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

Chapter 11

“It took three days,” Sebastian said.

He said it flatly, without ornament, the way a man reads a ledger of losses.

“They put him in a barn outside Brussels with forty others. Typhus. There is no dignity in it — there is a fever and then there is a great deal of filth and then there is a kind of quiet. He soiled himself. He wept for his mother, who had been dead nine years; the fever does that, it takes a man back to whatever room he was a boy in. His nose bled on the second day and he choked on it, and the orderlies held him up so he would not drown in it sitting.” He paused. “He was twenty-two. On the last afternoon he stopped asking for anyone and began watching the door, which is what they do at the end. He watched it for two hours. He was watching the door when he died.”

The glasshouse dripped. Somewhere overhead, a pane shifted and ticked with the heat.

Verity stood still and let it come into her.

She made herself see all of it — not to punish herself, which would have been self-indulgence dressed as grief, but because it had happened, and because a person had died there, and because the world was in the habitual business of painting such deaths gold and selling the picture to women in drawing rooms.

A boy watching a door.

“That is what you could not tell me at the ball,” she said.

“That is what I will not tell you at the ball, or in your father’s house, or ever again, unless you ask me.” He looked at her. “I have told that lie to eleven mothers. I have written it in letters in my own hand. He died without suffering. He spoke of you. I did it because the truth would finish them, and because I did not have the right to finish a stranger.” His jaw shifted. “You are not a stranger. So you get the truth, and if it was a cruelty to give it to you, I will carry that.”

“It was not a cruelty.”

“You are shaking.”

“I am furious.” Verity looked down at her own hands and found that they were, in fact, trembling, and that the trembling was not fear. “Twenty-two years old, in a barn, watching a door. And Lady Winchcombe has us all writing sanitized prayers on cream paper and calling it glorious victory while the men who actually stood there come home and are told to be grateful and to stop drinking.” She turned on him. “Do you know that there is not one person in that committee who has ever asked to read a letter back? Not one. We send them and we never once ask what came of them. It is the purest vanity I have ever seen and I have been sitting in it every Tuesday for two years.”

“Every Tuesday,” Sebastian repeated. “You have not stopped going.”

“Someone must write the truths.”

“Someone must.” He said it without mockery. “The committee will not survive it. But yes.”

She let out a breath that was almost a laugh and found, to her surprise, that her eyes had gone hot and full, and she turned her face up to the glass roof and blinked at the light until they cleared, because she was not going to weep in a hothouse in front of a duke.

She failed. One tear got away — one only, hot and furious, sliding down the side of her face.

And then she felt his hand.

Verity reached into her reticule without a word, past a coin purse and a handkerchief that she did not use, and drew out a small, hard object wrapped in a scrap of old silk. She unwrapped it in her palm, in front of him, and held her hand out flat.

A brass button. Tarnished, dented on one edge, and packed in black earth that had dried into the crevices of the stamp.

“This is what came home from my brother,” she said. Her voice was steady, deliberately, violently steady. “This and a watch with a broken face. And a letter he wrote that he never posted, which I have read so many times that the paper has gone soft as cloth.” She had never shown the button to a living soul, not even Letitia. “He didn’t write about glory either. He wrote that his boots had been wet for eleven days. He wrote that he had found an apple rotting in a ditch and eaten it anyway because he was so hungry he could not be particular. And then he wrote that he had heard the cannon and that he was glad, because it meant the waiting was over.” She closed her fingers around the brass. “The letter ends there. It ends mid-sentence, mid-word. The regiment wrote to tell my father that Edmund Marlow was struck by a French ball on the twenty-first of June and died instantly. But I have the last thing he ever wrote, and it is not about the King, or England, or freedom. It is about apples and wet feet. That is the whole truth of it. That is what a glorious victory is made of.”

Sebastian Ashford did not offer her any of the phrases.

He did not say that it was God’s will. He did not say that Edmund was in a better place, or that his death had meaning, or that the country would remember him. He knew — she saw in his face that he knew exactly, with a soldier’s specificity — that every one of those sentences was a poison pill wrapped in sugar.

