“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 18
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A ripple of laughter went round the room. Anna felt it on her skin like cold water."Pour for the Count, girl," said Cressida, and smiled.Anna crossed the long room in her blue gown and her brown apron, with every eye in it on her, and took up the great silver coffee pot from the tray, and poured. She poured for the Countess first, because she was a lady. Then she poured for the Count.And as she set his cup beside him, the old man looked up at her from under his white eyebrows and said in Russian, kindly:"Where are you from, child?""From the English Embankment, Your Excellency," Anna answered quietly in the same tongue. "My father was Robert Fenwick. He kept the books for the House of Cray."The Count put his cup down. "Fenwick?" he said. "Robert Fenwick?" He looked at her face for a long moment. "I knew him. When young Crayle ran off to Hamburg with the money, your father went to every creditor in Petersburg himself, on foot, in January, and told them the truth to their faces when he could have run as well. My own father was one of them. He said he had never seen a braver thing done by a poor man." The old man's eyes were wet. "We never knew what became of him. We never knew he had a daughter."Nobody else in the room understood a word of it. But they could see the Count's face, and they could see the coffee girl's, and the laughter had died away.Cressida saw it, too, and she did not like it. She stepped forward with her own cup held out, smiling, and said, "And now, me, Miss Fenwick, if you have quite finished your little chat."And as Anna lifted the heavy pot to pour for her, Cressida turned her wrist very slightly, very gracefully, at exactly the wrong moment.The hot coffee went over Anna's hand.She did not cry out. She set the pot down on the tray carefully so as to spill no more, and stood very still with her scalded hand pressed against her apron, and her face went white."Oh, how clumsy!" said Cressida clearly to the whole room. "But that is what comes of hiring from a coffee house. One can teach them French, but one cannot teach them to hold a cup."Somebody laughed. Only one person by the door: it was Felix.And then a small figure in a white muslin frock, with bare feet and her dark hair coming out of its ribbon, came pelting in through the open doors and across the drawing room carpet—between the gentlemen of the Cabinet and round the skirts of the diamonds—and flung herself at Anna, wrapped both arms round her waist, and turned to glare at Lady Cressida Hale with the full fury of a six-year-old who has just watched someone hurt the person she loves best in the world.