The envoy's astonishment doubled. He had not known the Duke had any of the tongue at all; neither had Aveline. Clearly, Mardenholt had been concealing the little he possessed, the better to listen. And caught between two people who could hear him, the diplomat's composure cracked. He glanced at the translator. The translator would not meet his eye. And in that glance, the whole thing was confirmed before a word more was said.
"Leave us," the Duke said to the translator in English, without turning his head. "You will wait in the steward's room. You will not leave this house. We will speak of your future when I have leisure for so small a matter."
The man went. He did not protest again. There is no protest available to a liar whose lie has been read aloud in two languages by a woman he had not troubled to notice.
What followed, Aveline watched from the sideboard, to which she had retreated and where she fully expected to be ignored. But the Duke did not ignore her.
He looked down the table at her and said, with a courtesy she had never once been shown in this house, "Miss, forgive me. I do not know your name."
"Took, Your Grace," Aveline replied.
"Miss Took. It seems I am to conduct the rest of this negotiation either in my own poor scraps of a language I am ashamed to use, or through an interpreter I now have excellent reason to distrust." He paused. "Or through you. Will you sit?"
She had been standing in that house for four months and no one had so much as asked her name. "I am a maid, Your Grace," she said, because honesty seemed the only ground left to stand on.
"You are," said the Duke of Mardenholt, "the only honest person at this table, and the only one besides our guest who knows what is being said. I am asking the cleverest person in the room to sit down at it. The matter of your livery we will sort out afterward." Something that was almost, but not quite, a smile touched the corner of his hard mouth. "Sit, Miss Took, and tell me, this time accurately, what His Excellency would like."
She sat, and she translated.
She translated for three hours, and she did it beautifully. Not merely the words, but the weight of them, the courtesies that smooth a hard refusal, the precise places where the envoy was bluffing and where he was in earnest, which she could hear in the man's choice of phrases as plainly as if he had announced it.
The envoy, recovering his footing, made one more attempt at sleight of hand in the sixth article. Aveline caught it before it had left his mouth and rendered it back to the Duke with a small, dry note: "He hopes you will not notice that, Your Grace."
That made the corner of Mardenholt's mouth twitch again and made the envoy laugh outright—a startled, genuine laugh—and say in his own tongue, ruefully, "Where did you find this woman? She is worth ten of the man you hired."
"I did not find her," the Duke said, when Aveline had translated even that. He was looking at her as he said it. "I very nearly failed to notice her. It is the single nearest thing to a disaster I have come to in years."
By the time the candles had burned low and the maps were rolled and the true agreement—fair, equal, with the river crossing firmly retained—was set down for sealing the next morning, the envoy rose and bowed to Aveline before he bowed to the Duke, which was a breach of all precedents, and which he plainly did not care about in the least.
"Madam," he said, in careful English, "it has been an honor to be honestly bested. I shall tell them at home that the Duke of Mardenholt's sharpest weapon pours the water." And he went out smiling.
Then it was only the two of them and the guttering candlelight and the long table strewn with the sealed letters and the silver-weighted maps.
"You will not go back to the sideboard," the Duke said.
"Your Grace?"
"You will not go back to carrying jugs. I will not have it. A woman who can do what you did this afternoon does not pour water in my house. She is wasted past the point of indecency."
He rose and came down the length of the table toward her, and stopped, and regarded her with that dark, formidable attention that no longer frightened her, because she had spent three hours learning that behind it was a quick and grateful mind.
"Why did you hide it? Five languages, the hearing of a born diplomat. Why in God's name were you carrying my water?"
"Because no one asked, Your Grace," Aveline said simply. "A maid is not asked what she knows. She is asked whether the glasses are full. I should have stayed silent today and kept my situation. I find I could not watch you sign your fortune away believing you were among friends. My father raised me to believe that a truth known and not spoken is a kind of lie. He left me five languages and very little else, and it appears he left me his conscience as well, which has been a great inconvenience to me my whole life, and never more than this afternoon."
The Duke was quiet for a moment. "Your father," he said, "raised a remarkable woman. I should like to have thanked him."