“Does Anyone Here Speak Russian?” the Duke Asked — His Little Girl Pointed at the Maid Serving Coffee
Chapter 9
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Anna stood very straight in her blue gown. She thought of the little girl upstairs who had gone nine days with nobody in the whole of England speaking her name."Forgive me, Your Grace. I will teach her English gladly, but I will not take her Russian away from her."The Dowager's eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch."It is the language her mother spoke to her," Anna said. "It is the language her grandmother sang to her in. It is all she has left of them. If I take it away, she will learn English, Your Grace. But she will learn it the way a person learns the inside of a prison."There was a long and terrible silence in the yellow room."You forget yourself," said the Dowager at last, very softly. "A girl who pours coffee for tallow merchants does not tell the Dowager Duchess of Ashkam how her granddaughter is to be raised. You are in this house because my son has been sentimental. Sentiment passes, Miss Fenwick. It always passes. You may go."Anna went, but she did not stop speaking Russian to Sonia, and nobody that week quite dared to make her.Lady Cressida Hale came on the fifth day.Anna had heard of her long before she saw her; everyone in London had. She was the only daughter of the Marquis of Thursby, who sat in the Cabinet and owned a third of Northamptonshire, and she had been called the most beautiful woman in England for three seasons together by people who had seen most of the others. It had been understood since the spring by everyone who understood such things that she would be the next Duchess of Ashkam.She came in a primrose pelisse trimmed with swansdown, with Lord Felix at her elbow and a pair of pug dogs on a blue ribbon. And the Dowager received her in the great drawing room on the first floor. And after half an hour of the weather and the Regent's latest folly, the Dowager rang the bell and asked for Lady Sophia to be brought down."And the girl," Cressida said lightly. "Do have them bring the girl. Felix has told me so much. I am perfectly wild to see her."So Anna brought Sonia down. Sonia held onto two of her fingers the whole way and hid behind her skirt at the drawing room door. Anna knelt to straighten the little white frock and whispered to her in Russian that the pretty lady was only a lady and could not bite.Cressida watched all of this from the sofa with her chin on her gloved hand."Oh, but she is exactly as Felix said!" she said, delighted. "Look at her hands, Felix. You can see the coffee on them still."