Chapter 1

 

“He’s coming.”

Mrs Wrightly said it the way another woman might have announced a plague of locusts, or perhaps the arrival of a mother-in-law three days early for Christmas. She pressed her considerable bosom against the bakery window, flour-dusted fingers leaving smudges on the glass that her husband would complain about later.

“Who’s coming?” asked Mrs Holloway, though she already knew. There was only one he in Ashwick who warranted that particular tone; the one that suggested the speaker had bitten into a lemon and discovered it personally offensive.

“The Duke.” Mrs Wrightly invested the title with approximately the same enthusiasm she might have given to the rat in the grain stores or the damp in the cellar. “I can see the carriage on the ridge road. Black as his soul and twice as shiny.”

Mrs Holloway abandoned her inspection of the morning’s bread and joined her friend at the window. The August sun had barely cleared the hills, painting Ashwick in shades of gold and honey, and then, indeed, there it was. A dark smudge against the pastoral prettiness of the countryside, moving with the kind of ponderous dignity that suggested its occupant had nowhere urgent to be and no one waiting who mattered.

“Well,” Mrs Holloway said, in the tone of a woman preparing for battle. “Well, well, well.”

“Indeed.”

“Shall I tell the others?”

Mrs Wrightly was already untying her apron. “I’ll take the east side of High Street. You take the west. We’ll meet at the forge.”

They moved with the efficiency of generals coordinating a campaign, because in Ashwick, information was currency, and the arrival of the Duke of Corvenwell provided at least a fortnight’s supply of conversational capital.

 

***

 

The village of Ashwick had existed for three hundred years in the shadow of Corvenwell estate, and in that time, it had developed a relationship with its noble neighbour that could best be described as complicated, if one were being charitable, or mutually antagonistic, if one were being honest.

The village was pretty in the way of English villages that know they are pretty and have decided to make a personality of it. Thatched roofs sat atop whitewashed cottages like well-placed hats. Window boxes rioted with late-summer flowers; geraniums and trailing lobelia, and the occasional ambitious rose. High Street curved gently, as if the original builders had been aesthetically opposed to straight lines, and at its heart stood a stone cross that had been there so long no one remembered what it commemorated, only that it made an excellent meeting point and an even better place to rest one’s shopping.

The people of Ashwick were equally pretty in their own way, if one’s definition of pretty included weathered hands and sun-browned faces and the kind of robust good health that came from honest work and plentiful gossip. They were farmers and shopkeepers, blacksmiths and bakers, and they had opinions about everything, which they shared freely and often.

Chief among these opinions was their collective assessment of the Duke of Corvenwell, refined through much repetition. He was cold, he was proud, he thought himself above them. And he had never, not once in the eight years since inheriting his title, done a single thing to suggest otherwise.

By the time the ducal carriage reached the outskirts of the village, word had spread with the efficiency of wildfire in dry brush. Children abandoned their games. Women emerged from doorways, wiping their hands on aprons. Men found reasons to linger near High Street, tools in hand, expressions carefully arranged into masks of indifference that fooled absolutely no one.

Old Mr Wrightly, husband to the flour-dusted messenger and proprietor of the bakery that bore his name, positioned himself with his arms crossed and his white eyebrows drawn into a thunderous line.

“I remember his father,” he announced to no one in particular, though the assembled crowd leaned in anyway. “He raised the rents in the bad harvest, and three families had to leave. The Morrisons, the Cartwright widow, and young Peter Finney’s people. They have gone to the cities, all of them, because one winter was lean and His Grace couldn’t bear to tighten his own belt.”

“That was the old duke,” someone pointed out. “The current one…”

“He is cut from the same cloth,” Mr Wrightly declared. “Colder, if anything. At least the old duke spoke to people, even if only to criticise. This one just looks at you. Like you are furniture. Like you’re not even worth the effort of contempt.”

There was a general murmur of agreement. Everyone had a story. Everyone had a grievance.

Young Tom Wheeler, who was seventeen and therefore convinced of his own worldly wisdom, pushed to the front of the gathering crowd. “I saw him once, up close,” he said importantly. “Last spring, when his carriage passed through. He looked right at me, and his face didn’t even move. Like I was nothing.”

“What did you expect?” asked his mother, who had grabbed him by the collar to prevent him from doing something foolish. “A smile? A wave? He’s a duke, Tom. They don’t acknowledge the likes of us.”

“That does not make it right.”

“No,” she agreed, her voice softening slightly. “It doesn’t.”

The carriage was closer now, close enough to make out the gleaming black lacquer and the matched pair of horses; greys, beautiful creatures that probably ate better than half the village. The Corvenwell crest glinted gold on the door: a falcon clutching something unfortunate in its talons, because of course the noble symbol would be a predator.

“Places, everyone,” Mrs Wrightly commanded, and the crowd arranged itself with the practised ease of a theatrical troupe preparing for a familiar performance. The men tipped their hats at angles that suggested respect while communicating none. The women turned their backs with synchronised precision. The children, well, the children had their own plans, as children always do.

Inside the carriage, Frederick Hawthorne, seventh Duke of Corvenwell, sat with his spine precisely three inches from the seat back and his gloved hands folded in his lap.

He was aware that this posture was uncomfortable. He maintained it anyway, because comfort was a luxury and luxuries led to softness and softness was unbecoming in a Hawthorne. His father had taught him that at the age of five, when Frederick had cried over a dead sparrow he’d found in the garden. Hawthornes do not weep over birds, his father had said, and Frederick had never wept over anything again. Not birds, not his mother’s death a year later, not his father’s collapse at the dinner table eighteen years after that.

