How to Tame Your Duke, page 4
“Frederick.” The single word snapped out of the duke’s throat.
The boy paused, one shoe poised above the gravel. “Yes, Pater?”
“In my study, if you please. We have a certain matter to discuss.”
Freddie’s hand dropped away from Emilie’s arm. “What matter, sir?”
“Frederick, my dear boy. We have all been to a great deal of trouble tonight. I believe some sort of reckoning is in order. Don’t you?” Ashland’s silky voice nudged upward at the very tip of the last word, implying a question where one didn’t really exist. Emilie heard a little slap, as of gloves hitting an impatient palm.
Emilie didn’t dare look at Freddie. She couldn’t have seen him well anyway, as the moon had just retired behind one of the thicker clouds. But she heard him gulp, even above the thrum of the wind about the chimneys. Her heart sank in sympathy.
“Yes, sir,” Freddie said humbly.
“That will be all, Mr. Grimsby,” said the Duke of Ashland.
The butler stepped aside in a meaningful crunch of gravel, and Emilie turned and walked up the steps, guided by the dim golden light from the entrance hall, and into Ashland Abbey.
* * *
The Duke of Ashland waited until his son’s footsteps had receded entirely up the stairs before he allowed the smile to break out at the corner of his mouth.
Well, it had been an entertaining evening, after all, and he couldn’t deny he stood in need of a little excitement from time to time. A chuckle rumbled in his throat at the image of poor Mr. Grimsby, eyes wide, whiskers a-flutter, one slender, scholarly fist closed at his side and the other brandishing a chicken drumstick. But he had shown spirit, after all. The young chap had put himself in imminent danger to rescue Freddie. That was all Ashland needed to know.
He rose from his desk. On the cabinet near the window, a tray beckoned alluringly with a single empty glass and three crystal decanters: one of sherry, one of brandy, and one of port. Ashland’s right hand—the one that no longer existed—throbbed with eagerness at the sight.
He walked with steady steps to the cabinet, picked up the sherry with his left hand, and filled the empty glass nearly to the brim. A single glass of spirits each night: That was all he allowed himself. Any more, and he might never stop.
The first sip slid down his throat in a satisfying burn. His nose and mouth glowed with the familiar taste, the taste of relief. Ashland closed his eyes and dug his fingers into the diamond pattern of the bowl, giving it time, letting the sherry spread through his body to fill all his parched and aching cracks. The stiffness on the right side of his face began to ease, the throb of his phantom hand to fade.
How Grimsby had stared at first. Ashland had almost forgotten the effect of his ruined face on the untrained eye. How long had it been since he had encountered, unmasked, a genuine stranger, one who hadn’t been prepared in advance for this abomination? But Grimsby had recovered in a flash and composed himself politely. Well-bred, that fellow. Outside the carriage, he hadn’t shifted his eyes away, hadn’t looked at the ground or his hands or Ashland’s hat. Another point in the young man’s column. He might very likely do. Only a few months, after all. Only a few more months until Freddie’s Oxford examinations, and then Ashland need no longer bother with this business of bringing tutors into the house, into his well-ordered routine, only to have them pack their valises and leave after a week or two. Freddie would be off, would likely only return to the howling moors for the odd dutiful week or two, and that would be that.
The Duke of Ashland would be alone at last. No tutors; no Freddie spreading about his profligate charm, so like his mother’s; no lingering reminders of the days before he had shipped off to India, plain old Lieutenant the Honorable Anthony Russell, leaving behind a beautiful wife and infant son, and two perfectly healthy cousins between himself and the dukedom.
Ashland took another drink, longer this time, and lifted aside the heavy velvet curtain. The window faced north; in full daylight, the view was bleak beyond description. Tonight, however, all was black. The clouds had moved in completely, propelled by the incessant wind, and there was no further moonlight to illuminate the spinning grasses, the rocks, the few scrubby bushes that had once formed a sort of garden along this side of the house. In her last year, Isabelle had worked obsessively on that garden, employing a raft of men from the village to eke out some sort of civilized order to the landscape. She had ordered plantings and statuary, tried for shade and windbreaks, and all for nothing. Only the statues remained, like the ruins of some lost Roman town, limbs cut off abruptly where the wind had toppled the poor fellows off their pedestals.
