” Angelique suggested gently.
They would need it. They were going to need to rely on providence to find one hundred chairs for the ballroom, too. They hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin for that.
As for the tickets, Lord Bolt had arranged for a popular jeweler in Bond Street to sell them, which would make it more convenient for gentlemen to purchase. They were printed in elegant script on a palm-sized card: four shillings for a seat, or two shillings if one preferred to stand, or, in the case of the drunk man who liked to lean against the building near The Grand Palace on the Thames, lean. The name of the jeweler was to be printed on the handbill along with the address of The Grand Palace on the Thames, and the handbills would then be distributed about London and posted primarily in places where opera enthusiasts might be found, near Haymarket and Covent Garden and Piccadilly. This ought to make it easy for people with money and a love for opera to learn about it and buy tickets, if the scandal didn’t stop them.
Mariana’s name would be tall enough on the handbills to see from at least ten feet away, if one didn’t need spectacles. Or opera glasses.
She began to feel hopeful. At least things were progressing a little.
And she’d studied her Italian, of course, as though her life depended on it.
She might be a “spirited girl,” but damned if she would let the Duke of Valkirk think she was anything like a fool.
“Buonasera, Miss Wylde.”
“Buonasera, Your Grace.”
Next to his arm was what seemed to be the same stack of foolscap—his book—she’d seen yesterday. Alongside it was a veritable mound of what looked like correspondence, some opened, some still sealed with various wax blobs, and next to that pile was what looked like a miniature tower of crisp, snowy, engraved invitations and calling cards. She’d never received or sent either of those things.
She peered and noted that the top sheet of his book began with the words “Chapter 4.” It appeared to be comprised of about five sentences, all of which had been violently scratched out, alongside which were a little drawing of a sailing ship and another of a tiny horse. She was gratified to see that this one had a fluffier tail.
Beneath this he’d drawn three gentle upward arcs. Perhaps he’d been testing a new ink?
“It was kind of you to donate two hundred pounds to the Society for the Protection of the Sussex Poor, Your Grace,” she said.
“I suppose it was,” he said, politely. “It was kind of Madame LeCroix to reminisce about her relationship to you.” He paused. “And yours to champagne.”
She regarded him coolly.
Kind, but also a bit of a bastard. How she wished someone would reminisce thusly to the newspaper about the Duke of Valkirk.
“I suppose it was,” she said, carefully.
A smile flickered over his lips. “Shall we review what you’ve learned since yesterday, to ascertain her assessment of your . . . how did Madame LeCroix describe it? Sense of responsibility?”
“I’m ready when you are,” she said.
He pulled the foolscap he’d given to her yesterday toward him, and swiftly, crisply, tested her on the words by first reading the English and demanding the Italian. Then reading Italian in a different order and demanding the English versions.
She didn’t miss a one.
“Well done, Miss Wylde.”
The faint surprise he’d inflected that with set her teeth on edge. But she could not deny that hearing these words from the most irritatingly exacting man in the world was gratifying.
“Grazie, Your Grace.”
“Do you think you can handle more vocabulary words this time? I’ll send you away with a much longer list and an assignment of, oh, say, fifteen to twenty sentences. How did Madame LeCroix put it? If a girl has plenty of work, she won’t have time to get into mischief.”
Normally she enjoyed a good piss-taking but was disinclined to let him know. She found herself instead coolly staring again, as if in so doing she had a hope of putting him in his place. The silence unfortunately allowed her to note, once more, that the contours of his face were fascinating. So distinctive and implacably fierce in repose. Those heavy brows. The mouth that bordered on sensual above that hard chin.
“Well done on memorizing the article, Your Grace. May I commend you on your parroting skills.”
A swift little smile flashed again. “Before we discuss which categories of words you ought to take away for your next lesson, was there an Italian phrase you’ve overheard that you’d like translated, or would you like to know how to say a specific phrase in Italian?”
“Ah, yes. I’d like to know what this means, Your Grace. It sounds like this: ‘voglio scoparti.’”
His eyes flew wide.
His entire body went as rigid as the mast of a ship.
Then his face went slowly—and what seemed like irrevocably—hard.
Oh God. Terrifying!
