"Translate for Her, She's Only the Nursemaid," the Countess Said — The Ambassador Bowed to Her
Chapter 2
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"There," said the Countess. "You see, a firm hand.""It understands being carried off like a parcel, Mama," said Lady Honoria, and laughed, and looked to see whether the Duke had laughed.The Duke had not. He had been at the Congress of Vienna for the best part of a year, and he had picked up, as a man does, a little Russian. Not enough to follow a conversation; enough to know that what the nursemaid had said to the child was not English, and was not French.He watched the gray dress go up the stairs with the small hand in it, and he said nothing, which was his habit.Her name was Theodora Marlow, and she had told the truth about it because it was the only part of herself she had kept. She had been born in St. Petersburg in a tall house on the English Embankment in the spring of 1794. Her father, Richard Marlow, had gone out to Russia as a young clerk in a merchant house and had stayed because he had a gift for the language and a love of the country. By the time Theodora was old enough to have a governess, he was secretary and translator to the British Embassy, trusted by two ambassadors, and known in every drawing room on the Nevsky.Her mother died when she was eleven. After that, it was Theodora and her father and books and the long white nights, and a Russian nurse called Avdotya who sang her to sleep with the old lullabies and scolded her in three languages. By eighteen, Theodora could pass for French in Paris, for German in Riga, and for a merchant's daughter at the Petersburg market. Her father used to say she was the only member of the embassy who had never once been misunderstood.Then came the war and the great year of 1812, when her father was away for months carrying letters between the embassy and the Russian army, and came home thin and silent, and would not speak about Moscow.And then came the debts.Richard Marlow had paid for horses, couriers, and lodging that year out of his own purse—3,400 pounds of it—on the written promise of repayment. The papers that proved it had burned in Moscow with everything else. When he died of a winter chill in November 1816, the Treasury in London declined the claim for want of vouchers, and a clerk wrote in the margin of a letter Theodora still possessed that Mr. Marlow had no doubt spent the money on himself.