Rather fitting, that.
Another drink. Nearly finished now. How had that happened? Must ration out the rest, one tiny sip at a time.
What would Isabelle have thought of young Grimsby? She would have liked him, Ashland thought. She liked young people, clever people, and there was no doubt that Grimsby was clever. It radiated from those large eyes of his, covered by his spectacles. What had Olympia written? That he knew no scholar more perfectly grounded in the subtleties of Latin and Greek than Mr. Tobias Grimsby, and that his mathematics were without flaw. Isabelle, who had been well-educated by an exacting governess, would have had Mr. Grimsby to the drawing room for tea every afternoon. She would have taken pleasure in teasing him out, in discovering his opinions and tastes and family history.
Isabelle. If Isabelle were here, Ashland would even now be climbing the stairs to his bedroom. He would even now be changing into his nightshirt and dressing robe, dismissing his valet, knocking politely on the door between their bedchambers.
Ashland tilted his glass and let the last golden drops slide down his throat. A very slight vibration now caressed his brain, the edge of intoxication just perceptible at the rim of his senses. It was all he allowed himself, to head off the lust that assaulted him every evening at this hour, as he prepared to climb the stairs and fill his lonely bed.
Isabelle’s body, white and rounded in the candlelight. Isabelle’s flesh, yielding to his. Her little sighs in his ear, her fingers on his back, her quickening movements. The drive to climax, the shudder of release, the slow pulse of its aftermath. Isabelle’s kisses on his unmarred skin, her body tucking itself in the shadow of his.
Ashland let the curtain fall back.
With exaggerated precision, he placed his empty sherry glass back on the tray and straightened his empty right cuff.
The hall was deserted. The servants had all gone off to bed, knowing the duke’s preferences. He climbed the stairs alone, and alone he readied himself for bed, because the challenge of handling his own buttons and sleeves kept his mind fully occupied.
THREE
Emilie awoke from a profound sleep to a familiar sound: the rough, metallic rattle of the coal scuttle as a maid lit the fire in her bedroom.
She opened her eyes, expecting to see worn velvet hangings and rioting unicorns on a medieval tapestry, to see sunlight pouring past the cracks of her sapphire blue curtains and her escritoire covered with books and notes and pencil stubs. She put her hand out, expecting to feel the warmth of her sleeping sister.
But her hand found only the coolness of empty bedsheets, and her eyes found only a thick gray darkness smudged with the shadows of unknown furniture.
She flung herself upright.
“Sir!” A crash sounded from the fireplace, and then the clatter of metal on stone.
Sir.
Emilie covered her cheeks. She had taken off her whiskers last night, because they itched so abominably, but her head was encased in a long woolen nightcap and her body bundled in a purely masculine nightshirt. “I’m sorry,” she gasped out, hoping the maid couldn’t see her clearly. She brought the bedclothes up to her nose.
“I thought ye was sleeping still, sir,” said the maid, turning back to the grate. She was nothing but a pale outline in the darkness; her basket of kindling seemed larger than her body. The grate itself was smaller still, which was of course natural, Emilie reminded herself, since Tobias Grimsby slept upstairs with the servants and not in the grander bedrooms below.
The grander bedrooms, the bedrooms for the duke and his family and their honored guests: paneled and papered and gilded, hung with silk and oil paintings, spacious and well furnished.
Emilie remembered few details from the night before, as she’d readied herself for bed, but she had a general impression of a clean space, plain and pleasant, with a few sticks of necessary furniture and a single window, curtained in striped cotton. The bedclothes beneath her fingers were smooth and woolen and unadorned. Comfort, not luxury.
“Have you the time?” she asked the maid.
“Why, I do suppose it’s near enough six,” said the maid, straightening. “There, then. Nice and hot afore ye knows it.”
“Thank you.”
The young woman turned and grasped the handle of her basket. “Ye’d best be up soon for breakfast, sir.”