Hawthornes did not weep. Hawthornes endured.

Across from him, Boggins sat with the particular stillness of a man who had learned long ago that his employer did not appreciate unnecessary movement. He was a lean figure, Boggins, all sharp angles and sharper observations, with grey threaded through his dark hair and a face that seemed perpetually on the verge of disapproval. He had been Frederick’s valet for many years, inherited from the previous duke along with the title and the debts and the pervasive sense that nothing Frederick did would ever be quite enough.

“We are approaching Ashwick, Your Grace,” Boggins observed, his tone carefully neutral.

“I am aware.”

“The villagers appear to have assembled.”

“I am aware of that as well.”

Boggins’ gaze drifted to the window, where the first cottages were becoming visible through the carriage’s silk curtains. “In significant numbers.”

Frederick did not respond. He had learned long ago that response only encouraged Boggins, who possessed an inexhaustible talent for observation and an unfortunate tendency to share his findings aloud.

“I count approximately thirty-seven individuals at present,” Boggins continued, undeterred. “Though the number appears to be growing. Word travels quickly in small communities, I understand.”

“It does.”

“Indeed, Your Grace. I believe the phrase is ‘like wildfire.’ Though perhaps ‘like plague’ would be more apt, given the expressions I am observing.”

Frederick’s jaw tightened by precisely one-sixteenth of an inch. Boggins noticed, because Boggins noticed everything, but had the grace to pretend otherwise.

Through the window, Frederick could see them now; the watchers, the critics, the keepers of grudges he had never fully understood. He recognised some faces from previous passages through the village. The baker with his thunderous eyebrows. The cluster of women who always seemed to turn their backs in unison, as if they had practised. The children gathering at the roadside with expressions that promised mischief.

He did not know their names. He had never been taught that names mattered; not the names of villagers and tenants and common folk who existed, in his father’s worldview, merely as figures in ledgers and problems to be managed from a comfortable distance.

A duke does not mingle, his father had said. A duke does not explain. A duke does not lower himself to seek approval from those beneath him. We are Hawthornes. We are above.

Above what, precisely, his father had never specified. Frederick had eventually concluded that the answer was everything, and everyone, and had arranged his life accordingly.

It was lonely, being above. But loneliness was also unbecoming in a Hawthorne, so Frederick had learned not to notice it.

“The young Wheeler boy appears to be miming something,” Boggins observed. “I believe it may be Your Grace’s death by drowning. His technique has improved since last season.”

“Has it? “

“Indeed. He has added a gurgling component. Quite theatrical.”

Frederick did not look. Looking would be acknowledging, and acknowledging would be bending, and bending was the first step toward breaking, and Hawthornes did not break.

The carriage slowed as it entered the heart of High Street, the horses’ hooves transitioning from dirt to cobblestone with a change in rhythm that Frederick had memorised over years of identical journeys. Clip-clop became clack-clack. The sound of judgment approaching.

“Your Grace might consider drawing the curtain,” Boggins suggested.

“I might.”

He did not. Drawing the curtain would be hiding, and hiding would be admitting that their stares affected him, and admitting that would be…

Weakness. Everything came back to weakness in the end. The Hawthorne philosophy could be summarised in three words: weakness is unacceptable. It left no room for doubt, for vulnerability, for the inconvenient humanity that lurked beneath Frederick’s perfectly pressed exterior.

He watched the village pass without appearing to watch, his face arranged in what he hoped was dignified neutrality, but he suspected it might simply look cold. The baker’s glare. The synchronised back-turning. The children’s escalating pantomimes of his theoretical demise.

He catalogued each slight with the precision of a steward recording minutes, filing them away in the mental cabinet where he kept everything that hurt. The cabinet was quite full, and he had stopped opening it years ago.

“The forge is approaching,” Boggins said, and something in his tone made Frederick’s attention sharpen involuntarily.

“Is it?”

“The Fletcher girl is there. In the doorway.”

Frederick’s gaze shifted before he could stop it, drawn by something in Boggins’ observation; a quality of particular attention that the valet usually reserved for noting stains on Frederick’s cravat or dust on his boots.

She was there. Standing in the entrance to the blacksmith’s forge, her frame silhouetted against the orange glow of the fire within. Soot smudged her jaw and dusted her apron, and her dark hair had escaped its pins in a way that suggested she had better things to do than worry about appearances. Her arms were crossed, not in hostility, he realised, but in something more like consideration.

She was looking at him.

Not glaring, like the baker. Not turning away, like the women. Not mocking, like the children. She was simply observing. Assessing. Her head tilted slightly to one side, her brow furrowed, as if he were a puzzle she was attempting to solve and finding the pieces unexpectedly complicated.

Their eyes met through the carriage window.

Frederick should have looked away immediately. He should have returned to his studied indifference, his practised distance, his way of being above, that kept him safe from the wanting and the wishing and the simple hope that someone, somewhere, might see past the ice to whatever remained beneath.

He held her gaze instead. Two seconds… Three… An eternity in the language of meaningful looks.

She did not flinch, she did not bow, and she did not curtsy or simper or show any of the deference his position supposedly commanded. She just looked at him, and in her looking there was something that felt almost like…

Recognition. As if she could see something the others had missed.

Frederick looked away first.

