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

Chapter 10

Society, as Verity had long maintained, was a predator that fed on novelty, and the Duke of Winterbourne’s sudden interest in the most notoriously uninteresting woman in Mayfair kept the drawing rooms of London fed for three weeks.

They did not behave like a courting couple. That was the first thing everyone noticed, and the first thing nobody could do anything about.

They did not promenade at the fashionable hour. They did not sit in a chaperoned parlor discussing the weather. They did not attend the same dinners, or exchange compliments through intermediaries, or do any of the other rites by which the ton certified that a man and a woman were safely on the road to the altar where everyone could watch them and take notes.

Instead, in the second week of May, at eight in the morning on a Tuesday, the Duke of Winterbourne’s carriage stopped in the road before Grosvenor Square, and took Miss Marlow to see the botanical gardens at Kew, three hours before the fashionable world would arrive there to be seen.

The great glasshouse was already a furnace.

The sun had been climbing since five and the panes had gathered it and refused to give it back. The air inside was thick enough to chew — damp earth, decay, and a smell like a thousand green rooms at once — and the heat settled on Verity’s skin within three steps of the door and threatened to defeat the sensible cotton round gown that had been chosen for exactly this purpose.

She did not care. She was standing in a cathedral built out of glass and leaves, and she had not been in such a place since she was nineteen.

Beside her, the Duke had shortened his long strides to match hers. He had left hat and gloves with a boy at the door and now carried nothing. Among the giant ferns, under the vaulted glass, he looked more at ease than he ever had in a ballroom — and much younger, though she could not have said why.

“Lady Winchcombe is telling anyone who will stand still long enough that you are clearly suffering from brain fever,” Verity said, stepping over a puddle on the path with the hem of her gown gathered in one hand. “She has decided that the campaign unhinged your senses, and that this is the only possible explanation for your attachment to a woman of four-and-twenty with no fortune and a reputation for saying exactly what she thinks.”

“Lady Winchcombe’s mind is a large room with nothing in it,” the Duke said agreeably, examining a vast, carnivorous-looking pitcher plant with genuine interest. “Let her talk. I have been talked about by better.” He glanced down at her. “I am, in fact, entirely sane. I simply prefer conversation that does not make me want to walk into the road.”

Verity laughed — hers, the low one, the real one, the laugh her family heard perhaps twice a year.

“You set a remarkably low bar for my charms, Your Grace.”

“Sebastian,” he said.

She looked up.

He was not smiling now. He had stopped on the path between two enormous tree ferns, and the light came down through the glass in a long pale slant, and he was looking at her with the full weight of that gray weather in his eyes.

“I have read the ugliest things you have ever thought,” he said. “You may manage my given name.”

Sebastian. She turned it over and found it heavier than she had expected, and warmer, and she had to look away down the path, at the drip of condensation falling from the roof onto the great slow leaves, before she could say it.

“Sebastian,” she said.

It sounded absurdly intimate in the hot, dripping silence, and she felt her face go pink, which she despised, and she set off walking again at a pace that was nearly rude, and he came alongside her without a word, which she despised slightly less.

They went down a side aisle of twisting vines, where the heat pressed in from both sides and the world shrank to the width of a path, and for a few minutes there was no London, no committee, no lavender and linen, no thousand pairs of eyes.

Then Verity stopped.

“There is a question I have been refusing to ask you for three weeks,” she said. “And I find I cannot carry it any further.”

The change in him was immediate. The ease went out of his shoulders; the stillness came back, the one from her father’s sitting room.

“Isaac Hooper,” she said. “You told me how he died. You did not tell me what it was like.”

He was silent.

She kept her eyes on the green dark ahead of them. “I wrote to him for twelve weeks. I told him to live. There is a version of me in this city — several versions, in fact, all of them in bonnets — who believes that he went out with a shout on his lips because a lady in London had asked him to be brave. I need to know whether what I sent him was worth anything at all, or whether he carried twelve pages of my temper into a barn and died calling for his mother while a stranger’s words lay unopened in his pack.” Her voice did not waver. She had practiced this speech at night, on her back, with the ceiling above her. “If it was quick, say so. I can bear quick. I cannot bear not knowing.”

Sebastian Ashford looked away from her, into the dense green light of the glasshouse — and for a long moment she watched a man stand at a fork in a road, deciding whether to hand her a lie.

He could do it beautifully, she knew. He had the whole vocabulary for it: he died bravely, he died with his face to the enemy, he was not alone. Every woman in England was told that. It was the fiction that kept the whole machine turning — the fiction that made grief bearable enough to be proud of.

She watched him choose otherwise.

“It was not quick,” he said. “And it was not glorious.”