“Miss Wylde,” he said icily. “I cannot tell if you are . . . is this flirting? . . . in some—well, I can only call it astounding—way, or if you’re trying to disconcert me. Both are inadvisable, and arguably, impossible.”
“Oh, no. Oh, dear. I’m not! You should see your face . . . your expression . . . oh, it’s a bad one, isn’t it?”
She brought her hands to her face, then deliberately forced them down and folded them tightly together in her lap and regarded him anxiously.
His expression hovered somewhere between scalding indignation, exasperation, and rank astonishment.
Still, her need to know what it meant far outweighed the mortification. He was never going to like her; she would need to get used to not caring. And now she really needed to know what that phrase meant.
He sighed heavily. “Since virtue demands I cannot say the English version aloud . . .”
He dunked his quill, scrawled something on the foolscap, and pushed it across to her.
She read it and she could feel herself going pink.
Her voice seemed to have been entirely burned away. She would never speak again from mortification.
She could not believe she had actually said this aloud to a duke.
She could not believe a duke had scrawled it on a piece of foolscap and passed it to her.
A silence ensued, during which she could feel his eyes boring into her lowered head.
She finally mustered the nerve to lift her face again.
To find his expression ever-so-slightly less censoriousness, but no less exasperated. The cold outrage had shifted to something more curious. Though it was hardly sympathetic.
“Miss Wylde . . . do men actually speak to you that way?”
She cleared her throat. “Not all of them. I should say most of the Italian performers I meet are perfect gentlemen. But I’m afraid more than a few have. I’ve heard it several times. A stagehand, once. Another time, a man in the chorus. A tenor with whom I once sang. They slip it in.”
His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.
“Into conversation!” she added hurriedly, aghast. “I’ve heard it more than once, and something about the inflection has always made me suspicious. They slip it in between other phrases, doubtless to . . . amuse themselves at my expense.”
His eyebrows remained in scowl position, and he assessed her with what she was beginning to think of as the subaltern glare. It would have withered a weaker person, and she supposed he’d cultivated it for that purpose.
Though gradually, before her eyes, she watched his expression become more thoughtful.
“Where is your father?”
She stared at him. It was the last question she’d been expecting.
“My father died when I was fourteen years old.”
“Your . . . husband?”
“I haven’t a husband.”
And then she took his point. Men were the solution to women’s problems as often as they were women’s problems.
He tapped his quill thoughtfully, pressed his lips together. She supposed he thought women were bound to learn filthy words if they hadn’t men in their lives to protect them.
“Astute of you to notice what those . . . men . . . were doing with that phrase.”
Her temper stirred. “Are you aware that when you see fit to appreciate a quality of mine, you inflect it with surprise? It’s not as flattering as you might think, Your Grace.”
His eyes widened in fleeting outrage.
A tense tick or two of silence ensued. And then his expression eased.
He gave a short nod. “Point taken, Miss Wylde.”
“Thank you,” she said graciously. Relieved.
After another moment of studying her, he gestured to the filthy little phrase he’d written. “Non parlarmi in quel modo,” he said slowly and flatly. Almost menacingly.
She thought about it. “Don’t speak to me that way,” she hazarded.
There was a little pause. “Yes.”
She was almost amused, and rather touched that he’d clearly taken pains not to sound surprised. Her confidence began to recover, along with a little of her cheer.
“It’s certainly convincing the way you say it, Your Grace. My hackles fair stood up.”
“I was a general. Everything I said was meant to be convincing. Hackle-raising was my forte.”
“I shouldn’t like to be a general,” she mused. She gestured to the sheet of foolscap with her chin. “Men being how they are.”
“The loss is the military’s, Miss Wylde,” he said dryly. “I think that will be a useful phrase for you to know should you encounter that expression in conversation again. Would you like to repeat it to me?”
She took a breath, and squared her shoulders, and lowered her voice an octave. “Non parlarmi in quel modo.”
It was a creditably menacing imitation of him, repeated with phonetic flawlessness.
Amazement and something like pure hilarity momentarily flared in his face.
“Well,” he said finally. “You certainly gave me second thoughts about speaking to you disrespectfully.”
“I think you’re humoring me, which seems unlike you.”
He snorted. “Why don’t you write that phrase now, Miss Wylde, so you won’t forget it.”
