Chapter 6
"No."
"Your Grace…"
"Absolutely not."
"If Your Grace would simply consider…"
"I have considered, Boggins. I have considered extensively. And my conclusion is no."
Boggins held the offending garment at arm's length, his expression suggesting that Frederick was being unreasonable and that he, Boggins, was far too professional to say so aloud.
The coat in question was brown. Not a distinguished brown, not a fashionable brown, but the particular shade of brown that suggested its wearer had recently rolled through a field and emerged philosophically at peace with the experience.
"The colour is called 'earth brown,' Your Grace. It is intended to convey amiability."
"It conveys that I have lost a bet."
"Perhaps if Your Grace tried it on…"
"I am not putting that coat on my body, Boggins. I have standards."
"Your Grace has rejected six coats this morning. Standards may need to be somehow adjusted."
Frederick turned from the mirror, where he had been examining his reflection with the kind of intensity usually reserved for military campaigns or particularly challenging chess problems. The morning light streamed through the windows of his dressing room, illuminating a battlefield of discarded garments: the blue coat, which he thought was too formal, the grey coat that looked too funeral, the green coat, which seemed to him too something, he couldn't articulate what, and now the earth brown abomination that Boggins seemed inexplicably attached to.
"I need something that says I am approachable but not desperate," Frederick said. "Friendly but not familiar. Willing to engage but not…"
"Not what, Your Grace?"
"Not..." He gestured vaguely. "Not trying too hard."
"I see." Boggins' tone suggested that he saw a great deal more than Frederick was comfortable with. "And what, precisely, does 'not trying too hard' look like, in Your Grace's estimation?"
"I don't know. That's the problem."
Three weeks. He had been given three weeks to prepare for this moment, and he had spent approximately two weeks and six days pretending it wasn't going to happen.
The remaining day had been devoted to panic, which had manifested as an obsessive review of the estate accounts, a thorough reorganisation of his study, and now this: a sartorial crisis of unprecedented proportions.
He was going to the Harvest Fair. He, Frederick Hawthorne, seventh Duke of Corvenwell, was voluntarily attending a village celebration for the first time in his adult life. And he had absolutely no idea what to wear.
"The navy, perhaps," Boggins suggested, producing yet another coat from the seemingly inexhaustible supply. "It is dignified without being severe. The cut is modern but not ostentatious. And," he paused delicately, "it has been known to survive contact with the elements."
"You mean mud."
"I mean the elements, Your Grace. Of which mud is merely one component."
Frederick took the coat, turning it over in his hands.
It was well-made, certainly. Fine wool, excellent stitching, the kind of understated quality that spoke of money without shouting about it.
But was it right? Would it communicate the proper message?
Would Lydia Fletcher look at him and see a man who was trying, or would she see a duke playing dress-up in clothes that weren't quite humble enough to be convincing?
"Your Grace is overthinking this," Boggins observed.
"I am thinking precisely the appropriate amount."
"With respect, Your Grace, you have been staring at that coat for forty-seven seconds. In my experience, garments that require such extensive contemplation are rarely the correct choice."
"What would you suggest, then?"
Boggins was quiet for a moment. Then, with the air of a man about to commit a minor heresy: "I would suggest, Your Grace, that it doesn't matter."
Frederick looked up sharply. "I beg your pardon?"
"The villagers will judge Your Grace regardless of what you wear.
You could appear in sackcloth, and they would find fault.
You could appear in cloth of gold, and they would find fault.
The coat is not the issue." Boggins met his eyes steadily.
"The issue is whether Your Grace can walk among them as a man rather than a title.
No garment can accomplish that. Only Your Grace can. "
The words landed like stones in still water, sending ripples through Frederick’s carefully maintained composure.
"You have become remarkably philosophical in your old age, Boggins."
"I prefer to think of it as accumulated wisdom, Your Grace."
"Is there a difference?"
"Philosophy is for people who have time to sit and think. Wisdom is for people who have to get dressed and face the day regardless." Boggins held out the navy coat. "The fair begins in two hours. I suggest we begin with the coat and work outward from there."
Frederick took the coat and put it on. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw what he always saw: a man who had been taught to be ice and was only just beginning to wonder if he might be allowed to thaw.
