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

Chapter 12

The first hint of trouble came on a Thursday, in the shape of a paragraph.

Verity read it standing up in her father’s library with the Morning Post unfolded in both hands, the tea going cold at her elbow.

We are reliably informed that the Duke of W______ has lately been observed in the most unexpected company. The lady in question is no longer in her first bloom, and is said to possess a tongue of considerable sharpness. Perhaps His Grace finds conversation a novelty; the Season, it must be admitted, has produced little else.

She read it twice. Then she read it a third time, to be sure.

“Verity,” said Letitia Danvers, from the window seat, where she had been sitting with a cup of chocolate and an expression of enormous enjoyment, “you are holding that newspaper as though you intend to strangle it.”

“Somebody has been talking.”

“Somebody is always talking. You are the most talked-about woman in London and you have been for a month, which, if you will allow me to say it, is a considerable improvement on the last four years.” Letitia set down her cup. “You have gone from being furniture to being a topic. Do not tell me you preferred the furniture.”

“I preferred the furniture.”

“You are a liar and I am keeping that newspaper.”

But the paragraph was only the beginning of it, and Verity knew it while she read it, because she had lived in this city long enough to recognize the particular grain of a piece that had been placed rather than merely written. Someone had spoken to the Post’s man on purpose. Someone with a reason.

The someone, as it happened, was not hard to identify.

Lady Clarissa Vance was the eldest daughter of the Marquess of Alderleigh and, by universal agreement of the ton, the handsomest woman of her year: pale gold hair, a face like a coin, and a manner so perfectly tuned to please that she had been the reigning belle of three seasons. She had also, since she was twelve years old, been spoken of in the same breath as the Duke of Winterbourne — a marriage long assumed by both families and never quite announced, because the old Duke had died before it could be, and because the young Duke had then gone to Spain and stayed there for four years, which nobody had expected and everybody had found inconvenient.

She came to Verity at Lady Meriden’s rout in the third week of May, at eleven at night, in a crush of people so thick that a man could not cross the room without turning sideways.

“Miss Marlow. I have been wishing to make your acquaintance.”

She was charming. That was the first thing, and the thing that mattered. She said it with two hands extended and a smile of such genuine warmth that a person who did not pay attention would have felt flattered for a week.

Verity paid attention. She always paid attention.

“Lady Clarissa.”

“I hear you have been to the Gardens at Kew. So early in the morning, too.” Clarissa leaned closer, conspiratorially, and her voice dropped to the register women use for confidences. “May I be forward? I have known Winterbourne since we were children — our fathers were the closest of friends. He was always the strangest man in the room, even then. Silent. Watching. One never knew what he was thinking.” Her fan moved, gently, in front of her face. “And then he came back from the Continent and he was concealed — I don’t know how else to express it. There is a great deal of him that simply isn’t there anymore.”

Verity said nothing. She had found that silence was the most expensive thing she could give away, and she gave it sparingly.

“He is not an easy man to know,” Clarissa went on. “I have spent a great deal of my life attempting it. I wonder — forgive me, this is dreadfully rude — what the two of you talk about, all those hours in gardens? He was never much of a talker.”

“No,” said Verity. “He isn’t.”

Clarissa’s smile did not change. “And yet he walks with you.”

“He does.”

“For how long, one wonders.” She said it pleasantly, like a comment on the weather. “Society has such a short memory for forgiveness and such an immortal one for everything else. A woman of your age, unmarried, with no fortune, seen alone in gardens at eight in the morning with the most eligible man in England — the world will draw its conclusions, and you know how the world draws them. It will not conclude that you were discussing the state of the poor.” The fan snapped shut. “It will conclude that you went hunting. And that you caught him by means that were not respectable.”

There it was.

Verity felt the heat come up her throat — not shame, which was what the woman wanted, but the old red fury, the fury of a girl who had spent four seasons watching the ton do exactly this to women and never once to a man.

“You are very kind to warn me,” she said.

“I am very kind, it is true.”