She dipped her quill and in her careful, neat hand began to copy what he’d written. And then she paused. “Should I be more polite about it when I use it? Perhaps add a ‘please’?”
“Do you think you ought to be polite about it, Miss Wylde?”
“If I thought I could get away with it, I would tell them in no uncertain terms where they could put their rude suggestion. And the day I’m able to do that freely will be the day they won’t dare to say it. So I suppose the issue is moot.”
He cast his eyes up to the ceiling in thought. “In that case, Ti chiedo di parlarmi con rispetto. I ask that you speak to me with respect.”
He retrieved the foolscap from her, wrote the phrase swiftly, then pushed it back to her.
“I believe ‘rispetto’—respect—will be a useful word for you to know and use. And a useful thing to demand in such circumstances . . . assuming, of course, ‘rispetto’ is what you want when someone says those words to you.”
She went rigid.
A surge of temper sent heat rushing into her cheeks. She knew, and he knew, what had been written about her in the newspapers. He had a fixed notion of who she was, and the injustice of it scalded.
She clamped her teeth together as she wrote. She could sense his eyes on her, and the fierce tick of his mind. He was as consequential as a bloody planet, sitting there.
She finished and looked up, to find him watching her.
“I’d like to make something clear, Miss Wylde. I—and the other gentlemen in residence here at The Grand Palace on the Thames, and gentlemen in general—do not ever and would not ever speak about or to women that way, either in the smoking room or in any other social context.”
Which was lovely to hear, of course. Perhaps he meant it to be reassuring. But the underlying implication was that the contexts in which she moved were at fault. That if these words were being said in her presence, then the men in question were surely not gentlemen.
And then what did that make her? Spirited, she supposed.
She already knew what he thought that made her.
“It’s very gratifying to hear that you don’t seem to have any difficulty respecting women, Your Grace,” she said pleasantly. “Or perhaps your respect is reserved to a type of woman?”
There was a pause.
“Women are people, Miss Wylde. All people deserve and are accorded respect until they prove they do not deserve it. It’s a simple rule, really.” He issued these words with a sort of patient, maddening certainty. As though they ought to have been self-evident but he was unsurprised she didn’t know it.
“How might someone lose your respect?”
His mouth curved slightly.
He knew precisely what she was asking. Because the splinter, as it were, had not yet been pulled entirely out of their association. Something remained unsaid.
Her heart began to jab at her breastbone. She realized she was afraid of the answer. But suddenly she could not endure another day without it.
“If one has ever needed to tell a soldier’s mother that he was killed in battle, Miss Wylde, they would perhaps lose all respect for frivolous, careless people who engage in thoughtless, reckless activities that endanger their lives and the lives of others.”
The words were elegantly drawled at first, but they gradually grew more taut until the last few fair glittered with ice.
His composure did not so much as shift a hair. But she heard it. It was a sort of futile fury at fate itself, at deaths not even he could have prevented, even with all of his brilliant rules and strategies. It was pain as much as it was anger. She could feel it echoing in the pit of her stomach.
It only surprised her in that she would not have guessed at it. She sat with this realization a moment.
And there they had it.
She breathed in. Breathed out. Mustering her nerve.
“I would like to ask a question, Your Grace.”
“Very well,” he said easily.
“What is your understanding of the . . . events . . . that led to my being here at The Grand Palace on the Thames?”
“That your two jealous lovers fought over you while you were present, a duel challenge was issued, the duel was fought on the spot, and a promising young man was nearly killed.”
He delivered this with brutal, unvarnished calm.
She was still, but her cheeks were hot. “‘Lovers.’ Plural. That word certainly tripped off your tongue, Your Grace.” She said it somewhat bitterly.
“May I refer you to an earlier conversation wherein I shared with you that it’s nigh on impossible to shock or offend me.”
“Irritate you, on the other hand . . .”
She reviewed his expression and decided it was wiser not to finish that sentence.
“I should like to say that I don’t owe you an explanation of what truly transpired that night. Would you agree?”
“I cannot disagree.”
“But I swear to you that neither one of those men was my lover.”
He tapped his quill slowly. Tap. Tap. Tap. Apart from a single arched brow, his expression did not change. He waited.
“. . . at . . . the time,” she expounded, a little more quietly.
