The Duke of Ashkam asked it of a room full of merchants with his small daughter sobbing into the collar of his greatcoat, and not one man answered him.Then the little girl lifted her head, stretched out one arm, and pointed past every gentleman in the room, straight at the young woman pouring coffee behind the counter in a patched brown apron.Her name was Anna Fenwick, and she said very quietly, "I do, Your Grace."The whole coffee room burst out laughing.She had eight shillings a week and a place she could lose before the cups went cold. So what would the Duke do?Ten minutes earlier, Pello’s coffee house in Birchin Lane had been exactly what it was every morning of the year. The Baltic merchants sat at the long tables under the tall windows with their newspapers and their price lists, arguing about hemp and tallow and the ice in the Gulf of Finland. The clerks ran in and out with letters. The fire smoked, and Anna moved between the tables with a big copper pot, filling cups before anyone thought to ask, because Mr. Pello said a good coffee girl was one nobody noticed.She had gone unnoticed for six years. She was very good at it.Then the street door banged open, and the cold October air came in, and with it a sound that stopped every conversation in the room.It was a child screaming. Not crying, not whimpering, but screaming the way a child screams when she has been frightened for so long that she has forgotten how to stop.The man carrying her was tall and dark-haired and dressed far too well for Birchin Lane. His hat was gone. His greatcoat hung open, and the little girl in his arms—a small thing of five or six in a pale blue traveling coat—had her fists knotted in his lapels and was howling into his neck.Behind him came a fair young gentleman in a lavender waistcoat, holding his own hat over one ear."Good God, Edmund," the fair gentleman said. "The whole of the city can hear her.""Then the whole of the city will have to bear it," said the tall man.He looked around the room, and every merchant at every table recognized the look of a man who was used to being obeyed, and had run clean out of people to obey him."I want Mr. Lockhart. The master of the Neva told me he takes his coffee here."Mr. Pello came out from behind the counter, wiping his hands on a cloth. He was a broad, red-faced man of sixty who had poured coffee for three generations of the Russia trade, and he knew a duke when one walked into his house, even a duke with no hat."Mr. Lockhart's gone to Riga, Your Grace. Sailed Thursday. He'll not be back before the ice."The fair gentleman laughed. "There, I told you so. Come home, Edmund. Your mother will find someone.""My mother has been finding someone for nine days."