He had never been tucked into bed. Nurses had put him there, efficiently and without sentiment. His father had visited the nursery occasionally; brief, formal visits that felt more like inspections than anything else. His mother......He had memories of his mother, soft around the edges with time and loss, but he could no longer be certain which were real and which were stories he had told himself to fill the emptiness.
What would she have been like if she had lived? Would she have softened his father? Would she have taught Frederick that feelings were not weakness, that connection was not dangerous, that it was possible to be a Hawthorne and still be human?
He would never know. The fever had taken her when he was six, and his father had forbidden anyone to speak of her afterwards.We do not dwell on what is lost,he had said.We endure. We continue. We do not look back.
Frederick had not looked back. He had kept his eyes forward, focused on duty and obligation and the endless work of maintaining a legacy he had never asked for. He had not allowed himself to wonder what might have been different or if he might have been different.
But tonight, watching those distant lights, he allowed himself to wonder.
What if he had been raised by a mother who loved him? What if his father had been capable of warmth? What if someone, anyone, had taught him that asking for help was not the same as admitting defeat?
He thought of his feelings when they had told him his father was dead. The bluntness of it. The liberation implicit in those four words.Your father is dead.As if his father's opinions, his father's rules, his father's cold and crushing certainty about how life should be lived—all of it had died too, and Frederick was free.
Was he free?
He had never felt free. The weight of the title, the expectations of generations, the endless obligations of land and tenants and a name that meant something to everyone except the man who bore it; none of that had lifted when his father's heart had stopped beating at the dinner table. If anything, the weight had grown heavier because now there was no one to share it. No one to guide him. No one to tell him whether he was doing it right.
He hadn't been doing it right. He could see that now. He had cultivated isolation, preserved his distance, and scrupulously avoided the slightest hint of vulnerability. His father would have approved, yet his father had been mistaken. His father had died alone in a room full of people, and no one had mourned him except out of duty.
Was that what Frederick wanted? To die alone, to be mourned by obligation, to leave behind nothing but ledgers and property and the cold stone weight of a legacy no one actually cared about?
No. The answer rose from somewhere deep inside him, surprising in its vehemence. No, that was not what he wanted. He wanted…
He wanted someone to know his name. Not his title. Hisname. He wanted someone to laugh at his stone face and call him Frederick and treat him like a person instead of a position.
He wanted to attend the Harvest Fair and have it mean something.
He wanted Lydia Fletcher to look at him the way she had looked at him today, with that mixture of challenge and understanding that had made him feel more alive than he had felt in years.
He wanted, desperately and pathetically and undeniably, not to be alone anymore.
The village lights twinkled in the distance, indifferent to his revelation. The night was silent around him. The manor, vast and empty, seemed to echo with all the conversations that had never happened within its walls.
Frederick Hawthorne, seventh Duke of Corvenwell, stood at his window and admitted, if only to himself, if only in the privacy of darkness, that he was afraid.
Not of the village. Not of their judgment or their mockery or their accumulated generations of grievance.
He was afraid of hope. Afraid of trying and failing. Afraid of wanting something so badly that the not-having of it would break him.
But he was more afraid of this, of the cold stone emptiness. Of another thirty years of frozen isolation, reaching toward no one, belonging nowhere, dying as his father had died; surrounded by people who didn't know him and didn't care.
He would learn to tolerate mud. He would learn to smile without terrifying children. He would learn, somehow, impossibly, to be the kind of man who could walk through a village and be welcomed instead of feared.
Or he would fail. That was possible too. Probable, even. The odds were against him, and he knew it.
But Lydia Fletcher had looked at him like he was worth looking at. And for that alone, he was willing to try.
Chapter 4
Morning came eventually, as it always did, and with it the relentless machinery of a ducal household grinding into motion.
Frederick had slept poorly, as expected. His dreams had been fragmented things; glimpses of forge fire and village lights, his father's voice echoing from somewhere distant, the strange sensation of walking through mud without minding it. He woke feeling more tired than when he had gone to bed, which was becoming something of a pattern.
He took breakfast alone in the small dining room, the one that only seated twelve, which felt almost intimate compared to the formal hall. The morning light streamed through tall windows, illuminating dust motes that danced in the air like tiny ballroom guests who had stayed too long at the gathering.
The breakfast itself was impeccable, as always. Eggs prepared exactly as he preferred. Toast at the precise shade of golden. Coffee strong enough to resurrect the dead, which felt appropriate given how Frederick felt. The kitchen staff had been with the family for decades; they knew his preferences better than he knew them himself.
He wondered, not for the first time, whether any of them actually liked him. Whether they prepared his food with care because they cared, or simply because precision was their job and they took pride in their work, regardless of who consumed the results.
