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 onehein 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 tothe rat in the grain storesorthe 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 ascomplicated, if one were being charitable, ormutually 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 justlooksat 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 wasnothing."
"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.
