To Love a Cold Duke (The Midnight Rose Dukes #2)

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.