What he did instead was reach out, slowly, and close his large hand around hers.

Not to take the button. He folded her fingers gently back over it, so that the brass was sealed inside her fist, and then he simply held her hand enclosed in both of his, in the dripping heat of the glasshouse, for a long moment in which neither of them spoke.

His skin was rough. Years of reins and sword hilts had left it like a man who worked with his hands, which dukes are not supposed to have.

“It is a senseless waste,” he said at last. His voice was low. “All of it. Every boy. Every barn. Every apple in every ditch. There is nothing underneath it — no pattern, no plan, no debt being paid. I have looked for fifteen months and there is nothing there. That is the thing nobody in England will let itself say out loud.” His hands tightened a fraction around her fist. “You are allowed to be angry for the rest of your life. You have my permission, for whatever it is worth, which is nothing.”

“It is worth something,” said Verity.

And then, without deciding to, she cried.

Not the single efficient tear of a woman who had practiced control for two decades. She stood in a botanical glasshouse in the middle of the morning with the sweat on her face and the heat pressing down on her, and wept for her brother, and for Isaac Hooper watching his door, and for the eleven other boys in the barn, and for the fact that she had been carrying all of it alone in a house full of furniture and silence.

Sebastian let go of her hand and lifted his own, and with the pad of his thumb — the roughest part of it, the callus where the reins sat — wiped the tear from her cheek before it could reach her jaw.

His touch stayed a moment longer than it needed to.

“Choose your next sentence carefully,” Verity said, and her voice was thick and wet and entirely without armor. “If it is a compliment about my eyes, I shall throw this button at your head.”

Sebastian laughed — a real laugh, surprised right out of him, loud enough that a gardener at the far end of the aisle looked up.

“I was going to tell you that I would walk back into that mud tomorrow,” he said, “if it meant I got to keep reading what you write.”

She pulled her hand from his.

The movement was too fast. It was a step back taken by a woman whose body had understood something before her mind had finished the sentence — if it meant I got to keep reading what you write — because what he had just described was not a courtship. It was a man who had spent a year in love with a voice on paper, and who was now standing in front of a woman with a red face and a bad temper who had just wept on him in public.

The difference between those two people was the whole of Verity’s terror.

“We should go,” she said, stuffing the button back into her reticule with fingers that had gone clumsy. “The humidity is becoming oppressive. And the fashionable will be here at eleven and I have no intention of being the morning’s entertainment.”

Sebastian let his hand fall to his side. He did not push. He did not call her back. He looked at her — at the panic she had not managed to hide, at the badly pinned hair going frizzy in the wet heat, at the chin that was trying to hold its line and failing — and he did not say a single word about it.

“As you wish,” he said quietly.

They walked out together in silence, past the palms and the ferns and the pitcher plants, and Sebastian retrieved his hat and gloves from the boy at the door, and neither of them spoke a word on the long carriage ride back into London.

Verity stared out of the window at the fields going by and did not see one of them.

She was thinking about the sentence. If it meant I got to keep reading what you write.

Somewhere behind her, forty feet back along the aisle of vines, a woman in a walking dress of fine lilac had stopped beside a potted camellia and stood quite still, watching them go.

Lady Clarissa Vance had been raised from the cradle to be a duchess. She had been told so at least twice a week for twenty-three years, by her mother, by her governess, by her father’s friends, by the entire weight of an arrangement her family had assumed since she was a girl of twelve and the old Duke of Winterbourne’s son had come home from school.

Winterbourne. The name had been hers in every conversation that mattered, for eleven years.

She closed her fan with a snap and smiled at the glasshouse door through which a middle-aged colonel and an ill-dressed spinster had just walked out, one after the other, not touching, not speaking.

“So that is where you have been going,” she said to nobody.

Then she turned and walked back toward her aunt’s barouche, and by the time she reached it she had begun — quite calmly, quite methodically — to think about what she would need to know.