Any Duchess Will Do
Page 20

“Not at all. I heard you perfectly.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m smiling because you said ‘spoiled plans’ and ‘boiled egg.’ Not ‘spiled’ or ‘biled.’ ”
Pauline clapped her hand over her mouth, aghast. Drat. The duchess was right. She had said the words correctly. What was happening to her?
She knew the answer to that question.
Griff was happening to her. When the duke kissed her, her head spun, her knees melted . . . and her elocution improved. Limber tongues and all that.
“Bloody hell,” she mumbled into her palm.
The duchess gave a weak sigh and motioned to the servant for more tea. “Your H’s still need work.”
Griff woke up at the crack of . . . half-nine. Hours earlier than usual.
He’d always been the sort of person who felt most himself at night, and in this last year he’d become a veritable vampire. More often than not he went to bed as the sun came up and remained there until well past noon. But yesterday’s debacle had made it clear to him he couldn’t afford to doze though another day of his mother’s scheming.
How had yesterday gone so wrong?
It had started with the frock. That damnable sweet, sheer, innocent white frock. She’d turned his head, and the rest of the day had been one mistake piling atop the next.
If he hadn’t lost his concentration with Del, he wouldn’t have been wounded. If he hadn’t been wounded, he would have never agreed to attend that ball. If they hadn’t attended the ball, he wouldn’t have ended with her in that dark, fragrant garden, sliding his fingers over her tempting curves and contemplating acts of romantic lunacy.
The answer to this situation was plain.
No new frocks.
No attractive ones, anyhow.
No more kisses, either. That was obvious.
And most important of all, no more surprises.
As he walked through the house in search of them, Griff passed an unusual amount of clutter. Strange debris littered every room—all sorts of activities hastily abandoned. As though the house’s occupants had recently fled an erupting volcano.
In the salon, he found various instruments of needlework strewn on the settee and table. In the morning room, an abandoned easel displayed a drippy mess of a watercolor. Nearby a few drawing pencils lay cruelly snapped in half.
He heard a faint melody, so he walked toward the music room. When he arrived, he found it empty of people—but every instrument in the place, from harp to harpsichord, had been stripped of its Holland cloth, dusted, and attempted.
Where were the servants? Why weren’t they putting these rooms back to rights?
And he still heard that strange, slow melody. Like a drunken music box winding into a death spiral.
The tune ended. It was followed by an enthusiastic smattering of applause.
“Brava, Miss Simms,” he heard.
And then, from someone else, “Give us another?”
The melody began again.
With slow, quiet footfalls, Griff traced the sounds to the dining room. He eased open the door a fraction.
At the far end of the room, he spied Pauline Simms. She stood before about fifteen water goblets lined up on the table, each one filled with a different amount of water, and she was pinging them with two forks. He couldn’t tell if they were pickle forks or oyster forks. And then he decided this absurd preoccupation with forks was why he didn’t do mornings.
Anyhow, she was doling out a cheerful melody with these forks, as if each note were a bite of music.
No wonder the house was a shambles. All around her the assembled servants of Halford House stood looking on, rapt. Anticipating each musical morsel that fell from those precious little tines. None of them noticed Griff standing in the door.
The music was only part of the entertainment. As she worked, she pulled the most amusing faces. Delicate frowns of concentration, punctuated by disarming cringes when she struck a wrong note. When a lock of hair worked loose to dangle over her brow, she huffed a breath, blowing it away without skipping a beat.
She was working so very, very hard—so very, very earnestly—to create this display. It was absurd. Ridiculous. And utterly adorable.
Everyone in the room was enchanted, and Griff couldn’t claim he was immune to her spell. She was enchanting.
When the last note faded, all the servants clapped.
“That was Handel, my girl,” his mother said, beaming with pleasure. “How did you learn that piece?”
Pauline shrugged. “Just by listening to the village music tutor. She taught piano lessons in the Bull and Blossom.”
“That’s natural musicality,” the duchess said. “You could translate that ability to any of several proper instruments, with practice.”
“Truly? But, your grace, there’s no time for prac . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked up—and saw Griff, standing in the doorway.
Their gazes tangled.
Without breaking eye contact, he could feel all the others in the room turning his way.
Griff knew he had a split-second decision to make. He was either going to be caught staring at Miss Simms, exposed for the enraptured, lusting fool he was, in front of his mother and all his servants—or he could do what he did best: hide his every emotion behind the mask of an indifferent, entitled jackass.
Really, there was no choice.
Jackass it would be.
He began to applaud in slow, smug claps—and continued long after the room had gone silent.
Long after the shy, endearing smile had fled her face.
He let one last, ringing clap echo through the sobered room. He brought out his most bored, condescending tone. “That . . . was . . . capital, Simms. You will certainly stand out from the debutante crowd.”
She ducked her head, looking flustered. “Just an old trick I learnt at the tavern. Some nights are slow. The duchess asked after my musical talent, and this is the sum of it.”
