Nobody answered him. The merchants looked at their cups. They were decent men, most of them, and she could see they were sorry. But a man can be sorry and useless at the same time.
Anna stood behind the counter in her brown stuff gown, with her sleeves pinned up and her apron spotted with coffee. She felt her heart begin to beat in a slow, heavy way, like a door being knocked on in a house where no one had lived for years.
"I do, Your Grace."
She had not meant to say it—or she had meant to say it for eight years, every day, and had simply never been asked.
The whole room turned to look at her. That was a new thing, and she did not like it. She had worked behind that counter since she was fifteen years old. In all that time, the gentlemen of the Baltic trade had looked at the coffeepot, the sugar, and the change in her hand, and never once at her face. Now they stared as though the coffeepot had spoken.
Behind her, in the doorway to the kitchen, her aunt drew in a sharp breath. Aunt Mildred was a small, straight woman in black, with her keys at her waist and her hair scraped back under a widow's cap. She had owned the coffeehouse since her husband died, and she had kept it respectable by never allowing anything in it to be surprising.
"My niece is mistaken, Your Grace," she said. "She had a foreign nurse as a child. She remembers a few nursery words. It is nothing that would be of use to you."
The Duke did not look at the aunt. He looked at Anna. He looked at her the way she imagined he might look at a map—steadily, without hurry, as though he expected to find a road on it.
"Is that true?" he asked. "A few nursery words?"
"No, Your Grace." Her voice came out lower than she wanted, and she made it steadier. "I was born in St. Petersburg. My father was an English merchant there, on the embankment by the river. My mother died when I was small. I was raised by a woman from a village on the Volga, and I spoke her language before I spoke my own. I have not spoken it aloud since we came to England. But I have not forgotten it. You do not forget the language you were sung to sleep in."
Something moved in his face. It was not a smile; it was the place where a smile had been a long time ago.