He told himself it was because she was beneath his notice. A blacksmith’s niece, probably. Certainly, no one of consequence. The Hawthornes of Corvenwell did not concern themselves with the assessing gazes of village girls who smelled of smoke and iron.

He told himself this, and if his heart was beating slightly faster than before, that was simply the heat of the day.

“Interesting,” Boggins murmured, so quietly that Frederick could pretend not to have heard.

The forge fell behind them, and the village continued its parade of hostility. Frederick resumed his rigid posture, his rigid expression and his rigid determination not to care about any of it.

But his hands, beneath their immaculate gloves, were clammy and clenched into fists.

 

Chapter 2

 

The carriage passed, and Ashwick exhaled.

It was remarkable, Lydia Fletcher thought, how much air the village seemed to hold when the duke was near; as if everyone collectively drew breath to brace themselves and only released it once the danger had passed. Not that the Duke of Corvenwell was dangerous, precisely. He had never raised a hand to anyone, never evicted a family, never done much of anything at all except exist in that great cold house on the hill and occasionally pass through their midst like a winter wind that didn’t understand the calendar.

But absence could be its own kind of cruelty, and indifference could wound as sharply as action. And the duke, by all accounts, had perfected both.

Lydia turned back to the forge, where her uncle Thomas was pretending he hadn’t been watching the spectacle with everyone else. He was a broad man, her uncle, with arms like oak branches and a beard that had gone more silver than brown in the years since her parents died. He had taken her in at seven, raised her alongside iron and fire, and taught her that honest work was its own reward even when the world tried to convince you otherwise.

“Back to work, then,” he said, not looking up from the horseshoe he was shaping. Sparks flew with each strike of his hammer, bright and brief against the forge’s deeper glow. “That hinge set won’t finish itself.”

“I know.” Lydia retrieved her own hammer from its hook, rolling up her sleeves. The familiar weight settled into her palm like a handshake from an old friend. “Uncle Thomas?”

“Mm.”

“Have you ever actually spoken to him? The duke, I mean.”

Her uncle’s hammer paused mid-swing; barely a hesitation, but noticeable to someone who had spent seventeen years learning to read his silences. “I can’t say I have. His steward handles the business. He always has, as far back as I can remember.”

“So, we don’t actually know what he’s like. As a person.”

Now Thomas did look up, his weathered face creased with something between confusion and concern. “What’s this about, girl?”

Lydia shrugged, focusing on her work with perhaps more intensity than the task required. “Nothing. I was just thinking.”

“Dangerous habit, that.”

“So you keep telling me.”

The truth was, she couldn’t quite shake the memory of his face in the carriage window. Everyone spoke of the Duke of Corvenwell as if he were carved from ice; frozen, unfeeling, essentially inhuman in his aristocratic detachment. And perhaps he was. Perhaps the coldness everyone described was exactly what it appeared to be: the natural temperature of a man who had never needed to be warm.

But when their eyes had met, for those two or three seconds before he had looked away, Lydia had seen something else. Something that flickered beneath the frost like a flame behind glass. Something that looked, if she were being fanciful, almost like…

Loneliness. Which was ridiculous. Dukes didn’t get lonely. They had everything: houses and horses and servants, and more money than they actually needed. They had the power to shape entire villages, entire counties, to their whims. If the Duke of Corvenwell was lonely, he had only himself to blame.

And yet.

“He looked at me,” she said, not quite meaning to say it aloud. “When the carriage passed. He actually looked at me.”

Her uncle snorted. “He looked through you, more likely. That’s what they do, his sort. We’re not people to them. We’re,” he waved his hammer vaguely, “landscape. Furniture.”

“No.” Lydia frowned, testing the memory against the dismissal. “He looked at me. There’s a difference.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

Thomas shook his head, but fondly. “You’ve always seen more than the rest of us, Lyddie. Ever since you were small. Remember when you insisted old Mrs Cartwright wasn’t actually mean, but just hard of hearing?”

“She wasn’t actually mean. Everyone shouted at her because they thought she was rude, but she just couldn’t hear them properly. Once I figured that out and started speaking slowly and clearly…”

“She became the sweetest woman in the village. Indeed, I remember.” Her uncle’s expression softened. “But Mrs Cartwright was a neighbour. The duke is…”

“Different. I know.” Lydia struck her iron with perhaps more force than necessary. “I know he’s different. I know he’s above us and cold and probably terrible. I’m not saying he isn’t. I’m just saying…” She trailed off, uncertain herself what she was trying to say.

“Just saying what?”

The iron hissed as she plunged it into the water barrel, steam rising in a dramatic plume. “I am saying he held himself stiff.”

Thomas was quiet for a long moment. Then: “You got all that from a carriage window?”

“I notice things.”

“That you do.” He returned to his work, but his voice was thoughtful when he spoke again. “Your mother was the same way. She saw straight through to the heart of people. It’s a gift, that. And a burden.”

Lydia thought of her mother; fragments of memory now, seventeen years distant. She thought of her hands kneading bread, her laugh that filled their small cottage like sunlight, and she thought of the fever that had taken both her parents in the space of a single terrible week, leaving Lydia alone in a world that had suddenly become vast and cold and uncertain.

The village had saved her. Mrs Wrightly had held her while she cried. Old Mr Holloway at the public house had told her stories until she fell asleep. A dozen families had fed her, clothed her, loved her in the gaps between their own lives until Thomas could figure out how to raise a child alongside his ironwork.