Two cynical dents appeared at the corners of his mouth. This, clearly, did not come as a shock to him.
It was both unbearable to have to explain this to him, and unavoidable.
She took another fortifying breath. “Two years ago, Lord Revell pursued me rather determinedly. I liked him. And I’ll admit I was flattered because . . . well, have you seen the man?” She flicked her eyes up at him, a bravura attempt to be minxy, instantly quelled by the pure flint in the duke’s eyes.
“And . . . and one must . . . well, when I hadn’t a book full of warnings to refer to, one must learn things the hard way, yes? In the absence of books on how to behave or the advice of moralizing dukes, that is.”
It was a bit like jousting with a fortress. She was going to come away with, at best, a snapped lance and a scrap or two of pride. As a duke, she supposed there were dozens of ways he could crush her, if the notion took him. But she was certain of one thing: he might be a bastard, but she knew in her gut he would be a fair one, if she could get him to listen to the truth.
“Learning things the hard way is a tried and true method for getting them to stick, yes,” he agreed with exaggerated patience.
“And so. My mother had gone to live in Scotland with a cousin until such time I could make enough money to keep both of us comfortably alive. I was . . . lonely. Lord Revell made . . . I shall use the word ‘overtures,’ given that this is a story that involves the opera. And we became involved.”
“I am familiar with how such associations come about, Miss Wylde. But thank you for the history.”
He was a sardonic bastard. She might have enjoyed it more if he wasn’t wielding it against her.
“I cannot fairly claim that it was an unpleasant or unwelcome association. Or that I was an unwilling participant. But I soon realized the whole notion did not sit right with me, and . . . it did not solve my loneliness.”
Her face felt warm with the revelation.
She bravely looked into his eyes.
He blinked.
And his expression—well, she didn’t suppose it ever softened—had gone decidedly more thoughtful.
She took it as encouragement to go on.
“Six months into our . . .” She cleared her throat. She could not bring herself to say “friendship,” as it was far too coy. She would have to use the more embarrassing and accurate “. . . affair, I explained as kindly as I could that I no longer wanted to go on as we were. We parted as friends, I thought. Or at least civilly. As much as any man enjoys being told he is . . . ah . . . no longer wanted in that way. I never had reason to believe his heart was either broken or even involved. And he certainly is spoiled for choice, when it comes to women. So at the time of the . . .”
“Duel?” the duke supplied evenly.
She nodded. “. . . he had not been my lover for more than a year.”
The word “lover,” like “duel” and “affair,” would forever be a part of her history. How had she been caught up in such a thing? It seemed she could not have escaped the momentum of it, no matter how she’d tried. She might as well get used to saying it bravely and frankly. It could not be undone.
“All of this I swear upon everything I have ever held or will ever hold dear. I do not have many things to hold dear, but they are my mother, my father’s memory, my pink ribbon, and my fur-lined pelisse. I would die for them.”
She’d tried a joke. Because she couldn’t help herself.
He took this in. His expression was difficult to interpret. Like a metronome, the quill between his fingers measured the methodical tick of his mind.
But his eyes never left her face.
“Then I shall be compelled to believe you, won’t I?” he said finally. Quietly. Almost gently.
She subtly released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“So . . . the night of the duel . . . well, it all began backstage, in our dressing rooms, after my first performance in the lead role. So many encores . . . my room was filled with roses. Roses, Your Grace. Actual flowers from a hothouse! I could not believe such loveliness was for me. It smelled like heaven. All the young bloods like to crowd backstage after a show . . . perhaps you know this?”
“So I have heard,” he said ironically.
“Lord Kilhone was one of them. He praised my performance and made so bold as to tell me I was beautiful. And . . . well, when someone tells you you’re beautiful, it’s only polite to graciously receive such a compliment, and perhaps return it somewhat in kind?”
“I cannot say, as I’ve never been accused of such a thing,” he said dryly.
“Well, then everyone’s been remiss, Your Grace.”
His slow smile was so unexpectedly, wickedly sensual, it shocked the breath from her.
She began to suspect, with a certain thrill and uneasiness that accompanies walking the ledge of a tall building, that he was, in fact, capable of devastating charm. He just hadn’t seen fit to expend any of it on her thus far.
It occurred to her that this was likely a mercy.
She did not think this was a man who did anything by halves.
