"No. Thank you, Boggins."
"Very good, Your Grace."
The valet withdrew, and Frederick was alone again with the hinges and his thoughts.
Three weeks. Twenty-one days to figure out how to be human in public.
It seemed impossible, and it probably was impossible.
But for the first time in eight years, Frederick found himself wanting to try.
***
Lydia walked home through the afternoon sunshine with her heart beating too fast and her thoughts in disarray.
She had done something foolish. She knew that. She had stood in a room with the Duke of Corvenwell and spoken to him like he were just a simple man. She had laughed at him, advised him, treated him with a familiarity that would scandalise everyone who knew her if they ever found out.
And she had liked him.
That was the truly dangerous part. Not that she had spoken honestly, or that she had seen through his coldness to the loneliness beneath. But that somewhere in their conversation, she had stopped seeing the duke and started seeing Frederick; awkward, isolated, desperate to connect but utterly lacking in the skills to do so.
She had wanted to help him. She still wanted to help him. And that was a path that led nowhere good for a blacksmith's niece with nothing but her reputation and her work to recommend her.
Be careful,Mrs Holloway had said.Don't let him make you feel small.
He hadn't made her feel small. He had made her feelseen, really seen, the way she had seen him. As if all the layers of class and expectation had peeled away to reveal something raw and real beneath.
The walk back to Ashwick felt longer than the walk out, though the distance was the same. Lydia's feet knew the path well enough that her mind could wander, and wander it did—circling back again and again to the conversation in the manor, examining it from every angle like a piece of metalwork she was checking for flaws.
He had looked at her like she mattered. That was the thing that kept catching in her thoughts. Not like she was a village girl or a blacksmith's niece or any of the labels that defined her in the eyes of the world. Just like she was,Lydia, a person with thoughts and opinions worth hearing.
When had anyone ever looked at her like that?
The village loved her, yes. They had raised her, sheltered her, given her everything she had. But the village loved her as one of their own, a piece of themselves, a thread in the fabric of Ashwick. They saw her through the lens of who her parents had been, who her uncle was, and where she fit in the larger pattern.
Frederick had no pattern to fit her into. To him, she was simply herself; no history, no context, no expectations. Just a woman who had looked at him without flinching and told him the truth.
It was probably nothing. It would probably come to nothing. He would probably send his stiff apologies and skip the fair like he skipped everything else, and she would go back to her forge and her village and her safe, predictable life.
But she kept thinking about his face when she had called him Frederick. The way he had said her name, like it was aforeign word he was learning for the first time. The crack in his voice when he had admitted he didn't know how to be seen.
She thought about what he had said—about watching the village gather, about wondering what it felt like to belong. She thought about how strange it was that the man with everything should envy the people with nothing, and how much less strange it became when you realised that money couldn't buy belonging, and titles couldn't command love.
He was lonely. Genuinely, desperately lonely. And he didn't even have the words for it, because he had been taught that loneliness was weakness and weakness was unacceptable, and therefore the loneliness didn't exist.
She knew something about loneliness herself. The particular kind that came from losing everyone who had known you before you knew yourself. The kind that the village's love could ease but never quite cure, because there was a difference between being loved by many and being known by someone.
Her parents had known her. Her uncle tried, bless him, but Thomas was better with iron than with feelings, and there were parts of Lydia that she had never quite been able to share with anyone.
Maybe that was why she had seen Frederick so clearly. Maybe loneliness recognised loneliness, the way metal recognised metal, the way fire knew fire.
Or maybe she was being a romantic fool, spinning castles in the air from a single strange conversation that meant nothing to anyone but her.
My goodness, she thought again, with even more feeling than before.
She might actually like him.
And that, as Mrs Holloway would certainly tell her if she ever found out, was a problem.