She owed Ashwick everything. Her loyalty to the village wasn’t just a habit; it was bone-deep, blood-deep, written into the very core of who she was.

Which was why the flicker of sympathy she’d felt for the duke, the enemy, the cold one, the man who had never once done anything for the people in his care, felt almost like betrayal.

“I should go change before tonight,” she said, setting down her hammer. “The public house will be full after that little spectacle.”

Her uncle nodded. “Go on, then. Tell Mrs Holloway I’ll be wanting my usual.”

Lydia smiled despite herself. “She knows, Uncle Thomas. You’ve ordered the same thing every Tuesday for twenty years.”

“And I’ll order it for twenty more.” He looked up at her, and his eyes, so like her father’s that it still caught her off guard sometimes, were warm with affection. “Don’t let the village talk fill your head too full tonight, Lyddie. They mean well, but they can be…”

“I know.” She knew exactly what they could be. Loyal and loving and absolutely certain of their judgments, right up until evidence proved them wrong. It was their greatest strength and their most significant flaw, this ability to form a collective opinion and hold to it.

Tonight, she would listen. She would nod. She would laugh at the jests and add her voice to the chorus of complaint.

But she would also remember those tight shoulders, that two-second gaze and the flicker of something human behind the ice.

Just in case it mattered, someday.

 

***

 

The Crossed Keys public house had been serving the thirsty citizens of Ashwick for nearly two hundred years, and in that time, it had accumulated the particular atmosphere of a place that knows it is beloved. The ceiling beams were low enough to threaten taller patrons with concussion. The fireplace, unlit in summer but somehow still the room’s focal point, was blackened with centuries of smoke. The floorboards creaked in specific patterns that regulars used as a kind of primitive navigation system, and the whole establishment smelled of spilt ale and wood polish and the indefinable scent of communal memory.

Tonight, it was full of people.

Old Mr. Holloway, who had owned the public house for forty years and would own it until he died and possibly after, was holding court from his usual position behind the bar. He was a mountain of a man, with hands like dinner plates and a voice that could silence a room or fill it with laughter depending on his mood. Tonight, his mood was expansive.

“I saw him myself,” he was saying to a cluster of men at the counter. “Face like a funeral in winter. Not a nod, not a wave, not so much as a blink in our direction.”

“Same as always, then,” said Robert the carpenter.

“Same as his father. Same as his grandfather. They’re all cut from the same bolt, that family. Cold silk and sharp edges.”

“My grandmother used to say the Hawthornes were cursed,” offered young Daniel, the miller’s son. “She said some ancestor made a bargain with some infernal power for wealth and power, and the price was…”

“Their souls?” Robert suggested.

“Their hearts. No Hawthorne has ever truly loved another human being. They can’t, apparently. Part of the deal.”

This was met with the particular silence that village superstition always commanded; half scepticism, half uneasy belief.

“That’s nonsense,” Mr Holloway said finally, but without much conviction. “Still. There’s something not right about that man. Something missing.”

Lydia had changed from her forge-clothes into something more presentable, a simple blue dress that had belonged to her mother and still fit tolerably well after all these years. Her hair was pinned more securely, her face scrubbed clean of soot, and she had even allowed herself a dab of the rose water that Mrs Wrightly gave her every Christmas despite Lydia’s insistence that she never used it.

She used it sometimes. For occasions.

The passage of the duke apparently qualified.

“And he didn’t even look at her,” Mrs Holloway was saying as Lydia made her way through the crowd toward the corner where the village women had claimed their traditional territory. “Poor Mrs Addison, standing right there at her gate, waving, actually waving, if you can believe it, and he looked straight through her like she was made of glass.”

“Ice, more likely,” Mrs Wrightly corrected. “That man doesn’t see glass. He only sees mirrors; himself reflected at him, over and over.”

“Mrs Addison shouldn’t have waved,” said Martha Fenn, who was notorious for having opinions about everyone’s behaviour. “She gave him the satisfaction of being ignored. Better to turn your back and let him know he doesn’t matter.”

“He should matter, though,” countered her sister Elizabeth. “He’s the duke. He’s responsible for half the county. If he doesn’t matter, what does that say about us?”

“It says we have sense. We know better than to rely on someone who can’t be relied upon.”

“When has he ever failed to be reliable?” Lydia heard herself ask, and immediately regretted it as several heads turned her direction.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Martha demanded.

“I only meant…” Lydia searched for safer ground. “He pays his debts promptly. Uncle Thomas has never had trouble collecting from the manor.”

“Oh, he pays his debts,” Mrs Holloway agreed. “We should acknowledge that much. But there’s more to being a landlord than settling accounts. There’s presence, there’s care, and there’s showing up when people need you, not just when the ledgers require it.”

There was a general murmur of agreement. Lydia accepted the drink that someone pressed into her hand and found a seat on the edge of the group, close enough to participate but far enough to observe.

“Remember when the miller’s barn burned down?” Mrs Wrightly said. “Three years ago. The whole village came out to help. We passed buckets until our arms ached. We raised money for rebuilding. We took turns feeding the family while they sorted themselves out.”

“I remember,” Lydia said quietly. She had been there, passing buckets alongside everyone else.

“And where was the duke? In his great stone house on the hill. Not a word, not a penny and not a single acknowledgement that something terrible had happened to people who live on his land.”

“His steward sent a letter,” someone offered.

“A letter! A letter expressing the duke’s ‘regrets for the inconvenience’ and reminding the miller that his rent was still due on the quarter day. Can you imagine?”

