“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 5
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Anna stood up with the child on her hip."I'll fetch my shawl, Mr. Pello," she said.As she passed the fair gentleman, he took a coin from his waistcoat pocket and flicked it, spinning, onto the counter beside her copper pot."For the performance," said Lord Felix Hale, and smiled at her.Anna looked at the coin. Then she looked at him. Then she walked past it and out of the door with the Duke of Ashkam's daughter in her arms, and she did not look back.The Duke paused only long enough to pick the coin up off the counter and drop it, without a word, into Lord Felix's coffee.His carriage was waiting at the corner of Lombard Street, black and gleaming, with the Ashkam arms on the door, and Anna had never in her life sat in anything so fine. She sat in it now with a coffee-stained apron still tied round her waist, and a duke's daughter asleep across her knees, because Sonia, having finally stopped crying, had fallen asleep the way small children do—all at once and completely, between one word and the next.The Duke sat opposite. Lord Felix had chosen to walk. The carriage rocked through Cheapside and up Holborn Hill, and the Duke watched his daughter sleep as if he were afraid she might vanish if he looked away."How," he said at last, "does a girl in a coffee house in Birchin Lane come to speak Russian like that? That was not trade Russian. I heard enough of that sort in four years at the embassy. That was a nursery.""It was a nursery, Your Grace." Anna smoothed the child's dark hair back from her forehead. "I grew up in Petersburg. My father kept the books for an English merchant house on the English Embankment. I had a Russian nurse before I had an English governess, and I spoke Russian before I spoke anything else. We came home when I was fifteen.""And your father?""He's gone, Your Grace. The spring after we came home." She said it the way people say a thing they have said many times, so that it has worn smooth with handling. "Mr. Pello knew him from the Russia trade. He gave me a place when nobody else would.""And I have just cost you that place.""Yes, Your Grace."He looked at her then, a long, considering look, and she made herself meet it."You knew what Pello would do, and you came anyway.""She asked me not to go away," Anna said simply. "She said everybody goes away."The Duke turned his face to the window, and he did not say anything else until they reached Grosvenor Square.Ashkam House stood on the north side of the square, tall and pale and severe, with a fanlight like a spread hand over the door, and a pair of footmen in blue livery who did their very best not to stare at the coffee girl climbing down from His Grace's carriage with His Grace's daughter in her arms.