“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 16
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Sonia listened to the whole of it with her eyes fixed on Anna's face. Then she said, "No," quite calmly, got down from her chair, and walked out of the nursery.They could not find her for an hour. The whole house looked. Footmen went through the cellars and the mews. Mrs. Dunston searched every cupboard on the second floor. The Duke came up from the library two stairs at a time and turned the attics inside out.And it was Anna, in the end, who thought to look in her own room and lift the lid of her own small, battered trunk—the one she had sent for from Birchin Lane.Sonia was curled up inside it, on top of Anna's two other gowns, with her wooden horse in her arms and her thumb in her mouth, fast asleep.She had packed herself.Anna sat down on the floor beside the trunk and put her face in her hands. When she looked up, the Duke was in the doorway, breathing hard. He looked at his daughter asleep in the coffee girl's luggage, and at the coffee girl sitting on the floor, and he understood the whole of it without a word being said."My mother," he said."It isn't her fault. She is right.""She is not right.""She is right, Your Grace." Anna got to her feet, because she could not say this sitting at his feet. "Lady Cressida is the daughter of a marquis. Your father gave his word. You have a name, and a daughter who will have to be married one day. And every day I stay in this house, I make all of those things smaller. I won't do it. I won't be the coffee pot in the print shop window. Not to you. Not to her.""Anna."It was the first time he had said her name. It went through her like a blade."Don't," she said. "Please don't. You are promised.""I am promised to no one. I have never asked Cressida Hale for anything in my life except the salt.""Then your mother has promised you, and your father before her, and the whole of London. It comes to the same thing for a man of your rank, and you know it does." She bent and lifted the sleeping child out of the trunk, and Sonia did not wake, only wound her arms round Anna's neck the way she had on the sawdust floor at Pello's. Anna held her and looked at the Duke over the small, dark head. "I'll stay until Saturday, because she'll need me that night with the house full of strangers. And on Monday, I'll go to Bath. And you will let me go, Your Grace, because if you don't, I don't think I shall be able to go at all."She carried his daughter past him into the nursery, and he stood in the empty doorway for a long time after she had gone.