"Translate for Her, She's Only the Nursemaid," the Countess Said — The Ambassador Bowed to Her
Chapter 3
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So the creditors came. The house on the embankment was sold, and the books, and her mother's piano. Theodora arrived in London in the spring of 1817 with one trunk, no family nearer than a second cousin in Northumberland who did not answer letters, and a name that, in the one government office where it was known, was thought to belong to a man who had taken what was not his.She did not tell anyone whose daughter she was. There seemed no point. She found a place through a registry as nursemaid to the younger children of the Earl of Stanwick, and she had been Marlow in gray for a year and eight months.She was good at the work. That surprised her. She had expected to be lonely and found instead that a nursery is a small, fierce country of its own, with laws and loyalties and five citizens who did not care in the least who her father had been.The nursery at Stanwick House ran the whole length of the third floor, and its citizens were these:Lady Frances, eleven, who read under the blankets with a stolen candle and had to be told every night that it would be a shame to burn the house down before she had finished the book.Rupert, Viscount Dalby, nine, the heir, who was called Dalby by his father and Rupert by everyone who loved him, and who was engaged in a long war with his Latin tutor and a longer one with his own temper.Lady Louisa, six, who talked from the moment she woke to the moment she slept, and sometimes after.And the Honorable Peregrine, three, called Perry, who could not say Theodora, could not say Marlow, and called her Lo-Lo, so that the others called her Lo-Lo, too, when their mother was not on the stairs.Lady Honoria, eighteen, had a room on the floor below with the grownups and came up to the nursery only when she wanted an audience.And now there was a sixth bed pushed in beside Louisa's, and a sixth citizen in it, holding a rag doll with a Russian name."She can have Annushka," Louisa had declared the instant the doll was produced, having been told its name. "Annushka is a Russian name, Marlow says, so Annushka is hers now. I shall have Betsy.""You cannot give away a doll you were given," said Frances from behind her book."I can if I am being kind," said Louisa.Natasha did not understand a word of it. She understood that the fat small boy had offered her half a biscuit, that the girl with the book had moved a candle so that it lit the corner by her bed, and that the woman in gray had told her, in her own tongue, that the fat small boy was called Perry and would probably want the biscuit back.