“To be fair,” Lydia ventured carefully, “we don’t know that the duke himself wrote that letter. Stewards often…”

“The duke is responsible for his steward,” Mrs Wrightly said firmly. “If the steward is cold, it’s because the master is colder. That’s how these things work.”

Lydia subsided, taking a long sip from her cup.

“My sister worked up at the house for a time,” Mrs Holloway continued. She had said this approximately once a week for the past three years, but the audience never tired of it because it represented the closest thing any of them had to intelligence from behind enemy lines. “She said the staff are terrified of him. Terrified! They’re not allowed to speak unless spoken to, not allowed to make noise, not allowed to exist too loudly in case it disturbs His Grace’s precious sensibilities.”

“What does he do all day?” Someone asked. “In that great empty house?”

“Nothing and everything. Who knows?” Mrs Holloway shrugged expressively. “My sister said he eats alone in a dining room meant for forty. Can you imagine? Forty chairs, all empty, and him at the head of the table like a king without subjects.”

Lydia thought of this image, the long, polished table, the ranks of vacant seats, the single figure at the end, and felt something twist in her chest that she chose not to examine too closely.

“It’s sad, really,” she said, before she could stop herself.

Twelve heads turned toward her with varying degrees of surprise.

“Sad?” Mrs Wrightly’s eyebrows rose toward her hairline. “Sad for who, exactly? He’s a duke, Lydia. He has more money than this entire village will earn in ten generations. If he eats alone, it’s because he chooses to.”

“I just meant…”

“He could invite people. He could host dinners, balls, whatever the nobility does.” Mrs Wrightly was warming to her theme now, her voice rising to carry across the crowded room. “He could open his doors to the community that has existed in his shadow for three hundred years. He could be a neighbour. But he doesn’t. He chooses not to. And that’s not sad, Lydia. That’s selfishness.”

The murmurs of agreement were louder now, more emphatic, and Lydia felt herself flush.

“I didn’t mean…”

“What did you mean, then?”

She should have let it go. She should have smiled and nodded and admitted that she’d misspoken. It was what the situation called for; the graceful retreat, the acknowledgement that the village wisdom was correct, and her momentary sympathy was misplaced.

But something stubborn in Lydia, the same something that had made her learn the forge despite being a girl, that had made her turn down three perfectly reasonable marriage proposals because she wasn’t ready to give up her independence, refused to yield.

“I meant that we don’t actually know him,” she said. “We know his father. We know stories about his father, passed down and embroidered until they might as well be fairy tales. We know that he doesn’t visit and doesn’t write, and doesn’t seem to care. But we don’t know why. We’ve never asked.”

The silence that followed was the particular kind that Lydia had learned to recognise: the silence of a group deciding whether to be offended or merely puzzled.

“Why would we ask?” Mrs Holloway said, finally. “He’s made it clear he wants nothing to do with us. Asking would be…”

“Beneath us,” someone supplied.

“Exactly. We have our pride, same as he does.”

“Do we, though?” Lydia heard herself say. “Or do we have our assumptions, which we’ve mistaken for knowledge, and our resentments, which we’ve polished until they shine like facts?”

This time, the silence was definitely offended.

“Lydia Fletcher.” Mrs Wrightly’s voice had gone very careful in a way that meant she was controlling her temper. “Your uncle raised you, and the village helped. We fed you when you were hungry. We clothed you when you were cold. We taught you your letters and your manners and everything you needed to know to be a proper woman of Ashwick. And now you sit here, defending the man who has never lifted a finger to help any of us?”

The guilt hit like a punch to the stomach. Lydia felt the blood rush to her face, then drain from it, leaving her pale and slightly sick.

“I wasn’t…”

“You were.” Mrs Wrightly’s expression softened, but only slightly. “I know you see good in everyone, girl. It’s one of your best qualities and one of your worst. But some people do not have good in them. Some people are exactly what they appear to be. And the Duke of Corvenwell appears to be a cold, selfish man who cares nothing for anyone but himself. Perhaps, just this once, you might trust the judgment of the people who love you.”

Lydia looked around the room at the faces she had known her entire life. The baker who had given her sweet rolls when she was small. The miller’s wife, who had sat with her through fever. The old men who had taught her card games, the young ones who had pulled her braids and the women who had clucked over her like a collective flock of very opinionated hens.

They loved her, and she loved them. And they were all looking at her with varying shades of disappointment.

“You’re right,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

The tension in the room eased. Mrs Wrightly patted her arm. Someone made a jest about young people and their foolish ideas, and someone else started a story about the time the old duke’s horse had relieved itself in front of the church, and gradually the conversation flowed back into its normal channels.

Lydia laughed in the right places. She nodded and agreed and made all the appropriate noises of village solidarity.

But somewhere beneath the performance, a small voice whispered: You saw what you saw. You know what you know.

She told herself to be quiet. She told herself that the village was right and she was wrong, that her momentary sympathy had been foolish, that the Duke of Corvenwell was exactly what everyone said he was.

And she almost believed it.

 

***

 

The evening wound down in the way of village evenings, with the crowd thinning gradually as people remembered children to put to bed and animals to feed and all the small responsibilities that kept the wheels of daily life turning. Lydia stayed later than she should have, nursing her drink and listening to the conversations ebb and flow around her.

It was Mr Wrightly who finally brought up the subject she’d been half-dreading, half-anticipating all night.

