How to Tame Your Duke by Juliana Gray Read Free Book Online

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.
    *   *   *
    T wenty 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