The room went absolutely silent.
Every head turned. The Duke's pen stopped a half-inch above the paper. The translator's smooth face flickered, just once—a crack of pure alarm before he smoothed it over. And the envoy's pleasant smile froze in a way that told Aveline, more surely than anything, that she was right and that he had understood her English perfectly.
"I beg your pardon?" said the Duke of Mardenholt. His voice was very quiet and very dangerous, and it was not at all clear at whom the danger was aimed. His dark eyes had fixed on her with the full weight of his attention, and Aveline felt it land like a hand.
"The maid forgets herself," the translator said quickly, recovering, contempt flooding back into his voice. "Your Grace, I must protest. A serving woman interrupting affairs of state—"
"That clause does not concern the tariff on wool." Aveline did not look at the translator. She looked at the Duke, because if she was to be ruined for this, she would at least be ruined looking the man in the eye. "It concerns the river crossing. His Excellency proposed a moment ago to his own delegation, and in his own tongue, that you be given to understand the fourth article was a trifle about wool. His word, Your Grace, was 'fool,' so that you would initial away the exclusive rights to the crossing without reading it. And in the third clause, which your man rendered to you as 'a long and equal friendship,' His Excellency in fact said he would have the better of you before you had finished your wine."
She drew a breath. "I am only a maid, Your Grace, but I understood every word that has been spoken at this table this afternoon in every language spoken at it, and very little of it has reached your ear as it was said."
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence. It had texture. The Duke's gaze did not leave her face. The translator had gone the color of tallow. And the envoy—the envoy was looking at Aveline now with an expression of pure, arrested astonishment, as though one of the candlesticks had stood up and addressed him.
The Duke set down his pen.
Very slowly, very deliberately, he turned to the foreign envoy, and he said something—not to the translator, but directly to the envoy in the man's own language, halting and accented, but entirely comprehensible. A single sentence asking, with cold courtesy, whether what the maid had said was true.
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.