Society will shun him. His children will pay for his choice.
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is let him go.
She struck the iron harder, channelling her confusion into force. The metal sparked and deformed, taking a shape that had nothing to do with hinges or nails or anything useful.
My sister loved someone else. She gave him up.
And died in that cold manor, leaving a son who grew up without her warmth, without her love, without the protection a mother should provide.
Was that what Helena wanted for Frederick? A loveless marriage, a lonely life, the slow calcification of the soul that came from doing duty without joy?
Or was she offering something different; a chance for him to have both? A suitable wife, a respectable position, the opportunity to do good in the world without the stain of scandal?
What does love really mean?
Lydia set down her hammer, her arms aching, her mind no clearer than before.
Love meant wanting the best for someone. That much she knew. Love meant putting their happiness above your own.
But whose happiness? What kind of best?
The best she could give him, her heart, her loyalty, her fierce devotion, or the best his world demanded; propriety, position, the approval of people who would never accept her?
She thought about what Robert had said at the public house.Love was always madness. There was no sensible reason to risk everything for another person.
But Robert had also said that the people who never risked it, the ones who played it safe, ended up bitter and alone.
So which was worse? Risking everything for love and possibly failing? Or playing it safe and definitely losing?
In another world, I would be proud to call you family.
That was the cruelest thing Helena had said. Because it acknowledged what they both knew: that in a different life, with different circumstances, there would be no obstacle. That the only thing standing between Lydia and Frederick wasn't character or compatibility or love; it was an accident. The accident of birth that made him a duke and her a blacksmith's niece.
And accidents couldn't be undone. Not by love, not by determination, not by anything.
Consider what I've said.
She was considering. That was the problem. She couldn't stop considering.
The fire had burned down to embers, unattended in her distraction. Lydia rebuilt it mechanically, not really seeing what she was doing. Her hands knew the motions, but her mind was elsewhere.
She thought about the manor; the vast, empty rooms, the portraits of disapproving ancestors, the weight of three hundred years pressing down on every surface. She'd walked through those halls with Frederick. She had seen the places where he'd suffered as a child, and she had listened to him talk about his father's coldness, his mother's absence, the loneliness that had been his constant companion.
He wanted to escape that. He wanted to build something different, something warmer. And he'd chosen her to build it with.
His children, your children, will be whispered about. They will spend their lives paying for a choice their father made before they were born.
The words wouldn't leave her alone.
She picked up her hammer again and struck the iron.
The rhythm helped. The physical exertion, the heat of the fire, the familiar smell of metal and smoke. These were things she understood. Things she could control.
Unlike love. Unlike the future. Unlike any of the things that actually mattered.
What does love really mean?
She still didn't have an answer.
