8 years I have kept you and fed you and taught you to be useful and to keep your father's foolishness out of your mouth. And tonight you stood in my house and told every man in the Baltic trade that you are a Russian peasant woman's child. I told them I could help a man who was ill. You told them who your father was. Her aunt stood.
The candle shook very slightly in her hand. And Anna saw it shake and saw her aunt see her seeing it. Every man in that room lost money when your father's house failed. I lost everything I had put by. I lent him every shilling of it because he was my brother and he wrote such hopeful letters.
Do you know what it is to carry that shame behind a counter for 8 years to pour coffee for men who pity you? She drew a long breath. Go to bed. You will not go to that house again. But the next afternoon, the Duke's carriage stood at the end of the lane.
The Duke himself came into the coffee house and spoke to her aunt in her own small parlor for a quarter of an hour with the door shut. Anna never learned what he said. When the door opened, her aunt's face was red and stiff and oddly pleased. A great man had been courteous to her, and she did not quite know what to do with it. She said that her niece might go for the afternoons, provided the kitchen did not suffer for it.
So Anna went, she went every afternoon for 10 days of that April, and the days began to take a shape she had not known she was hungry for. In the mornings she ground the coffee and scolded the pots and served the merchants, and none of them quite looked at her, though now they did so on purpose. In the afternoons she sat on a hard chair beside a bed in Grovener Street, and spoke the language of her childhood until her mouth remembered every corner of it. Stepan mended slowly. The pain under his ribs faded.
He began to keep down broth and then bread and then to the cook's great pride a whole dish of stewed chicken. And as he mended he talked. He did not talk about the death. He had drawn a line around that and he walked carefully along the edge of it and never crossed it. But he talked about everything else.
He talked about the captain, which was what the whole Russian regiment had called the Duke's brother because they could not manage his English name. He said the captain had arrived in their camp in a beautiful blue coat that was ruined within a week. He said the captain rode badly and sang worse, and he sang all the time. He said the captain had given his own blanket to a boy with frostbitten feet and then spent the night beside Stepan's fire pretending he was not cold. Anna gave it all back in English, every word.
And the Duke listened. He always stood by the window to listen, never in a chair, and he never interrupted. Sometimes he asked a question at the end, a short plain question and she carried it across. Once when Stepan described the captain trying to teach a whole company of Russian infantry to sing an English hunting song, the Duke turned his face to the glass very suddenly and stayed turned for some time. Anna went on translating in the same quiet voice as if nothing had happened.