“Do you juggle tankards, too? Fold table napkins into jousting cranes?”
“I . . . No.” She set aside the forks.
“Pity.”
“Excuse me,” she muttered, rushing out the dining room’s other door.
Griff stared at the empty space she’d left. He hadn’t expected her to take it quite that hard. She wanted to be a successful failure, didn’t she?
Once she was gone, every footman and housemaid in the room turned in his direction. Their eyes shot beams of pure resentment.
“What?” he asked.
Higgs cleared his throat in subtle rebuke.
Good God. He’d lost them, their loyalty. Just like that.
“Really,” Griff said. He ceased leaning on the doorjamb and drew to full ducal height. “Really. I’ve been your employer for years. In some cases, decades. Annual rises in pay, Christmas boxes, days off. Simms pings a fork on some goblets, and now you all side with her?”
Silence.
“You’re servants. Stop standing about, and go . . . serve.”
A dour parade of footmen and maids filed past him on their way out of the room, leaving Griff alone with his mother.
She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a palm.
“I will do the talking,” he said. He was the duke. He was solely responsible for six estates, a vast family fortune, and this very house—and he meant to assert that authority.
“I don’t know what else you have planned for Simms this morning, but I intend to be a part of it. No more of this scheming and shopping in secret, only to ambush me with new frocks and water goblet sonatas. Am I understood?”
She lifted her chin. “Yes.”
“Good.” He clapped his hands together. “So what’s on today’s agenda, now that music is finished? Whatever it is, I’m joining you. More shopping? Etiquette lessons? Some stab at exposing the girl to art or culture?”
“Charity,” she said.
“Charity?”
“It’s Tuesday. We’re going to the Foundling Hospital. I visit every Tuesday.”
The Foundling Hospital. The floor dropped out of Griff’s stomach. Of all the places. He had no desire to spend his day at an orphanage.
“You only have a week with Simms. Why not skip this particular Tuesday?”
“Because it’s an essential part of any duchess’s duty—charity toward the less fortunate.” Her brow quirked. “It’s an essential part of a duke’s duty, too.”
Now he saw where she was going with this. And he didn’t like it.
“On second thought,” he said, “I can’t go.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“I have an urgent appointment. I’ve just remembered it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “An urgent appointment with whom?”
“With . . .” He churned air with one hand. “Someone who needs to see me. Urgently. The land steward.”
“He’s in Cumberland.”
“I meant the family solicitor.” He looked down his nose at her. “I’ve decided to decrease your quarterly allowance.”
She hmphed. “Well, then. You can discuss the matter with him today. His office is in Bloomsbury, directly across from the Foundling Hospital.”
Griff sighed. Damn.
Chapter Twelve
Pauline was amazed. In London, it seemed even the orphans lived in palatial splendor.
The Foundling Hospital was a grand, stately edifice in Bloomsbury, surrounded by green courtyards and fronted by a formidable gate. Inside the building, the halls and corridors were lavishly decorated with paintings and sculpted trim.
As they walked down the center of the main hall, Pauline felt a cramp forming in her neck from staring upward at the artwork. But any pain in the neck was preferable to feeling the sting of Griff’s indifference.
She couldn’t even look at him. Not after that humiliation in the dining room.
It wasn’t as though she took great personal pride in pinging tunes on crystal, but there’d been such malice in those slow, smug claps. She expected him to be displeased after last night, but she hadn’t been braced for cruelty.
Men. Such capricious creatures.
She ought to have learned this lesson from Errol Bright. Whenever they’d stolen an hour or two alone together, he’d been all eager hands and fervent promises. But if they crossed paths in the village, he treated her as just the same old Pauline. At first she’d told herself it was romantic that way—they had a secret passion, and no one could guess. Eventually she’d realized the painful truth. All Errol’s tender words in the moment were just that—in the moment. He’d never truly wanted more.
Now she’d made the same error with Griff.
Last night he’d made her feel beautiful and desired. This morning he’d made her feel small and stupid. No doubt she’d do well to take the duchess’s advice: find some phlegm, and refuse to feel anything.
But that just wasn’t her. And if she lost herself this week, she’d have nothing left.
As they moved through the Foundling Hospital, the duchess kept up a steady monologue. “This establishment was founded last century by Sir Thomas Coram and several of London’s leading men—noblemen, tradesmen, the artists whose work you see displayed. The fifth Duke of Halford was among the original governors, and each of his successors has continued the tradition.”
Pauline didn’t think the current Duke of Halford cared a whit. He was so eager to be done with this place, both she and the duchess were trotting to keep pace with his long strides. If he didn’t wish to be here, she couldn’t understand why he’d come.
Once they passed out of the public rooms and into the actual home, the building’s decor became markedly more austere. Evidently the palatial splendor was for show, not for the foundlings’ benefit.
They passed a wide green courtyard filled with hundreds of children. All boys, clad in identical brown uniforms and arranged in orderly files.