Breakfast? Emilie’s mind was still aching with fatigue. Five hours’ sleep had not been nearly enough to recover from the drama of the previous day. Breakfast? Her belly echoed with hunger, but she couldn’t imagine pushing her heavy limbs out of bed and into her shirt and trousers and plain woolen jacket.
The maid left, banging her basket behind her. Emilie lay back down to contemplate the gray ceiling. Dawn was no more than a rumor beyond the glass. The wind, at least, had stilled for the moment, lulled by the approach of sunrise.
Breakfast. The duke was an early riser, then. And since early risers tended to look with scorn on those who weren’t up at the first searing crow of the nearest cock, Emilie had better take the maid’s advice and stir herself.
Half an hour later, her trousers buttoned and her whiskers neatly in place, Emilie arrived in the center of the great hallway. Dawn had finally begun to leak through the windows, a dawn of surprising strength and brightness, suggesting actual sunshine. Emilie took absent note of the classical dimensions, the polished marble, the depth and intricacy of the plasterwork. Ashland Abbey had likely been rebuilt a century or so ago, she judged, and at considerable expense. When Emilie was a child, she had been to stay with the Devonshires at Chatsworth (her mother had been a great friend of Lady Frederick Cavendish in her girlhood), and she felt echoes of its formal grandeur here, that sense of scale and proportion. Each gilt-framed painting was mounted in its place, edges exactly squared; each fold of drapery hung downward without a mote of dust to mar its color.
The breakfast room, Emilie knew, would be positioned to make the most of the meager Yorkshire sunrise. She rotated, took note of the angle of the light, and set off to the right: the eastern wing, she supposed.
She passed through one doorway and the next, a succession of impossibly perfect salons, ending in a grand corridor hung with portraits. She paused. A clink of china met her ears, followed by a low and resonant voice.
Emilie straightened her collar and stepped in the direction of the sounds.
“May I help you, sir?”
Emilie stopped and turned. The butler stood before her—what was his name? Simpson?—looking arch, his voice much sterner than his words, his bearing almost painfully correct. His white shirtfront might have been made of plaster instead of linen.
Emilie’s back stiffened. She lifted her chin. “On my way to breakfast, thank you. If you’ll excuse me.”
“Mr. Grimsby,” said the butler, laden with ice, “I believe you’ll find that the staff breakfasts below stairs, in the service dining room.”
The staff.
The blood drained from Emilie’s face, and then returned an instant later in a hot flush that made her skin itch beneath her whiskers. She stared into Simpson’s impassive dark eyes and willed herself not to flinch, not to betray herself by a single flicker of her eyelids. “Of course,” she said, when her throat was calm. “Perhaps you could direct me, Mr. Simpson, at your earliest convenience.”
He didn’t turn. “Back down the corridor, Mr. Grimsby, and to the right. You’ll find the service stairs at the end of the hall.”
“Thank you, Mr. Simpson. Good morning to you.”
Emilie turned and forced her legs to carry her along the echoing hallway. The service dining room, of course. This grand architecture, this clink of priceless china, was no longer meant for her.
I have dined at Chatsworth! she wanted to shout, over her shoulder. I have sat to table with sovereigns! I am a cousin to the damned Tsarina!
All right, a distant cousin. But nonetheless.
It was better this way, of course. She could conceal herself better below stairs. What if Ashland had noble guests, guests she might have met in some previous stay in Great Britain? At the duke’s table, she might be seen and noticed. Questions might be asked. Among staff, she was invisible. Nobody noticed the servants.
And that was the point, wasn’t it? To hide.
Emilie’s shoes clacked hollowly on the marble tiles. She turned right and found the stairs at the end of the hall, descending into the unknown world below.
* * *
Twenty heads swiveled as Emilie passed through the doorway into the servants’ dining hall. She was used to that sort of thing, of course: When a princess of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof entered the room, people generally noticed.
But this was different. Emilie was dressed not in pearls and silk, but in padded black broadcloth and curling whiskers. The eyes turned in her direction brimmed not with awe, but with an impertinent and even hostile curiosity. She recognized one face: the maid from this morning, thin-cheeked and wide-eyed. She was the only one smiling.
