"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."
"He would have liked you, I think," Aveline said, surprising herself. "He had a great contempt for men who were fooled easily, and a greater respect for those who could bear to be told the truth. You did not have the translator thrown out for being a liar. You had me sit down for telling you so. Not one gentleman in fifty would have done the second."
"Not one gentleman in fifty," said the Duke of Mardenholt, "would have had the wit to deserve it. Stay in my house, Miss Took. Not as a maid. I scarcely know what to call it. I have need of a person who hears what is truly said. I have, I begin to think, need of a great deal more than that. But we will start there, with the work and proper wages and your name spoken aloud in my house as though it mattered, which it does."
She thought of the four cold months behind her, the jugs, the unanswered name, the steady labor of being unseen. She thought of her father who had given her five languages in three countries and told her, the winter he died, that a mind was a thing one owed to the world whether the world had asked for it or not. He had not lived to see her carry water for strangers. She found, standing in that candlelit room, that she was glad of it, and that the gladness did not hurt the way she had expected.
"My father used to say," she told the Duke, "that a language is not a thing you know, but a door you keep. That every tongue you hold is a room more of the world you are let into." She looked down the long table at the sealed letters and the silver-weighted maps, at all the doors she had stood beside for four months with the keys in her apron pocket, and no one to ask her to open them. "I have kept a great many doors, Your Grace, and stood outside every one of them. I confess I had begun to think I should die with all of them locked and the keys gone to rust in my hand."