The Duke closed the watch. The small click was very loud in the room. For a long moment, she thought he would insist. She could see how badly he wanted to in the line of his jaw and the way the knuckles of his hand stood out white around the silver.
Then he inclined his head to the man in the bed, as he would have done to an equal.
"Tell him I have waited this long," he said. "I can wait until he stands."
It was past two in the morning when the carriage set her down at the end of the lane. The Duke had come with her, though she had told him there was no need, and he walked her to the door of the coffeehouse through the dripping dark without a word.
At the door, he stopped. "Will you come again tomorrow?" he said. "I would not ask it if there were another way. I will speak to your aunt myself."
"You need not speak to her," Anna said. "I will come."
Her aunt was waiting inside with a single candle, sitting very straight on the bench by the cold stove. She did not shout. She never shouted.
"Eight years," she said softly. "Eight years I have kept you, and fed you, and taught you to be useful, and to keep your father's foolishness out of your mouth. And tonight you stood in my house and told every man in the Baltic trade that you are a Russian peasant woman's child."
"I told them I could help a man who was ill."
"You told them who your father was." Her aunt stood. The candle shook very slightly in her hand, and Anna saw it shake, and saw her aunt see her seeing it. "Every man in that room lost money when your father's house failed. I lost everything I had put by. I lent him every shilling of it because he was my brother and he wrote such hopeful letters. Do you know what it is to carry that shame behind a counter for eight years, to pour coffee for men who pity you?" She drew a long breath. "Go to bed. You will not go to that house again."
But the next afternoon, the Duke's carriage stood at the end of the lane. The Duke himself came into the coffeehouse and spoke to her aunt in her own small parlor for a quarter of an hour with the door shut.