"Then don't be a duke for an afternoon. Just be Frederick." She held out her hand, not quite knowing why, just knowing it felt right. "It's not as hard as you think."
He looked at her hand, looked at her face and then, slowly, like a man stepping off a cliff, he took it.
"Show me the sack race, then."
Chapter 8
The remainder of the afternoon passed in a blur of small, ordinary moments that felt, to Frederick, like tiny miracles.
Lydia showed him the sack race, which was indeed deeply undignified and extremely entertaining. He found himself laughing, actually laughing, at the sight of children tumbling over each other in their desperate attempts to reach the finish line. When Molly tripped and went sprawling, he started forward instinctively, only to see her leap up, triumphant, having crossed the line in second place.
She ran over to him afterwards, still half-wrapped in her sack. "Did you see? Did you see? I almost won!"
"I saw. You were magnificent."
"Next year I'm going to win for real. You'll see."
"I believe you."
Molly beamed at him like he'd given her a gift. Which, he supposed, he had; the gift of being believed in, of being seen as capable of triumph. It cost him nothing, but to her it seemed to mean everything.
"You're good with children," Lydia observed, as Molly ran off to show her mother the ribbon she'd won for second place.
"I'm surprised by children. I didn't know they could be like this."
"Like what?"
"Open. Trusting. Willing to like someone just because that person was nice to them once." He watched Molly disappear into the crowd, a small figure bouncing with excitement. "The children I knew growing up were........Different. More guarded. More aware of social position and expectations."
"That sounds lonely."
"It was. Though I didn't realise it at the time. I thought it was normal, I believed that all children maintained a certain distance, that friendship was a transaction rather than a gift." He turned to look at her. "How did you learn differently?"
"I had the village. After my parents died, every child in Ashwick decided I was their responsibility. They included me in their games, shared their secrets, made me part of their world whether I wanted to be or not." She smiled at the memory. "I was too sad to push them away, and by the time I stopped being sad, I'd forgotten how to be alone."
"That sounds wonderful."
"It was, and it is." She touched his arm again, that brief, electric contact. "You could have that too, you know. Not the same, you can't go back and have a different childhood, but something like it. Community. Belonging. People who know you and want you around anyway."
"You make it sound simple."
"It is simple. It's just not easy."
Lydia showed him the apple bobbing, which he politely declined to participate in despite her teasing insistence that it would "improve his image considerably."
"I am not putting my face in a barrel of water while the entire village watches," he said firmly.
"Why not? It's fun."
"It's undignified."
"So is having gooseberry on your chin for an hour, but you managed that."
"That was an accident. This would be deliberate indignity."
She laughed, and the sound of it warmed something in his chest. "Fine. No apple bobbing. But you're going to have to do something undignified eventually. It's good for the soul."
"I'll take that under advisement."