"Well?" he asked.
"Acceptable, Your Grace. Not inspired, but acceptable."
"High praise indeed."
"I do endeavour to maintain standards." Boggins began gathering the rejected garments with the efficiency of long practice. "Shall I have the carriage brought round?"
"Yes. No. Wait." Frederick’s hands had clenched again; that habit he couldn't seem to break, the physical manifestation of anxiety he'd been trained to never show. "Boggins, what if this is a mistake?"
"Then it will be a mistake, Your Grace. And you will learn from it, and you will try again, or you will not. But you will have tried once, which is more than you have done in eight years."
"That is not particularly comforting."
"Comfort was not my intention, Your Grace. Honesty was."
Frederick looked at his reflection one more time.
The navy coat. The carefully pressed trousers.
The boots that had been polished to a shine and that would probably last approximately three minutes in actual mud.
He looked like a duke. He had always looked like a duke.
The question was whether he could learn to look like something else as well.
"Very well," he said. "Bring the carriage."
"As Your Grace wishes." Boggins paused at the door. "For what it's worth, Your Grace…I believe Miss Fletcher will be pleased that you came. Regardless of the coat."
"You seem very certain of that."
"I have been observing human nature for thirty-one years, Your Grace. One develops a sense for these things."
He withdrew before Frederick could respond, which was probably for the best. Frederick wasn't sure he had a response.
He only had hope, fragile and terrifying, that somewhere in the chaos of the day ahead, he might find a way to become the kind of man who deserved to be looked at the way Lydia Fletcher had looked at him.
It seemed impossible. It probably was impossible.
But he went anyway.
***
In Ashwick, the morning had dawned bright and promising, the kind of late-summer day that seemed specifically designed to make harvest fairs successful.
The sky was that particular shade of blue that painters despaired of capturing accurately, and the air carried the mingled scents of fresh bread, roasting meat, and the indefinable sweetness of a community preparing to celebrate itself.
Lydia had been awake since before sunrise, helping Mrs Wrightly set up her jam stall and pretending, very badly, that she wasn't watching the ridge road.
"You're doing it again," Mrs Wrightly observed, not unkindly.
"Doing what?"
"Looking toward the manor. You've done it approximately seventeen times in the past hour."
"I'm looking at the sky. Checking for rain."
"Blue skies do not suggest rain, dear. And you should not need seventeen times to realise that."
Lydia felt heat rise to her cheeks and focused very intently on arranging jam jars. All of them were suddenly fascinating. "I don't know what you mean."
"Mm-hmm." Mrs Wrightly's tone suggested that she knew exactly what she meant and was choosing to be merciful about it. "The duke won't come, you know. He never does."
"I know."
"Even if he wanted to, and I can't imagine why he would, he wouldn't lower himself. It's not in his nature."
"I know."
"So there's no point watching for him."
"I wasn't…" Lydia stopped herself. There was no point in lying; Mrs Wrightly had known her since she was a child covered in mud and asking too many questions. "I just thought maybe this year would be different."
"Why would this year be different?"
Because I talked to him. Because he asked me what I saw when I looked at him, and I told him the truth, and he didn't send me away. Because he said he would try.
But she couldn't say any of that. She couldn't explain the conversation in the manor, the strange vulnerability she'd witnessed in a man everyone assumed had no vulnerability at all.
The village would think she was mad, or worse, they would think she was besotted, which she wasn't; she absolutely wasn't, she had merely had a conversation with a lonely man and suggested he might consider being less lonely.
That was all. That was absolutely all.
"No reason," she said instead. "Just a feeling."
Mrs Wrightly gave her a long, considering look; the kind that made Lydia feel seven years old again, caught with her hand in the jam pot. Then she shook her head and returned to her stall arrangement.
"Feelings are dangerous things, Lydia Fletcher. Especially where dukes are concerned."
"I don't have feelings about the duke."
"I didn't say you did. I said feelings are dangerous." Mrs Wrightly adjusted a jar with unnecessary precision. "Your mother had feelings once. About a man who wasn't suitable. Fortunately, she came to her senses and married your father instead."
"I didn't know that."