“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 14
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
It was the hour of the promenade. The carriages were out along the Ring, and the riders on Rotten Row, and the ladies walking in pairs along the gravel with their maids behind them. And everyone in that whole bright, gossiping half-mile of London saw the Duke of Ashkam come walking across the grass, with a little girl in a red pelisse between him and a young woman in a plain blue gown and a cheap straw bonnet.The little girl was holding both their hands. Every few steps, she lifted her feet off the ground and swung between them, shrieking with joy. And every time she did it, the Duke laughed out loud.Carriages slowed. Quizzing glasses went up. Anna felt every eye like a hand laid on the back of her neck."Your Grace," she said low. "People are looking.""Let them look.""They are looking at me. I am a coffee girl in a straw bonnet holding the hand of the Duke of Ashkam's daughter in Hyde Park at five o'clock. There is not one of them who doesn't know exactly what they think I am."He did not answer, but he did not let go of Sonia's hand, and he did not walk any faster. And when a yellow barouche came bowling past with Lady Cressida Hale in it under a white parasol, and Lady Cressida looked straight through Anna as if she were a gap in the railings, the Duke lifted his hat to her with perfect courtesy and kept on walking.By the next evening, it was in every club in St. James's. It was Felix who told it at White's, at length, with gestures, and Felix who coined the phrase that went round the room and down the length of Piccadilly before midnight:The Duke's Coffee Pot.By the end of the week, a print shop in St. James's Street had a colored caricature in its window: a tall man in a coronet on his knees on a sawdust floor, holding up a tiny cup to a girl in an apron, with a row of fat merchants laughing behind them. People stood three deep on the pavement to look at it.Anna went to her room and sat for a long while looking at her red hands.The Dowager went to the library, which she had not entered since her husband's funeral, and shut the door."You have made the girl ridiculous," she said, "and yourself a great deal more so. I have had three notes today, Edmund. One of them was from Lady Thursby. If the engagement is not announced at the Arsenyev dinner on Saturday, as it was always intended to be, the Marquis will consider himself released, and he will say why, at length, to anyone who will listen."The Duke was standing at the window with his back to her. "Let him."