"You mean mud."
"I mean the elements, Your Grace. Of which mud is merely one component."
Frederick took the coat, turning it over in his hands. It was well-made, certainly. Fine wool, excellent stitching, the kind ofunderstated quality that spoke of money without shouting about it. But was it right? Would it communicate the proper message? Would Lydia Fletcher look at him and see a man who was trying, or would she see a duke playing dress-up in clothes that weren't quite humble enough to be convincing?
"Your Grace is overthinking this," Boggins observed.
"I am thinking precisely the appropriate amount."
"With respect, Your Grace, you have been staring at that coat for forty-seven seconds. In my experience, garments that require such extensive contemplation are rarely the correct choice."
"What would you suggest, then?"
Boggins was quiet for a moment. Then, with the air of a man about to commit a minor heresy: "I would suggest, Your Grace, that it doesn't matter."
Frederick looked up sharply. "I beg your pardon?"
"The villagers will judge Your Grace regardless of what you wear. You could appear in sackcloth, and they would find fault. You could appear in cloth of gold, and they would find fault. The coat is not the issue." Boggins met his eyes steadily. "The issue is whether Your Grace can walk among them as a man rather than a title. No garment can accomplish that. Only Your Grace can."
The words landed like stones in still water, sending ripples through Frederick’s carefully maintained composure.
"You have become remarkably philosophical in your old age, Boggins."
"I prefer to think of it as accumulated wisdom, Your Grace."
"Is there a difference?"
"Philosophy is for people who have time to sit and think. Wisdom is for people who have to get dressed and face the day regardless." Boggins held out the navy coat. "The fair begins in two hours. I suggest we begin with the coat and work outward from there."
Frederick took the coat and put it on. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw what he always saw: a man who had been taught to be ice and was only just beginning to wonder if he might be allowed to thaw.
"Well?" he asked.
"Acceptable, Your Grace. Not inspired, but acceptable."
"High praise indeed."
"I do endeavour to maintain standards." Boggins began gathering the rejected garments with the efficiency of long practice. "Shall I have the carriage brought round?"
"Yes. No. Wait." Frederick’s hands had clenched again; that habit he couldn't seem to break, the physical manifestation of anxiety he'd been trained to never show. "Boggins, what if this is a mistake?"
"Then it will be a mistake, Your Grace. And you will learn from it, and you will try again, or you will not. But you will have tried once, which is more than you have done in eight years."
"That is not particularly comforting."
"Comfort was not my intention, Your Grace. Honesty was."
Frederick looked at his reflection one more time. The navy coat. The carefully pressed trousers. The boots that had been polished to a shine and that would probably last approximately three minutes in actual mud. He looked like a duke. He had always looked like a duke. The question was whether he could learn to look like something else as well.
"Very well," he said. "Bring the carriage."
"As Your Grace wishes." Boggins paused at the door. "For what it's worth, Your Grace…I believe Miss Fletcher will be pleased that you came. Regardless of the coat."
"You seem very certain of that."
"I have been observing human nature for thirty-one years, Your Grace. One develops a sense for these things."
He withdrew before Frederick could respond, which was probably for the best. Frederick wasn't sure he had a response. He only had hope, fragile and terrifying, that somewhere in the chaos of the day ahead, he might find a way to become the kind of man who deserved to be looked at the way Lydia Fletcher had looked at him.
