was a strange household where a duke took his counsel from a woman who had once carried his water, Mardenholt looked at him a long moment and said only, "It is a strange household where a man would rather be flattered by a fool than told the truth by the wisest person under his roof. I do not keep that kind of house. I used to. I am glad to be cured of it."
And the marquess, who had expected agreement, found he had nothing to say.
He named it himself in the end, on a winter evening in the library, the candlelight low and the maps put away.
"I have been trying," he said, "to find the language in which to say a thing, and I find that for the first time in my life there is no interpreter who can do it for me. I shall have to manage it myself, badly." He turned the sealed letter in his hands, a letter he had been not reading for ten minutes, and set it down. "Aveline, when you stood up at that table and told me my translator was deceiving me, you risked everything you had to keep me from being robbed of a fortune. I have spent every day since discovering that the fortune scarcely mattered.
"What I should truly have lost, had you held your tongue, was you, for I should never have known you were there. I have no wish to spend the rest of my life never knowing you were there. I am asking you, in my own plain words and no one else's, to be my wife—not my interpreter, not my clever maid. My wife and my equal, and the one voice in all the world I am certain will always tell me the truth."
Aveline Took, who had stood unnoticed at a sideboard with a jug in her hands and a secret in her head, looked at the formidable man who had been the first in her whole hard life to ask her what she knew, and found that her own five languages had quite deserted her, and that only the plainest words of the plainest one remained.
"Yes," she said, "though I warn you, Your Grace, I shall go on telling you the truth whether you like it or not. It is the only dowry I have."
"It is," said the Duke of Mardenholt, taking her ink-stained hand in both of his, "worth more than every harbor and river crossing in the kingdom, and I shall spend my life being grateful you could not hold your tongue."
They were married in the spring very quietly, with no envoy present and no language spoken at the altar but their own. The steward wept and pretended he had not. The old marquess sent a stiff letter of congratulation that Aveline read aloud to her husband with one eyebrow raised, translating its grudging courtesies into the plain truth beneath them, until the Duke laughed so hard he had to set down his cup.
And in the long warm years after, when foreign envoys came to the table and found, to their everlasting frustration, that the Duke of Mardenholt heard every word they said in every tongue they said it, there was always at his side a quiet, brilliant woman who had once poured the water, and who had risked all she had for a truth no one had asked her to tell, and who had been heard at last and treasured for it every day of her life.