“The manor commission,” he said, settling into the chair across from her with the groan of a man whose knees had opinions about the day’s work. “How’s your uncle getting on with it?”

“Nearly finished. Another day or two, and the hinges will be ready.”

“And who’ll be delivering them?”

Lydia shrugged, aiming for casual and probably missing by a mile. “Me, most likely. Uncle Thomas isn’t one for dealing with stewards and clerks.”

“Dealing with the duke, more like,” Mrs Holloway said from across the room, her ears apparently sharper than her years suggested. “I hear he sometimes comes down to inspect deliveries personally. Very particular about quality, they say.”

“I thought he never spoke to anyone,” Lydia said.

“He doesn’t speak warmly to anyone. There’s a difference.” Mrs Holloway’s smile had an edge to it. “My sister said he once rejected an entire shipment of candles because the wicks were inconsistent. He made the chandler re-wax the whole lot. He didn’t apologise, and he didn’t explain. He just handed them back with that look of his and walked away.”

“Sounds like he has standards,” Lydia said, and then immediately wished she hadn’t.

But Mrs Holloway only laughed. “Standards! That’s one word for it. Another might be impossibly demanding. Another might be incapable of human decency.” She leaned forward, her eyes bright with something that was probably concern but looked a lot like a warning. “Be careful when you go up there, girl. Don’t let him rattle you. Don’t let him make you feel small. And whatever you do, don’t…”

“Don’t what?”

The older woman hesitated. “Don’t expect anything. Don’t hope for anything. Just do your business and get out. The less time you spend in that house, the better.”

It wasn’t quite advice. It was closer to prophecy, delivered with the certainty of someone who had watched better women than Lydia try to find warmth in cold places and fail.

“I’m just delivering hinges,” Lydia said. “Not storming the castle.”

“Famous last words,” Mrs Holloway muttered, but she let the subject drop.

Lydia walked home through streets that were quiet now, the summer stars scattered overhead like spilt salt against black velvet. Her uncle’s cottage was dark when she arrived; he kept early hours, claiming that the forge demanded it, so she let herself in quietly and climbed the stairs to her small room beneath the eaves.

Sleep should have come easily. The day had been long, the evening longer, and her body knew the rhythm of rest the way her hands knew the weight of a hammer.

But her mind refused to settle.

She kept seeing his face. That moment when their eyes met. The way he had looked at her was like she was the first person to actually see him in a very long time.

You’re being foolish, she told herself. He probably looks at everyone like that. It probably doesn’t mean anything.

But she had felt something pass between them; something that wasn’t hostility or indifference or the careful blank mask that both classes wore when dealing with the other. Something that had felt, for just a heartbeat, like recognition.

Like a question, waiting to be answered.

He’s a duke, she reminded herself firmly. Cold, proud, above us all. Everything they say he is.

And yet.

Those tight shoulders…….

What kind of man braced himself to drive through a village? What kind of fear required that level of defence against nothing more threatening than disapproving looks and children’s mockery?

But Lydia stared at the ceiling and wondered, and wondered, and eventually slept.

Her dreams, annoyingly, were full of ice.

 

Chapter 3

 

Some fifteen miles distant, in a house too large for its single occupant and yet somehow too small to contain his restlessness, Frederick Hawthorne was also failing to sleep.

This was not unusual. Sleep had never come easily to him; not as a child, when the nursery shadows had seemed full of criticisms waiting to be spoken; not as a young man, when the weight of impending responsibility had pressed down like a physical thing; and certainly not now, when the reality of that responsibility had proven even heavier than its anticipation.

He was in his study, because the study felt less empty than the bedroom. A fire burned in the grate despite the August warmth, because light was better than darkness and flickering movement was better than stillness. A book lay open on the desk before him; estate accounts, the endless arithmetic of rents and repairs and the complex machinery of keeping an old name solvent in a changing world.

He was not reading it.

He was thinking about a girl with soot on her face and steel in her spine.

This was inconvenient; this was inappropriate. This was exactly the kind of distraction his father had warned him about. The pull of attraction toward those beneath him, the weakness that had destroyed better men than Frederick.

Your grandfather, his father had said once, in one of his rare moments of personal disclosure, nearly married a farmer’s daughter. Can you imagine? The Duke of Corvenwell, leg-shackled to a woman who smelled of hay. It would have been the end of the family. The absolute end.

Frederick had been fourteen. He had nodded solemnly and filed away the lesson: attachment was dangerous, particularly attachment to the wrong sort of person. It was better to remain detached, better to remain alone. It was better to be ice than fire, because ice held its shape while fire consumed everything it touched.

He had followed this philosophy faithfully for fifteen years. He had kept his distance from everyone, noble and common alike, and if this meant loneliness, well, loneliness was preferable to destruction.

So why couldn’t he stop thinking about her?

She hadn’t bowed, she hadn’t curtsied, and she hadn’t shown any of the deference that his position supposedly commanded. She had just looked at him, and in her looking there had been something he couldn’t identify, something that felt almost like…

Interest. Genuine interest, not the sycophantic variety that he occasionally encountered from those seeking favour, but something simpler and more complicated at the same time. As if she actually wanted to understand him. As if understanding him might matter.

“Your Grace appears troubled.”

Frederick didn’t jump, Hawthornes didn’t jump, but he did look up sharply to find Boggins standing in the doorway with a tray bearing what appeared to be brandy and a distinctly judgmental expression.

“I did not ring for you.”