“Do you see the difference?” she said. “That was flirting, Your Grace. And now we’ve both learned something today.”
“It’s a mystery why duels spontaneously happen around you, Miss Wylde.”
“I think so, too,” she said earnestly. “But mind you, it was just the one. Sometimes flirting seems the polite thing to do. Isn’t it rude not to say or do a thing about it when men flirt? That is, they will flirt, won’t they?”
“Do I really strike you as the sort?”
“Oh, I suspect you’re capable of anything, if you really put your back into it, Your Grace.”
She wanted another one of those smiles the way she’d wanted another sip of champagne that fateful night. And what did that say about her? Both were potent. Neither was wise.
He gave her another one. Fleeting and patient.
She was reminded he was a castle. All but impossible to breach with her meager weapons.
And as far as he was concerned, she was still on trial.
“Lord Revell heard this exchange, and he was outraged that Lord Kilhone would dare to compliment me in his presence, which is frankly ridiculous, as he had no claim on me at all, though they were both . . . ah, foxed.”
“You don’t say,” the duke said cynically.
And even as she said the words, the story seemed unspeakably frivolous and sordid even in her own ears; how must it sound to him? But oddly she felt stronger as she unburdened herself, which spoke to how heavy it had weighed upon her.
“I wasn’t,” she hastened to add, primly. This was true, but mainly because they had run out of champagne. “They used me as an excuse to go outside with pistols and shoot at each other,” she said bitterly. “While their friends looked on. While their friends looked on! The papers were wrong. I didn’t watch. I couldn’t bear it. But neither of them gave a da . . . fig about . . . me.” She took a breath to steady her voice; she heard the rise in pitch, the stifled anguish in it. “It was about two spoiled men and their pride and reckless tempers that they felt free to indulge like children throwing tantrums. Something I would never dream of doing, and never, ever get away with doing.”
His eyes were cool and remote, as if he was watching the entire sordid scene inside his mind, the way he might an enemy army amassing on a faraway hillside.
“If they cared at all for me, wouldn’t they have minded or noticed that I was terribly frightened?”
Damnation. She kept her chin up, but her voice broke on the last word, anyway.
“You were frightened?” he said sharply, after a moment.
She nodded wearily.
His face was pensive now. Lips pressed together.
She took a breath, and dared to ask the question she’d yearned to ask all along.
“So that is the story, and I swear it on my life. I am sorry it happened, but I cannot see how I caused it. But what I’d like to know is this, Your Grace. You ought to know. Is it honorable, what they did?”
She asked it as if she were indeed on the dock and he were the magistrate.
Her heart was pounding.
There was a beat of silence.
“No,” he said.
It should not have felt like absolution. She was not Catholic. This was not confession. He was not St. Peter at the Gates. But he was the national arbiter of honor, and it was the best she was going to do, and it was enough.
She exhaled.
“And I don’t feel as though my honor was harmed—im . . .”
“Impugned.”
“Even so, one can be angry and not lose one’s head. Is that not so?”
“Yes. Being angry without losing my head is, in fact, my specialty.”
“I thought glaring was.”
A vanishingly swift smile here. “The glaring is usually a result of that.”
There was a pause.
“And so, Your Grace, that is my story. Knowing it, you may continue to hold me in contempt if you so choose, but I should be obliged if you would disguise it better.”
His eyes flared in fleeting astonishment. His jaw tensed against a reflexive jolt of temper, or perhaps arrogance.
But she’d been right. He was a fair man.
But what settled in was a certain wry speculation. For the space of a few seconds, he assessed her.
“I hold you in the utmost respect, Miss Wylde,” he said quietly.
She gave him a little smile.
He continued to study her, a tiny furrow forming between his eyes.
“Gentilmente non sparatevi l’un l’altro,” he said suddenly, firmly.
She gave a start.
“Kindly do not shoot each other,” he translated.
“Sono spaventata,” he continued. His voice softened. “I am frightened.”
He wrote them down for her to take away.
She departed in possession of a sheet of foolscap that said, “I want to fuck you” in Italian and English, below which were written the word “impugn” and two new sets of Italian nouns (buildings and food) and some more verbs. All in all, representative of a satisfying day’s work, if a confusing document for anyone who might happen to come across it out of context.