For Three Months She Wrote Letters To An Unknown Soldier — The Duke Read Every Single One

Chapter 1

The tent smelled of vinegar, wet wool, and copper. Outside, the rain had turned Belgian earth into something that ate boots and swallowed wheels whole, and the guns had stopped two hours ago, which was somehow worse than when they were firing. Colonel Sebastian Ashford, Duke of Winterbourne, sat on a crate with a dead man’s rucksack open across his knees. Inside, wrapped in oiled canvas as though it were something precious, lay twelve letters. Every seal was unbroken. Every one was addressed to Corporal Isaac Hooper, who had died three hours ago of typhus, sweating, calling for his mother, in a cot that stank of the same vinegar now filling Sebastian’s lungs. He had no right to any of it. He broke the first seal anyway.

The lavender came first. It always came first at Lady Winchcombe’s house on Mount Street — lavender, beeswax, and the particular odor of twenty well-bred women pretending very hard that they were not frightened.

It was the second Tuesday in March, 1815. Outside, a thin London sun fought a losing war against the coal smoke and lost. Inside, in a drawing room the color of weak tea, the Ladies’ Comfort Committee had assembled to perform what society had agreed to call a noble sacrifice: rolling bandages for the Continent and writing letters to the enlisted men of His Majesty’s army.

Verity Marlow sat nearest the window, where the light was best and the conversation was thinnest. Her hands lay idle on a stack of parchment. She was twenty-four years old, which in the arithmetic of the ton made her a woman standing at the edge of a cliff with her toes over the drop, entirely by her own design. She had a sharp jaw, brown eyes several shades darker than fashion approved of, and a fatal inability to suffer fools. Three seasons had taught her the price of that last quality. She had decided, some time ago, that she was willing to pay it.

“Tell them we are praying for their glorious victory,” Lady Winchcombe announced from the center of the room, wrestling a spool of linen as though it were a French spy. “They must know the women of England stand firmly behind them.”

Glorious victory. The words sat on Verity’s tongue like ash from a cold grate.

Her brother Edmund had died for a glorious victory two years ago, on a field outside Vitoria, and when his effects had finally come home to Grosvenor Square they arrived in a battered tin box that smelled of other men’s belongings. There had been no glory in it. There had been a pocket watch with a cracked face, a brass button torn from a coat by a cannonball or a surgeon’s knife, and a letter in Edmund’s own cramped hand that he had written and never managed to post. The letter had smelled of old rain and copper. Verity had read it forty times. She could have recited it in a court of law.

To her left, a girl in her first season was filling a page with looping, elegant nonsense about the spring assemblies and which of the Patronesses had smiled at whom. Verity watched her for a moment — the soft, uncomplicated happiness of a girl who had not yet learned what the post could bring — and then she dipped her nib in the inkwell and began to write.

Dear Corporal Hooper,

The name had come from a master list provided by the War Office: a column of names, a column of regiments, a column of nothing at all. She had been assigned her soldier the way one was assigned a seat at dinner.

I am instructed by a room full of women in silk to tell you to be brave. I will spare you the insult. I imagine bravery is a thing a man does because there is nothing else left to do.

She paused. The ink pulled at the paper’s tooth.

Instead, I will tell you that it rained in London today, and the mud in the streets was deep enough to swallow a carriage wheel. I watched a man in a velvet coat step into a puddle that ruined his boots, and he wept. He genuinely wept, in public, over leather. I thought of men like you sleeping in ditches, and I had to turn my face to the window before I laughed at him.

The words came faster after that, the way blood comes once a tourniquet has been tied too long and finally cut. She wrote about the theater of the season — the endless, exhausting performance of it. She wrote about the hollow ring of crystal during toasts to the King, a sound like coins dropped into an empty box. She wrote about the particular suffocation of standing in a room full of laughing people and understanding, with perfect clarity, that you belong to none of them.

She did not know this man. He was a name on a list, a phantom in a wet coat somewhere on the other side of the water.

That was precisely what made it possible.

A stranger was a wall you could shout at. A stranger would never repeat what he heard, never look at you differently afterward, never use your worst hour against you at dinner. Verity had spent two years learning how to keep her grief tidy and her mouth shut, and she had discovered that the only honest thing left in her life was the moment she put pen to paper for someone who would never write back.

When she finished, she folded the parchment in thirds. She did not seal it with her family crest. She took a plain lump of red wax, held it over the candle until it wept, and pressed it flat with her thumb. No lion, no coronet, no name. Just a red circle, the size of a shilling, and her thumbprint inside it like a signature she was too cowardly to write.

“Finished, Miss Marlow?” Lady Winchcombe had materialized at her elbow, radiating approval.

“I have.”

“Excellent. Let us hope it brings some poor frightened boy a measure of comfort.”

Verity dropped the letter into the leather satchel on the mahogany table, and something cold turned over behind her ribs. There was no comfort in what she had written. There was only honesty with the skin off, and she had just posted it into the mouth of a war.

She told herself it would be burned for kindling. She told herself she would never think of the name again.

She was wrong.

Eleven more letters would follow in twelve weeks. She would write them late, by a single candle, when the house was asleep and the mask was off, and she would send every one of them into the dark without knowing whether a living soul would ever hold them.

And every one of them would end up in the hands of a man who had no business reading a single word.