“Then allow me to be kind in return.” Verity took half a step closer, so that the two of them stood inside their own private pocket of noise. “If it is hunting you are worried about, Lady Clarissa, you may set your mind at rest. I have no title, no dowry, no beauty, and no interest in the marriage market. I am, by the standards of this room, worthless. You, on the other hand, have spent eleven years being told that a man belongs to you, and have never once been told it by the man himself. I do know what that is like, you know. To be promised something that was never offered.” She smiled, and it was not a nice smile. “It is a particular kind of humiliation. And I will not be made to carry yours.”

The color went out of Clarissa Vance’s face as though a candle had been snuffed.

She recovered in one breath — she was well-trained — and what came back onto her face was not anger. It was something colder and far more dangerous.

“You are clever,” she said admiringly. “Clever women tell themselves that cleverness is a kind of armor.” She turned her fan over in her hands. “It is not. It only means you have more surfaces to be cut.” She began to move away, and then paused, and leaned in one last time, her voice dropping so low that Verity had to strain to catch it. “I know where his correspondence goes, Miss Marlow. And I know where yours went. Twelve of them, I’m told.” Her eyes flicked up. “Was it twelve?”

Verity’s heart stopped, and then restarted, hard.

Clarissa smiled prettily, dipped a curtsy, and was gone into the crowd with her gold hair catching every lamp in the room.

Verity stood alone in the middle of Lady Meriden’s rout with her hands at her sides, and understood, with a clarity like ice water, exactly what had just happened.

She had made her position plain, and it had cost her the one secret she could not afford to lose.

Across the room, Sebastian Ashford saw her face change.

He had been talking to a Northamptonshire squire and had been thinking about leaving; he had watched her from forty feet away all evening, in the way he watched everything, and he had seen her spine go stiff. He was crossing the room before he had finished deciding to, and when he reached her he did not ask what was wrong. He looked at her hands and then at the crowd, and he said one word.

“Who?”

“Lady Clarissa Vance.”

Sebastian’s face went entirely still. Then he did something that Verity had never seen him do in a London drawing room: he turned and looked through the crowd until he found the gold head, and he looked at Clarissa Vance for a long, unhurried moment.

Clarissa turned. Their eyes met across the room, through a hundred people — and she raised her fan, unhurried, and lowered her eyes in the smallest conceivable acknowledgment, and turned back to her companion with a laugh.

“What are you going to do?” Verity said.

“Nothing. Tonight.”

“Sebastian—”

“She has a brother-in-law in the Adjutant-General’s office,” he said quietly. “I know it because I looked up every clerk in this city who could have shown her a list of names, and I noted which ones were close to which families. I have known for eleven days that someone had gone through the Comfort Committee roster after I did.” He looked down at her. “I did not know she had also been told the number of letters.”

Verity’s breath went in through her teeth. “If she publishes—”

“She will not publish it. Not yet.” His voice was calm and terrible. “She will do what she has always done. She will hint to one person at a time, for weeks, until the whisper is a shape everyone knows and no one can be blamed for saying. And then, when you are worn down to nothing, she will come to you kindly and offer to help.”

They stood in the middle of the noise, close enough that people were beginning to look.

“Then what do we do?” Verity said.

Sebastian looked at her for a long moment. Whatever was in his face, she could not read — it was the face he wore when he was walking into gunfire on purpose.

“When the war ended,” he said, “I made you a promise that I would not lie to you. So here is the truth. There are two things she can say, and only one of them can hurt you. She can say that the Duke of Winterbourne read the letters of a dying man. That is true, and it is mine, and I will stand in front of it when it comes.”

“And the other?”

“She can say a woman of four-and-twenty wrote twelve intimate letters to a soldier she had never met.” He paused. “That one is yours, and it would be harder, and it would be crueler. And I will not let it cost you a single night of sleep.”

“You cannot stop a whisper.”

“No.” He took her hand — in the middle of Lady Meriden’s rout, in front of the whole of London, without hesitation, without a glove, in the plain light of thirty candles. “But I can stand near enough that the whisper has to come through me first.”