“No, Your Grace. You did not.” Boggins crossed the room and set the tray on the desk with the precise movements of a man who had done this exact thing a thousand times before. “I took the liberty of anticipating Your Grace’s needs. The fire suggested extended wakefulness. Extended wakefulness suggests either deep thought or digestive complaint. As Your Grace consumed very little at dinner, I concluded the former.”

“Your powers of deduction are, as always, remarkable.”

“I do endeavour to give satisfaction, Your Grace.” Boggins poured the brandy with surgical precision, exactly two fingers, the way Frederick preferred, and set the glass within reach. “Though I confess I had an ulterior motive in attending upon Your Grace.”

“Did you?”

“Indeed. The household is talking.”

Frederick’s jaw tightened. “The household is always talking.”

“True, Your Grace. But tonight, they are talking about the passage through the village. More specifically, they are talking about Your Grace’s reaction to it. Several of the younger maids have been talking about your decision to pass through the village today. They had not expected it, and they have concluded.”

“What sort of conclusions?”

“The romantic sort, Your Grace. The housekeeper has already had to quash speculation about a village sweetheart.”

Frederick nearly choked on his brandy. “A village sweetheart. Good Heavens.”

“Indeed, Your Grace. I informed Mrs Patterson that such rumours were both inappropriate and absurd, and that Your Grace’s interest in the village was purely administrative.”

“Thank you, Boggins.”

“However.” The valet’s expression remained perfectly neutral, which lent his words greater weight. “I confess I am curious about the truth of the matter. Your Grace was staring rather intently at the forge as we passed.”

“I was not staring.”

“Your Grace’s head turned precisely seventeen degrees to the left and remained in that position for approximately three seconds. In the dictionary of ducal behaviour, Your Grace, that qualifies as staring.”

“You counted the degrees?”

“I estimated, Your Grace. I have been in service long enough to develop a reliable sense of such things.”

Frederick set down his brandy glass with perhaps more force than necessary. “There is nothing to tell. I noticed the blacksmith’s niece because she was the only person in the village who did not immediately look away or make obscene gestures.”

“Ah.”

“What does ‘ah’ mean?”

“It means I understand, Your Grace.”

“You understand what, exactly?”

Boggins permitted himself the ghost of a smile, just barely visible, and quickly suppressed. “I understand that Your Grace is protesting considerably more than the situation would seem to warrant. In my experience, such protests often indicate…”

“Boggins.”

“Yes, Your Grace?”

“You are dangerously close to overstepping.”

“My apologies, Your Grace. I shall endeavour to step more carefully.” But his eyes, when they met Frederick’s, held a knowing gleam that suggested no such endeavouring would take place.

Frederick reached for the brandy, then stopped. “Boggins.”

“Your Grace?”

“How long have you been in service to this family?”

The question appeared to surprise Boggins, though his expression barely changed. “Thirty-one years, Your Grace. I began as a footman under your grandfather and progressed through the usual channels until your father appointed me valet upon his ascension to the title.”

“Thirty-one years.” Frederick turned the number over in his mind. “You have served three generations of Hawthornes.”

“Indeed, Your Grace. Though I confess the third generation has proven the most… interesting.”

“Interesting how?”

Boggins’ pause was microscopically longer than usual. “If Your Grace will permit an observation?”

“Since when have you required permission?”

“Since always, Your Grace. I merely choose to interpret silence as consent.” The ghost of something that might have been humour flickered across Boggins’ austere features. “Your grandfather was a passionate man. Volatile. He felt everything too intensely and made decisions based on those feelings that caused considerable difficulty. Your father, in reaction, became the opposite; calculating, controlled, determined, never to let emotion influence judgment. He succeeded, largely.”

“And me?”

“Your Grace,” Boggins said carefully, “has inherited your grandfather’s depth of feeling and your father’s determination to suppress it. The result is……Complicated.”

Frederick stared at him. In his years of service, Boggins had never spoken so directly about anything personal. Estate matters, yes. Wardrobe concerns, certainly. The correct temperature for shaving water, extensively. But never this.

“You think I feel things,” Frederick said finally.

“I think Your Grace feels everything very intensely, and expends considerable energy pretending otherwise. The cost of this pretence is…” Boggins hesitated. “Significant.”

“And what would you have me do about it?”

“That is not for me to say, Your Grace. I am merely a valet.”

“You are the closest thing I have to a confidant, and we both know it.”

The words hung in the air between them, too honest, too raw. Frederick wished he could take them back. Hawthornes didn’t make admissions like that. Hawthornes didn’t acknowledge vulnerability, need, or the desire for connection that lurked beneath every interaction.

But Boggins didn’t flinch, he didn’t look away, and he didn’t offer false comfort or easy platitudes.

“Then, as Your Grace’s confidant,” he said quietly, “I would suggest that the current approach, isolation, suppression, the studied avoidance of all human connection, is not serving Your Grace well. The passage through the village today was… difficult. It is difficult every time. And it does not have to be.”

“You think I should…..What? Attend the Harvest Fair? Make friends with the villagers? Host dinner gatherings for farmers and their families?”

“I think Your Grace might start with smaller steps. Speaking to the tenants occasionally. Learning the names of the people whose lives depend on your decisions. Perhaps acknowledging the existence of the forge girl who caught your attention this afternoon.”

Frederick’s hand tightened on the brandy glass. “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“Of course not, Your Grace.” Boggins’s tone suggested that he knew exactly what he was referring to and found Frederick’s denial adorably transparent. “Will there be anything else?”

