Across the street, a gentleman in a brown greatcoat was coming home from somewhere. Anna knew him: he took coffee at the long table by the fire every Tuesday and Friday, he dealt in Riga timber, and he had never once looked at her face.
He looked at her face now. He looked at her hair, the Duke's bare head, and the open door behind them. Then he raised his hat to the Duke with a slow, careful courtesy, and walked on.
By noon, it was all over the city. By evening, it was in the West End.
By the next morning, there was a print in the window of the shop at the corner of Cornhill. It was a colored print—crude and very quick—of a long-legged duke in his nightshirt pouring coffee into the cup of a serving girl in an apron. Underneath, it said: The Duke's Coffee Maid. And underneath that: Served Hot.
Her aunt did not shout then, either. She took the apron from Anna's hands at the kitchen door and hung it on its hook. She said that no respectable man would buy a cup of coffee from those hands now, and that the house could not afford to lose the men it had left. She said Anna might keep to her attic until something could be arranged.
She did not say what, and for the whole of that day, Anna sat on the narrow bed under the slope of the roof. The faded blue kerchief her nurse had tied round her neck on the ship lay folded on her knee. It was the only thing of her nurse's she had kept. She listened to the voices of the merchants coming up through the boards, laughing.
The Duke of Rothley came at four. Her aunt showed him up to the attic herself, since there was nowhere else in the house to receive him, and then stood outside the door, which he closed.
He had to bend his head under the beam. He looked at the narrow bed and the washstand and the single row of hooks with her two gowns on them, and he made no remark on any of it, which she was grateful for.
"I have seen the print," he said. "I have done you a very great harm. I did not intend it, but that does not undo it." He stood very straight with his hat in his hand, exactly as he had stood at the counter. "There is only one remedy that the world will accept. I am asking you to marry me."
Anna had been sitting on the edge of the bed. She stood up. "Your Grace... you do not have to do this. I went of my own will. Nobody forced me to that house."
"I know it. So does Stepan. And so does my household. And so do you. The city does not care what any of us know." His voice was level and dry, like a man laying out a case he had already argued with himself all night. "Consider it plainly. My name will cover yours. No man will print that picture again, or laugh under your floor. I am not a warm man, and I will not pretend to be. I will not ask anything of you that you do not choose to give. You will have your own rooms, your own money, and your freedom to go where you like."