Chapter Are you going to say yes? #2
"Practical ones. For walking in mud and attending village functions. That sort of thing."
"That sort of thing." Mr Marsh's tone suggested that he had opinions about dukes who suddenly developed interests in village functions. "Those boots you're wearing now…London work?"
"Yes."
"I thought so. Good construction, wrong purpose. Made for drawing rooms and ballrooms, not for anything useful." The cobbler shook his head with the resignation of a craftsman confronted with inferior work. "Sit down, Your Grace. Let me see your feet."
"Is that entirely…"
"If you want boots that fit, I need to see what I'm fitting them to."
Frederick sat. He removed his boots, an activity he wasn't sure he'd ever performed in public before, and submitted to Mr Marsh's examination with the uncomfortable feeling of being judged and found wanting.
The next twenty minutes were an exercise in humiliation.
Frederick was measured, questioned, criticised, and subjected to a lecture on the inadequacy of London boot-makers that he suspected was directed at him personally.
Mr Marsh made him stand, sit, walk across the room, and stand on one foot while the cobbler examined his arches.
"You've been walking wrong your whole life," Mr. Marsh announced. "Putting too much weight on the outside of your feet. Probably because those fancy London boots don't support you properly."
"I didn't realise there was a wrong way to walk."
"There's a wrong way to do everything, Your Grace. Most people muddle through anyway. But if you want boots that last, you need to understand your feet." He made a note on a scrap of paper. "High arches, narrow heel. I can work with that."
Through it all, Lydia sat in the corner, watching with barely concealed amusement.
"You're enjoying this," Frederick accused, during a brief moment when Mr. Marsh had retreated to his back room to fetch samples.
"Immensely."
"He's treating me like a recalcitrant schoolboy."
"He treats everyone like a recalcitrant schoolboy. Last week, he made Mrs Wrightly stand in the corner for five minutes because she couldn't decide between two colours of kid leather."
"That's absurd."
"That's Mr Marsh. He takes footwear very seriously."
The cobbler returned with an armful of leather samples, and the process continued.
By the time they emerged, Frederick, having ordered two pairs of boots, one for walking and one for "standing about looking approachable," which Mr Marsh insisted were different things, the afternoon had shifted toward evening, and the sky had taken on an ominous quality.
"It looks like rain," Frederick observed.
"It's been threatening all day." Lydia glanced up at the clouds, her expression thoughtful. "We should probably start back. It could break at any moment."
"I shall walk you home."
"You don't have to."
"I want to." He met her eyes, willing her to see that he meant it. "Unless you'd rather I didn't."
She was quiet for a moment, and Frederick had the terrible feeling that she was about to refuse; that the boot shopping had been enough, that the door she'd opened was closing again.
"All right," she said. "But my uncle's forge is on the other side of the village. It's a bit of a walk."
"I don't mind walking."
"In those boots?" She glanced down at his feet; still clad in the impractical, mud-attracting boots from the fair. "You'll ruin them."
"They're already ruined. And the new ones won't be ready for a week." He offered his arm, a gesture that felt simultaneously too formal and not formal enough. "Shall we?"
***
The first drops of rain began to fall as they reached the edge of the village proper; fat, heavy drops that promised worse to come. By the time they'd gone another hundred yards, the sky had opened up entirely, transforming the autumn afternoon into a wall of water.
"This way!" Lydia grabbed his hand and pulled him off the main road, down a narrow path he hadn't noticed. They ran, stumbling over roots and rocks, while the rain soaked through their clothes and turned the ground to mud.
Frederick didn't know where they were going; he could barely see, but he held onto Lydia's hand and followed, trusting her knowledge of the terrain. After what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, she pulled him through a doorway into sudden, blessed dryness.
He stood there, gasping, water streaming from his hair and clothes, and tried to make sense of his surroundings.
They were in a cottage. Small, clearly abandoned, but intact; the roof held, the walls were solid, and there was even a fireplace with what looked like the remnants of old logs.
The single room was furnished with the ghosts of habitation: a broken chair, a table missing one leg, a mattress that looked like it had been home to mice for several generations.
"What is this place?" he asked, when he had enough breath to speak.
"Old groundskeeper's cottage." Lydia was wringing water from her hair, which had come loose from its pins and was hanging in wet ropes around her face. "It's been empty for years; the last groundskeeper died before I was born, and the manor never replaced him."
"The manor. My manor."
"Unless another duke is lurking about that I don't know of."
Frederick looked around the cottage with new eyes, seeing not just the decay but the neglect—his neglect, or at least the neglect of his estate. "I should have.......Someone should be living here. Using this."
"Probably." Lydia found a relatively dry spot near the fireplace and sat down, pulling her wet skirts around her. "But that's a problem for another day. Right now, we need to wait out the storm."
The rain showed no signs of abating. If anything, it was getting heavier. Frederick could hear it hammering on the roof, and he could see it through the single small window. They weren't going anywhere for a while.
