"So you keep telling me."
The truth was, she couldn't quite shake the memory of his face in the carriage window. Everyone spoke of the Duke of Corvenwell as if he were carved from ice; frozen, unfeeling, essentially inhuman in his aristocratic detachment. And perhaps he was. Perhaps the coldness everyone described was exactly what it appeared to be: the natural temperature of a man who had never needed to be warm.
But when their eyes had met, for those two or three seconds before he had looked away, Lydia had seen something else. Something that flickered beneath the frost like a flame behind glass. Something that looked, if she were being fanciful, almost like…
Loneliness. Which was ridiculous. Dukes didn't get lonely. They had everything: houses and horses and servants, and more money than they actually needed. They had the power to shape entire villages, entire counties, to their whims. If the Duke of Corvenwell was lonely, he had only himself to blame.
And yet.
"He looked at me," she said, not quite meaning to say it aloud. "When the carriage passed. He actually looked at me."
Her uncle snorted. "He looked through you, more likely. That's what they do, his sort. We're not people to them. We're," he waved his hammer vaguely, "landscape. Furniture."
"No." Lydia frowned, testing the memory against the dismissal. "He lookedatme. There's a difference."
"If you say so."
"I do say so."
Thomas shook his head, but fondly. "You've always seen more than the rest of us, Lyddie. Ever since you were small. Remember when you insisted old Mrs Cartwright wasn't actually mean, but just hard of hearing?"
"She wasn't actually mean. Everyone shouted at her because they thought she was rude, but she just couldn't hear them properly. Once I figured that out and started speaking slowly and clearly…"
"She became the sweetest woman in the village. Indeed, I remember." Her uncle's expression softened. "But Mrs Cartwright was a neighbour. The duke is…"
"Different. I know." Lydia struck her iron with perhaps more force than necessary. "I know he's different. I know he's above us and cold and probably terrible. I'm not saying he isn't. I'm just saying..." She trailed off, uncertain herself what she was trying to say.
"Just saying what?"
The iron hissed as she plunged it into the water barrel, steam rising in a dramatic plume. "I am saying he held himself stiff."
Thomas was quiet for a long moment. Then: "You got all that from a carriage window?"
"I notice things."
"That you do." He returned to his work, but his voice was thoughtful when he spoke again. "Your mother was the sameway. She saw straight through to the heart of people. It's a gift, that. And a burden."
Lydia thought of her mother; fragments of memory now, seventeen years distant. She thought of her hands kneading bread, her laugh that filled their small cottage like sunlight, and she thought of the fever that had taken both her parents in the space of a single terrible week, leaving Lydia alone in a world that had suddenly become vast and cold and uncertain.
The village had saved her. Mrs Wrightly had held her while she cried. Old Mr Holloway at the public house had told her stories until she fell asleep. A dozen families had fed her, clothed her, loved her in the gaps between their own lives until Thomas could figure out how to raise a child alongside his ironwork.
She owed Ashwick everything. Her loyalty to the village wasn't just a habit; it was bone-deep, blood-deep, written into the very core of who she was.
Which was why the flicker of sympathy she'd felt for the duke, the enemy, the cold one, the man who had never once done anything for the people in his care, felt almost like betrayal.
"I should go change before tonight," she said, setting down her hammer. "The public house will be full after that little spectacle."
Her uncle nodded. "Go on, then. Tell Mrs Holloway I'll be wanting my usual."
Lydia smiled despite herself. "She knows, Uncle Thomas. You've ordered the same thing every Tuesday for twenty years."
"And I'll order it for twenty more." He looked up at her, and his eyes, so like her father's that it still caught her off guard sometimes, were warm with affection. "Don't let the village talk fill your head too full tonight, Lyddie. They mean well, but they can be…"
"I know." She knew exactly what they could be. Loyal and loving and absolutely certain of their judgments, right up untilevidence proved them wrong. It was their greatest strength and their most significant flaw, this ability to form a collective opinion and hold to it.
Tonight, she would listen. She would nod. She would laugh at the jests and add her voice to the chorus of complaint.
But she would also remember those tight shoulders, that two-second gaze and the flicker of something human behind the ice.
