The village appeared ahead, its familiar shapes resolving out of the afternoon haze. The church spire, the baker's chimney and the forge, with its column of smoke rising straight into the windless sky.
That was home, those were people. Her place in the world.
She loved Ashwick. She always would. But as she walked down High Street toward her uncle's cottage, nodding at neighbours and accepting their greetings, she found herself wondering, for the first time in her life, whether belonging to a place meant you could never belong to a person.
Whether the love of a community was enough.
Whether a man who had never belonged anywhere might somehow belong with her.
Foolish thoughts. Dangerous thoughts. She pushed them aside as she pushed open the forge door, and her uncle looked up from his work with a questioning expression.
"Delivery went well?" he asked.
"Well enough," she said. "The payment is settled. They liked the work."
"Good. There's tea on the stove if you want it."
Chapter 6
"No."
"Your Grace…"
"Absolutely not."
"If Your Grace would simply consider…"
"I have considered, Boggins. I have considered extensively. And my conclusion isno."
Boggins held the offending garment at arm's length, his expression suggesting that Frederick was being unreasonable and that he, Boggins, was far too professional to say so aloud. The coat in question was brown. Not a distinguished brown, not a fashionable brown, but the particular shade of brown that suggested its wearer had recently rolled through a field and emerged philosophically at peace with the experience.
"The colour is called 'earth brown,' Your Grace. It is intended to convey amiability."
"It conveys that I have lost a bet."
"Perhaps if Your Grace tried it on…"
"I am not putting that coat on my body, Boggins. I have standards."
"Your Grace has rejected six coats this morning. Standards may need to be somehow adjusted."
Frederick turned from the mirror, where he had been examining his reflection with the kind of intensity usually reserved for military campaigns or particularly challenging chess problems. The morning light streamed through the windows of his dressing room, illuminating a battlefield of discarded garments: the blue coat, which he thought was too formal, the grey coat that looked too funeral, the green coat, which seemed to him toosomething, he couldn't articulate what,and now the earth brown abomination that Boggins seemed inexplicably attached to.
"I need something that says I am approachable but not desperate," Frederick said. "Friendly but not familiar. Willing to engage but not…"
"Not what, Your Grace?"
"Not..." He gestured vaguely. "Not trying too hard."
"I see." Boggins' tone suggested that he saw a great deal more than Frederick was comfortable with. "And what, precisely, does'not trying too hard'look like, in Your Grace's estimation?"
"I don't know. That's the problem."
Three weeks. He had been given three weeks to prepare for this moment, and he had spent approximately two weeks and six days pretending it wasn't going to happen. The remaining day had been devoted to panic, which had manifested as an obsessive review of the estate accounts, a thorough reorganisation of his study, and now this: a sartorial crisis of unprecedented proportions.
He was going to the Harvest Fair. He, Frederick Hawthorne, seventh Duke of Corvenwell, was voluntarily attending a village celebration for the first time in his adult life. And he had absolutely no idea what to wear.
"The navy, perhaps," Boggins suggested, producing yet another coat from the seemingly inexhaustible supply. "It is dignified without being severe. The cut is modern but not ostentatious. And," he paused delicately, "it has been known to survive contact with the elements."