He looked at the fireplace. Then at the broken chair. Then back at the fireplace.
"We should probably have a fire," he said. "You're soaked."
"So are you."
"Yes, but I'm…" He stopped himself before he could say something about dukes not minding discomfort, which would have been both untrue and insufferably pompous. "I'm concerned about you catching a cold."
Lydia raised an eyebrow. "I've survived twenty-four years without a duke to worry about my health. I think I shall manage."
"Nevertheless."
He crossed to the broken chair and examined it.
The wood was old and dry, perfect for burning.
With some effort, he managed to break it into manageable pieces, piling them in the fireplace with what he hoped was reasonable competence.
He'd never actually built a fire before; there had always been servants for that, but the principle seemed straightforward enough.
Finding something to light it with was another matter.
"There's a tinderbox on the mantle," Lydia said, watching him with an expression that mixed amusement with something softer. "Behind the candle stub."
He found it; a simple metal box containing flint, steel, and char cloth. He'd seen fires lit before. He understood the theory. Actually making the sparks fall upon the char cloth and take hold was considerably more difficult than it appeared.
After several minutes of increasingly frustrated attempts, Lydia rose and crossed to where he knelt by the fireplace.
"May I?"
He handed her the tinderbox, trying not to feel like a failure.
She struck the flint against the steel with practised ease, catching a spark on the char cloth almost immediately. Within moments, she had coaxed the spark into a flame, transferred it to a twist of dry grass she'd found somewhere, and used that to light the kindling he'd prepared.
"You've done this before," he observed.
"I work at a forge. I light fires every day." She handed the tinderbox back to him. "It takes practice. Don't feel bad."
"I don't feel bad. I feel......Inadequate.
" He watched the flames catch and spread, filling the small space with warmth and flickering light.
"I'm one and thirty, and I've never lit a fire.
I've never cooked a meal or drawn my own bath or done any of the thousand things that normal people do without thinking.
I've had people serving me my entire life, and I don't know how to do anything useful. "
"You know how to run an estate."
"I know how to review ledgers and sign documents.
That's not the same thing." He sat back on his heels, staring into the flames.
"When I was a child, I used to wonder what it would be like to be one of the village boys I saw from my window.
They seemed so free. They could run and play and get dirty without anyone lecturing them about the dignity of their position.
They had mothers who hugged them in public and fathers who taught them trades. They belonged somewhere."
"You belonged somewhere, too."
"I belonged to a title. That's different." He glanced at her, then away. "I'm sorry. You're cold and wet and trapped in an abandoned cottage with a duke having an existential crisis. This isn't what you expected, I suppose."
"I agreed to boot shopping. But all the rest are acceptable, as well."
He surprised himself by laughing; a real laugh, unguarded and genuine. "You're remarkably adaptable."
"I've had to be." She settled closer to the fire, and after a moment, he did the same.
They sat side by side, not quite touching, while the storm raged outside and the flames danced before them.
"After my parents died, I had to learn to adapt or drown.
The village helped, but ultimately, I had to choose to keep going.
To find reasons to get up in the morning.
To build a life out of the pieces that were left. "
"How old were you?"
"Seven."
Almost the same age he'd been when his mother died. The parallel struck him with unexpected force.
"My mother died when I was six," he said quietly.
"I remember... I remember the day they told me.
My father called me into his study; I'd never been allowed in there before; it was forbidden territory, and he said: Your mother has passed.
Hawthornes do not weep. You may return to your lessons.
" He shook his head. "That was it. The entirety of his acknowledgement.
And then I went back to my tutor and conjugated Latin verbs while my world fell apart. "
"That's..." Lydia seemed to struggle for words. "That's monstrous."
"It was training. That's how my father saw it; everything was training for the role I would eventually assume.
Emotions were a weakness. Attachment was vulnerability.
The only thing that mattered was the title, the legacy, the continuation of a family name that stretched back centuries.
" His voice had gone flat, the way it always did when he talked about his father.
"He succeeded, I suppose. I learned not to feel things. Or at least not to show them."
"But you do feel them."
"Yes." He looked at her; at her face lit by firelight, her wet hair drying in waves around her shoulders, her eyes soft with something that might have been understanding. "I feel them. I just don't know what to do with them."
"Maybe you don't have to do anything with them. Maybe you just have to let them exist."
"Is that what you do?"
"At times when the weight of grief is too great, when I miss my parents so sorely I can scarcely draw breath, I let it remain. I do not attempt to mend it, nor to reason with it, nor to drive it away. I sit with it, as one might keep company with an ailing friend, and in time, it passes."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It is. But it's also honest." She shifted slightly, and her shoulder brushed against his. "I think that's what you're looking for, isn't it? Honesty. A place where you can stop performing and just be."
The question hit him like a blow to the chest. Because indeed, that was exactly what he was looking for. What he had been looking for his entire life, without knowing how to name it.