“Why, good morning, sir! Ye nearly missed yer breakfast, nobbut like I warned ye.”
“I beg your pardon,” Emilie said. “I am unfamiliar with the plan of the house.”
Somebody tittered. An older woman, to the right of the empty seat at the head of the table, set down her spoon and dabbed at the corner of her mouth. “Good morning, Mr. Grimsby. I am Mrs. Needle, the housekeeper. Ye’re welcome here, of course, though I’m sure Lucy will be happy to bring you a tray in t’morning, if that’s yer preference. Ye may take Lionel’s place at t’left. He’s serving upstairs at t’moment.”
Lionel, who sat to the left of the butler’s seat: No doubt he was the head footman, and now busy anticipating Ashland’s wishes in the breakfast room. Emilie ran her gaze once more around the table, more carefully this time, taking note. After all, servants were just as conscious of rank and precedence as their masters, and the appearance of a tutor had likely disturbed everything. Tutors and governesses occupied that liminal space between stairs, neither servant nor lord, of the educated class and yet a household employee. Hence the offer of a breakfast tray, which would make things easier for all concerned. Lionel, whose place she’d usurped, would be delighted.
But here she was. She couldn’t turn tail and run.
Emilie walked around the table, head high, and pulled out Lionel’s chair. His place was already set with bowl, plate, fork, knife, and spoon. She sat down and nodded at Lucy, who sat on the opposite side, several places down. “May I trouble you for the toast, Miss Lucy?” she asked.
Lucy smiled. Her eyelashes swept down. “Why, of course, Mr. Grimsby.”
Emilie ate quietly, head bowed slightly to her plate, doing her best to be invisible in the heavy silence. The clatter of cutlery began to resume. Someone asked a low question; someone answered a bit more loudly. Emilie drank her tea.
“Ooh, Lucy,” said one of the maids, “they’ve another story in t’paper today about them lost princesses in Germany. Pictures and owt.”
The tea made an immediate detour down Emilie’s windpipe.
“Ooh, have they?” exclaimed Lucy. “What do they look like? Are they beautiful? Have they got them tiaras on?”
“Yes, great big ones, and t’great blue sashes across their chests. I thought t’oldest one were t’ prettiest. She’s got lovely curling hair, just like yers. They do say . . .”
“I say, are ye all right, Mr. Grimsby?” asked Lucy.
“Quite all right,” Emilie gasped, between spasms.
“Have ye heard about t’princesses, Mr. Grimsby? It’s t’most terrifying story.”
“No, I haven’t. Mrs. Needle, may I trouble you”—cough, cough—“for the teapot?”
Mrs. Needle poured Emilie a solicitous cup. “Small sips, Mr. Grimsby. That’s it.”
“It’s nobbut some little kingdom in Germany, Mr. Grimsby, and t’king . . .”
“T’prince, Lucy,” said the other maid knowingly. “It ain’t never a kingdom, it’s a prin-ci-pality. Ruled by a prince. That’s what t’paper said.”
Lucy sighed. “Them Germans. Anyroad, t’prince died a pair of month ago, out hunting, shot dead with his poor son-in-law, t’one what was just married to his oldest daughter. And a week after, when they was supposed to crown t’oldest daughter as ruler—the prince never having no sons what might take over—they had all gone missing. Every one. Even t’Royal Governess.” She leaned forward and said it with capital letters.
Emilie cleared her throat at last. “How shocking.”
“And do you know what t’morning post do say today?” The other maid bounced in her chair. “They think t’princesses came to England!”
“England! Oh, Jane!” said Lucy.
“Whatever for?” whispered Emilie.
“Why, because their mother were English, seems like. She were t’sister of t’Duke of Olympia,” said Jane.
A single sigh drew forth around the table. Emilie spotted a pot of marmalade near her teacup and snaked her hand around the china to snare it.
“His Grace knows t’Duke of Olympia. Great friends, they are,” said one of the lesser footmen, down the table. “Thieves ain’t in it.”
“Imagine,” said Lucy dreamily, fingering her teacup. “Imagine if them princesses was to be hiding right here in t’village. Imagine if we was to be standing next to them at t’shops.”
