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.