“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 7
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Sonia woke at 4:00 in the afternoon and would not eat. This, Mrs. Dunston explained to Anna in the nursery with the air of a woman describing the weather, was how it had been for nine days. The best cook in Mayfair had sent up broth and jelly and bread and butter, and on one desperate occasion a whole iced cake, and Lady Sophia had pushed every one of them onto the floor.Anna knelt beside the little girl and asked her a question in Russian. Sonia answered in two words."She wants kasha," Anna said.Mrs. Dunston looked blank."Buckwheat, ma'am. Boiled in milk with a little butter and salt. It's what every child in Russia eats in the morning. If the cook has no buckwheat, there will be some at the corn chandler's in Shadwell, where the Russia ships come in."A footman was sent to Shadwell. He came back at 7:00, splashed to the knees, with a paper bag of brown grain under his arm. And Anna went down to the kitchen herself, past the scandalized cook and the staring kitchen maids, and stood at the great black range in her coffee house apron, and stirred a pan of porridge the way Dunyasha used to stir it—slowly, always the same way round.Sonia ate two bowls. Then she ate a third. Then she fell asleep at the table with the spoon still in her hand.The Duke had been standing in the nursery doorway for the whole of the third bowl. Anna had not heard him come up. When she looked round, he was simply there, leaning against the frame in his shirtsleeves, watching his daughter sleep with an expression Anna would remember for the rest of her life.It was not the face of a duke. It was the face of a man who had been holding his breath for nine days and had just been given leave to let it go."Thank you," he said."It was only porridge, Your Grace.""It was not only porridge." He came in quietly, lifted the spoon out of his daughter's fist, and stood looking down at her. "She has her mother's mouth. I had forgotten. I have looked at that little face every day since the ship, and I had forgotten."Anna said nothing. She had learned, pouring coffee, when a man wanted an answer and when he only wanted not to be alone."Her mother was the Princess Elena Stranikova," he said after a while. "I was a secretary at the embassy in Petersburg. I was twenty-five and a younger son with no expectations of anything, and she was the bravest woman I ever met. She married me over the heads of her entire family because she said I was the only man in Petersburg who did not bore her." He smiled faintly. "I think it was the only time in her life she was wrong about anything.