“No. Thank you, Boggins.”

“Good night, Your Grace.”

The valet withdrew, closing the door behind him with barely a sound. Frederick remained where he was, staring at the fire, the brandy warming in his hand.

The forge girl who caught your attention.

He hadn’t been that obvious. Had he?

He thought of her face, the directness of her gaze, the stubborn set of her jaw. She had looked at him like he was a problem to be solved. Like beneath all the ice and title and studied distance, there might be something worth finding.

No one had ever looked at him like that before. Probably no one had ever looked at him at all, either avoiding him or mocking him. However, she had looked straight at him and had not moved or flinched.

It was probably nothing. Probably just curiosity, the same kind that made villagers gawk at his carriage and children mime his death. She would forget him by morning, if she hadn’t already.

And he would forget her. He would. Because that was what Hawthornes did. They forgot, and they endured, and they held themselves apart from a world that had never wanted them anyway.

Frederick drained the brandy in one long swallow and reached for the account books.

Work was easier than feeling. It always had been.

 

***

 

But even work failed him eventually, and when the fire had burned down to embers, and the candles guttered in their holders, Frederick found himself standing at the window of his study, looking out across the dark expanse of his lands toward the distant cluster of lights that marked Ashwick.

The village glowed faintly in the darkness; warm lights behind small windows, the promise of families gathered, conversations shared, the simple human commerce of people who knew each other and cared about each other and belonged to something larger than themselves.

He tried to imagine what they were doing. The women at The Crossed Keys, perhaps, are still talking about him; his cold face, his silent carriage, the sins of his father visited upon his generation. The blacksmith, settling down for the night in the cottage above his forge. The children, being tucked into beds by parents who loved them, who would always love them, who would teach them to love in turn.

He had never been tucked into bed. Nurses had put him there, efficiently and without sentiment. His father had visited the nursery occasionally; brief, formal visits that felt more like inspections than anything else. His mother……He had memories of his mother, soft around the edges with time and loss, but he could no longer be certain which were real and which were stories he had told himself to fill the emptiness.

What would she have been like if she had lived? Would she have softened his father? Would she have taught Frederick that feelings were not weakness, that connection was not dangerous, that it was possible to be a Hawthorne and still be human?

He would never know. The fever had taken her when he was six, and his father had forbidden anyone to speak of her afterwards. We do not dwell on what is lost, he had said. We endure. We continue. We do not look back.

Frederick had not looked back. He had kept his eyes forward, focused on duty and obligation and the endless work of maintaining a legacy he had never asked for. He had not allowed himself to wonder what might have been different or if he might have been different.

But tonight, watching those distant lights, he allowed himself to wonder.

What if he had been raised by a mother who loved him? What if his father had been capable of warmth? What if someone, anyone, had taught him that asking for help was not the same as admitting defeat?

He thought of his feelings when they had told him his father was dead. The bluntness of it. The liberation implicit in those four words. Your father is dead. As if his father’s opinions, his father’s rules, his father’s cold and crushing certainty about how life should be lived—all of it had died too, and Frederick was free.

Was he free?

He had never felt free. The weight of the title, the expectations of generations, the endless obligations of land and tenants and a name that meant something to everyone except the man who bore it; none of that had lifted when his father’s heart had stopped beating at the dinner table. If anything, the weight had grown heavier because now there was no one to share it. No one to guide him. No one to tell him whether he was doing it right.

He hadn’t been doing it right. He could see that now. He had cultivated isolation, preserved his distance, and scrupulously avoided the slightest hint of vulnerability. His father would have approved, yet his father had been mistaken. His father had died alone in a room full of people, and no one had mourned him except out of duty.

Was that what Frederick wanted? To die alone, to be mourned by obligation, to leave behind nothing but ledgers and property and the cold stone weight of a legacy no one actually cared about?

No. The answer rose from somewhere deep inside him, surprising in its vehemence. No, that was not what he wanted. He wanted…

He wanted someone to know his name. Not his title. His name. He wanted someone to laugh at his stone face and call him Frederick and treat him like a person instead of a position.

He wanted to attend the Harvest Fair and have it mean something.

He wanted Lydia Fletcher to look at him the way she had looked at him today, with that mixture of challenge and understanding that had made him feel more alive than he had felt in years.

He wanted, desperately and pathetically and undeniably, not to be alone anymore.

The village lights twinkled in the distance, indifferent to his revelation. The night was silent around him. The manor, vast and empty, seemed to echo with all the conversations that had never happened within its walls.

Frederick Hawthorne, seventh Duke of Corvenwell, stood at his window and admitted, if only to himself, if only in the privacy of darkness, that he was afraid.

Not of the village. Not of their judgment or their mockery or their accumulated generations of grievance.

He was afraid of hope. Afraid of trying and failing. Afraid of wanting something so badly that the not-having of it would break him.

But he was more afraid of this, of the cold stone emptiness. Of another thirty years of frozen isolation, reaching toward no one, belonging nowhere, dying as his father had died; surrounded by people who didn’t know him and didn’t care.

He would learn to tolerate mud. He would learn to smile without terrifying children. He would learn, somehow, impossibly, to be the kind of man who could walk through a village and be welcomed instead of feared.

Or he would fail. That was possible too. Probable, even. The odds were against him, and he knew it.

But Lydia Fletcher had looked at him like he was worth looking at. And for that alone, he was willing to try.