Any Duchess Will Do (Spindle Cove #4)(20)

She was wrong.

Nothing in life, dreams, or fairy tales had prepared her for this. And how she would keep from gawking, she had no idea.

To begin with, the house was massive. Four stories high, and wide enough that one would have to stand all the way at the opposite end of the square to regard it in its entirety. Close as she was when she alighted from the coach, Pauline had to tip her head nearly all the way back. She felt her jaw hanging agape.

And then, as the sun was just sliding beneath the city’s uneven horizon, it lingered one last moment to splash brilliance across the square. The amber rays landed directly on Halford House, like a coronation. Every glass pane flashed like a diamond facet, and the white granite façade looked dipped in gold.

She was stunned.

Then the door opened. And she was stunned some more.

She followed the duchess through a gauntlet of eight liveried footmen. Once they crossed the threshold, there were more servants lined up in the entrance hall. Cook, housekeeper, housemaids, scullery maids, lady’s maid.

The interior was accordingly impressive. Paintings on every available swatch of wall, ornate clocks chiming in welcome. Sumptuous upholstery in any place a person could possibly think to sit. It was really too much to take in with her eyes, but she didn’t need to. She could feel this house’s elegance in the soles of her feet. The wooden floors were expertly sanded and polished, and the carpets . . . oh, the carpets had pile so thick and plush, they made her insteps sigh with gratitude.

Pauline was introduced to the housekeeper, Mrs. Thomas—a woman who, in any other circumstance, would have been handing her a bucket and brush, sending her to scrub a floor somewhere.

Today, she welcomed Pauline as a guest. She even curtsied. “Let me show you to your room, Miss Simms.”

As she followed the housekeeper, Pauline wished she could leave a trail of bread crumbs. She’d never find her way back on her own.

Straight from the entrance, up the steps. Right at the top, and round the bend to the second, narrower flight of stairs. Then left down the wainscoted corridor—the one with walls papered with a green toile pattern—or was it blue? This would have been easier in full daylight.

She counted the doors as they passed. One, two, three . . .

By the time the housekeeper stopped before the fourth door, it was all a blur.

The room was dark, and she was happy for it to remain that way.

Pauline numbly accepted assistance in stripping down to her shift, bathing the travel dust from her body, and climbing into the softest, warmest bed she’d ever laid upon. As her eyes closed and her legs stretched to the toasty depths of the bedsheets, she had the vague thought that someone had been here with coals in a bed warmer only moments before she’d entered the room.

Such excellent service. And for the first time in her life she was on the receiving end of it. It would have been folly to try to make it seem real, so she gratefully fell into dreams.

For several hours she knew nothing more.

She woke to darkness. And found she could not return to sleep.

She ought to have still been exhausted. She was exhausted, in truth. Her joints ached from the long hours in the coach, well-sprung as it was. Her mind was taxed to its limits from stretching to grasp so many unbelievable notions.

But she just couldn’t sleep.

She was in a duke’s house. Surely a duke didn’t even call it a house, did he? House was too humble, too common a word. He called it a “residence.” In the country, an “estate.” Whatsit Manor, or Summat Castle.

She drew aside a corner of the heavy tapestry bed hangings and peered into the darkened room. Fortunately, it was nearing full moon, and the milky glow seeping in from the glazed windows (three of them! in one room!) gave her enough light to see the room she’d been too fatigued to explore earlier.

She could make out so far as the foot of the bed, to the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed, to the plush embroidered carpet, its oriental reds and brassy golds now soothed by night. The lotus pattern stretched for miles, it seemed. If she strained and blinked, she could see the edge of the dressing table and catch the glint of a full-length, gilt-framed mirror hanging on the wall. The looking glass was supported by sculpted marble cherubs. Mischievous cherubs. Evidently, they never slept.

Pauline gave a short, muted chirp of a whistle. It echoed back to her from the coffered ceiling. Goodness, the room was a cavern.

This one bedchamber could swallow her family’s cottage whole.

And this was a guest room. Not even their best, she’d imagine. What must the other chambers be like?

On a side table, she spied a tea service, left over from when she’d arrived. Pauline supposed she should have rung to have it removed, but now she was glad she hadn’t. A sip of cold tea with lemon might soothe her nerves.

She tugged the counterpane free and wrapped it about her shoulders before sliding from the bed.

“Oof!”

It was a long way down. She landed with a thud, tangling in the counterpane and tumbling to the floor.

She wasn’t hurt. Even this carpet was softer than her mattress at home.

Ruefully, she blinked at the little staircase toward the foot of the bed. She’d forgotten climbing the thing earlier that evening. Imagine, a staircase just for getting into bed. The duke’s own bed must be so piled with feather beds, he probably needed six or eight steps. He probably lay drowning in satin bedsheets and downy pillows, cloaked in a nightshirt of regal purple velvet. The idea made her laugh.