“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 12
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She stood up. He waved her down again and sat himself on the window seat at the far end, with the whole length of the room between them."Teach me," he said."Your Grace?""Teach me Russian. Not all of it. I'm thirty-four, and I have a head like a turnip for languages. I spent four years in Petersburg and came away with the words for 'sledge' and 'good evening' and 'bring me another.' But I want to be able to say good morning to my daughter without a cow being mentioned. I want to say good night to her. I want her to be able to tell me she has had a bad dream without sending for you first." He looked down at his hands. "I want her to stop needing an interpreter for her own father."Anna looked at him across the schoolroom for a long moment. Then she put the stocking down in her lap."Dobroye utro," she said. "Good morning. Say it after me."So began the strangest courtship in Grosvenor Square, though neither of them would have called it that, and Anna would have been mortified to hear it named. Every night when Sonia was asleep, the Duke came up to the schoolroom, with the door open and the footman dozing on the landing, and sat on the window seat. Anna sat by the fire, and she taught him.She taught him "good morning" and "good night." She taught him "don't be afraid" and "I am here" and "what's the matter?" and "are you hungry?" and "look, it's snowing." She taught him the names of the animals in Sonia's picture book and the first two verses of the Bayushki song, which he sang so badly that she had to put her hand over her mouth.He was not, as he had warned her, any good at it. He put the stress on the wrong syllable of everything. One night he tried to tell her that the evening had turned cold, and told her instead, with great seriousness, that the soup was a bear. She laughed until she cried.He sat on the window seat and watched her laugh with an expression she did not let herself look at too closely.And between the words, a little at a time, they talked.She told him about the Neva freezing so hard in January that they held fairs on it with ice hills and gingerbread stalls; about Dunyasha, who knew a song for everything and a saint for everything else. He asked about her father, and she told him that, too, in pieces on different nights: how Robert Fenwick had kept the books for the House of Cray and Sons for eighteen years, and how old Mr. Cray's son had taken the house's money and fled to Hamburg, and how it was her father's hand on every page of the ledgers; how there had been no charge because there was no proof, but there had been no more work either—not for an English clerk whose name had gone round every counting house in Petersburg; how they had come home on a timber ship with one trunk; and how he had walked the city every day for a whole winter looking for a stool in a counting house, and had come home every evening with his boots wet through, until a cold settled on his chest in March and did not lift.