"Maybe."
"Definitely." He turned back to his work, dismissing her with the particular abruptness of a man who had never learned to linger over emotional moments. "Take the main road. It should get you there and back before the afternoon rain."
Lydia shouldered the bundle and set off.
The walk to Corvenwell Manor was familiar; she had made it before, delivering commissioned work, collecting payment, doing the small transactions that kept the forge solvent and the manor functional. The road wound through fields and woodland, climbing gradually toward the estate that crowned the highest hill in the region like a cold stone crown.
The house itself came into view about a mile from the village, and no matter how many times Lydia saw it, it still struck her as excessive. Not beautiful, exactly; there was too much of it for beauty, too many windows and wings and extensions added by generations of Hawthornes who apparently believed that more was always better. But impressive, certainly. The kind of place that made ordinary houses look like children's toys.
She thought of Mrs Holloway's description: a dining room for forty, all the chairs empty. A duke eating alone in that vast,echoing space. Standards so impossibly high that even candle wicks weren't safe from rejection.
Be careful,Mrs Holloway had said.Don't let him make you feel small.
Lydia straightened her spine and kept walking.
***
The servant who met her at the kitchen entrance was briskly efficient, the sort of woman who had clearly been dealing with deliveries her entire career and had no patience for anyone who slowed down her carefully orchestrated schedule.
"Forge work? This way. The housekeeper will inspect it."
Lydia followed her through corridors that seemed designed to intimidate; high ceilings, cold stone floors, portraits of Hawthornes glaring down from the walls like a jury of the perpetually disappointed. The housekeeper, when they reached her, was a thin woman with sharp eyes and the particular manner of someone who had achieved their position through sheer force of will and intended to keep it the same way.
"Set it there," she said, pointing to a table. "I'll examine the work and send word to your uncle about payment."
"Of course." Lydia unwrapped the bundle, revealing the hinges in their careful arrangement. They gleamed in the light from the windows; good work, solid work, the kind of work that would last generations if properly maintained. "I can explain the specifications if…"
"That won't be necessary."
"But there's a particular treatment my uncle used on the…"
"I said that won't be necessary."
Lydia bit back her response. This was fine. This was normal. Servants of great houses didn't have time for explanations from village blacksmiths' nieces. She would leave the work, return home, and never think about this place again.
Except that at precisely that moment, a door opened somewhere behind her, and a voice she recognised, a voice that had said nothing in her presence but somehow still echoed in her memory, said:
"Mrs Patterson. I believe I expressed an interest in inspecting this delivery personally."
Lydia turned.
He was standing in the doorway. The Duke of Corvenwell. Dressed in clothing that probably cost more than her uncle earned in a year, his posture as rigidly correct as it had been in the carriage, his face arranged in that same expression of careful neutrality.
But his eyes…
His eyes, when they met hers, held that same flicker she remembered. They held recognition and interest. Something that looked almost like relief, as if he had been hoping she would be the one to come and hadn't dared admit it even to himself.
"Your Grace," the housekeeper said, and Lydia heard the surprise in her voice. This was not, apparently, typical behaviour. "Of course. I was simply…"
"That will be all, Mrs Patterson. I wish to speak with Miss Fletcher alone."
The housekeeper's expression cycled through several emotions too quickly to identify before settling on professional blankness. "As Your Grace wishes."
She withdrew, and the door closed behind her.
And Lydia found herself alone with the Duke of Corvenwell, with nothing between them but air and ironwork and the dangerous, impossible possibility that everything she had thought she knew about him might be wrong.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
