This man is for the Duke of Rothley. He speaks no English. God help him.
That was all the paper said in a sailor's heavy capitals, and Anna Carburn read it upside down across the counter because the gentleman who had laid it there had not yet taken his hand away.
It was a torn half-sheet, damp at the corners, with a smear of tar along the fold. Someone had pinned it to a coat; she could see the little rusted holes where the pin had gone through. She set down the coffeepot she was holding very quietly and looked up at the man who had brought the rain in with him.
He was tall, and he was plainly a gentleman of the highest kind—the kind that made a room lower its voice before it knew why. He had ash-brown hair darkened by the wet, and eyes of a warm, tawny brown that should have made his face kind and somehow did not. He was perhaps thirty. His coat was black and very well cut, and there was mud on his boots to the ankle, as though he had walked from his carriage through the worst of the lane without noticing it.
He did not take off his hat. He looked around the long, smoky room at the merchants on their benches with their newspapers and their pipes, and he spoke to all of them at once:
"Does anyone here speak Russian?"
The coffeehouse off Threadneedle Street had heard a great many questions in its time. It was the place where the Baltic merchants met—the men who bought hemp, timber, and tallow from the cold ports across the North Sea. On most evenings, it was full of talk about ships, prices, and ice. It had never, in Anna's memory, gone so completely silent.
A newspaper rustled. Somebody coughed into his fist. The old gentleman by the fire, who had traded with Riga for most of his life, took his pipe out of his mouth and said that he had a little German, if that would serve. A younger man said that the Russians he dealt with all spoke French.
"This man does not," the gentleman at the counter said. "He speaks nothing but his own tongue. I have a physician in my house who cannot ask him where it hurts. The embassy will not open its doors until morning."
He paused. It was a very small pause, but Anna heard it.
"The physician is not certain he has until morning."