How to Tame Your Duke(7)

       
           



       

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.