“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 2
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The child screamed again. Something in Russian. One word over and over, and the merchants looked at one another and shifted in their seats. A few of them had a little trade Russian, enough to buy a cargo of flax at Archangel, enough to curse a ship's master in his own tongue. But not one of them knew what to say to a weeping child, and not one of them tried.Anna was standing three feet away with her pot. She did not mean to do anything. She only heard what the little girl was crying, which was the word for "nurse," and then the word for "home," and then a word that meant nothing at all—the kind of word a very small child makes when she has used up all the others.And without thinking about it, because it was the oldest habit she had, Anna hummed under her breath the first line of a song every child in Petersburg knew:Bayu, bayushki, bayu...It was barely a sound, but the little girl stopped screaming as if a door had shut. She turned her wet face out of her father's collar and looked round the room, searching.The Duke felt her go still and looked down at her in astonishment. And then, because she could not find the voice again, she began to cry once more, softly now, hiccuping.And the Duke lifted his head and said to the room, in a voice that had clearly never before had to beg for anything in a public coffee house: "Does anyone here speak Russian?"Silence. A newspaper rustled. Somebody coughed into his cravat.And the little girl raised her arm and pointed straight at Anna.There was a moment when nobody understood. Then Anna set the copper pot down on the nearest table, wiped her hands on her apron, and said, "I do, Your Grace."The laugh started with Mr. Gedge, the tallow merchant, who was the loudest man in the room and the richest, and liked everyone to know both."Who? Pello's girl? And I'm the Emperor of all the Russias!"Then it went round the tables the way a fire goes round a grate. Men who had never once looked at her face in six years looked at it now and laughed at it.The fair young gentleman in the lavender waistcoat laughed loudest of all."Edmund, she pours coffee!" he said, delighted. "She'll be speaking Chinese to us next. Shall we ask the boy who sweeps the floor whether he has any Greek?""Anna." Mr. Pello's voice was low and sharp. "Back to the pots. You're making a show of this house."Anna's face burned. She knew exactly what she looked like to them: a coffee girl of twenty-three in a darned blue gown and a brown apron with a scorch mark on the hem, putting herself forward in front of a duke—a girl from nowhere with no family and no name who had forgotten her place. She had been taught every day of her life in London that a place was the one thing a girl like her could not afford to forget.