Page 20 of The Good Duke
Alas, she was twenty years out ofanyand all climbing practice.
Balancing her weight over her right shoulder, she used her left to wrestle the immense east window up.
She’d done it!
A long, gleeful grin brought her lips up in their first smile in longer than she could recall.
Persephone peeked over her shoulder to the ground below, where her bag still rested against the base of the earl’s townhouse. She puzzled her brow.
Well, mayhap, not done itquiteyet.
Shimmying her body up, she drew herself up and over.
In a tangle of skirts, Persephone gasped as she lost her balance and tumbled headfirst. She managed to roll just in time, so her shoulder collided with the monstrously hard oak floor.
And Mrs. Belden had believed thepenis renderingbad. If the old dragon could see Persephone now, with her skirts rucked about her waist, and in the midst of breaking into a distinguished lord’s household at that.
Laying sprawled on the floor and breathless, Persephone stared dizzily up at the trompe-l’œil mural overhead and waited for the rush of servants…
Who did not come.
Persephone pushed herself up onto her feet. The moment she stood, she reflexively shoved her rumpled hems back into their proper place and instantly regretted that movement. The muscles of her right arm, sore from her fall, instantly tightened in protest.
Sinking her teeth into her lower lip to repress another groan, Persephone tiptoed back over to the window and distractedly rubbed her tight muscles as she went.
She ducked her head out.
Her small, dark brown leather valise stared forlornly back from its lonely place upon the pavement. The moon’s rays glinted off the rusted buckles that no longer buckled and served more as an antique embellishment than a functional clasp.
“I’ll return for you,” she whispered to her bag.
Just then, the sound of heavy footsteps in the hall reached Persephone’s ears.
“…I told you, I heard…”
Silently cursing, she dropped onto her knees at the same time the door opened.
“You arehearingthings.”
“I’m the new head footman.” That voice came rich with exasperation.
“And that means what exactly, Jordan?” the other person drawled as those footfalls moved about the darkened parlor.
Persephone’s heart pounded hard in her breast as she gathered her cloak and inched around the sofa, away from the pair’s approach.
“Itmeans, Warren, I want to ensure the household is operating efficiently and—”
The pair stopped on the other end of the high-backed upholstered sofa. “And you take it we’re being besieged by intruders?” There came a quiet laugh, followed by an indignant sniff.
Her back pressed against the arm of the high-backed Hepplewhite sofa, Persephone remained crouched.
She stole a peek around at the quarreling pair of servants. Each tall, slender, uniformed, and bewigged, the men may as well have been twins. They were alike in every way. That was, with the exception of the sizeable black mole on the corner of one fellow’s nose, which managed to set the two apart.
“…You find that so very hard to believe? What, with the master’s change in circumstances…”
She furrowed her brow. The master’s change in circumstances?
Suddenly, Persephone registered an abrupt silence.
