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

Chapter 13

For three nights afterward, Verity did not sleep.

She lay in the dark of her own room and listened to the house settle, and imagined the whisper moving through London the way water moves through a wall: invisibly, patiently, arriving in the foundations. She imagined the version of herself that would exist by the end of June — the woman who had once been merely dull and was now notorious — and she found, to her own astonishment, that the prospect did not frighten her the way it once would have.

That was the thing that kept her awake. Not the fear. The discovery.

On the fourth night — the third of June, a Saturday, a night so close and heavy that the candles burned badly — the weather broke.

She had known it was coming since six o’clock. There had been a pressure in the air all day, an electric stillness that made the horses restless and the maids cross. At nine in the evening, the sky went yellow, and then black, and then the first thunder came down over London like a cart full of stones tipped off a roof.

Verity was sitting in her father’s library with a volume of poetry open in her lap when it started. The Viscount was at his club and would not be back until two, and the servants had gone down to the kitchen, and the big house was empty above and below her, all its dark rooms stacked like a locked chest.

She was not reading. She had not read a line in half an hour. The page in front of her was nothing but a place to rest her eyes while her mind went around the same circle for the hundredth time.

If it meant I got to keep reading what you write.

He was dismantling her. That was the plain truth of it, and she had known it since the glasshouse. He did not flatter — flattery she could have survived; flattery she had been vaccinated against at nineteen. What he did was worse. He listened to her arguments and then took them apart with a cold, patient logic, and he made her laugh at the worst possible moments, and he treated every single thing she said as though it had weight. He spoke to her as though her mind were an estate worth surveying. Nobody in Verity’s life had ever done that. Not her father, who had always regarded her as a difficult piece of accounting; not the ton, which had always regarded her as a temporary problem; not even Edmund, who had loved her without ever once being interested in what she thought.

She had spent four years making herself unlovable.

It was working much less well than she had planned.

At nine o’clock exactly, the library door opened.

Verity’s head came up. There had been no knock, no steps in the hall, no sound from Craddock’s quarters. The door simply swung open on its hinges and stayed open, and the rain came into the room with the man standing in it: a black sheet of water in the doorway, dripped from the tail of a riding coat, dark hair plastered flat to the forehead, one hand braced against the doorframe as if he had run the last half mile on foot.

Sebastian Ashford stepped into the library and shut the door behind him with a thud she felt in the floor.

“What on earth are you doing here?” Verity was on her feet, the book sliding off her lap. “You are dripping on my father’s Turkey carpet. It is nine at night. It is raining, in case that has escaped your notice—”

“Your butler attempted to stop me.” His voice was rough, wet, and entirely unsteady. “I informed him that if he did not step aside I would put him in the street. I believe he is now hiding in the pantry.”

“Sebastian.”

“Good man. Loyal. He should not have let me in.”

Verity heard the noise underneath the words: the catch, the grain, the thing scraping in his throat. She had heard it once before, in a sitting room on a Tuesday morning, right after a coal wagon.

She crossed the room and stopped two feet in front of him. “What has happened?”

He was not, she realized, looking at her. He was looking at the floor between them, at the dark spreading circle of water going into the carpet — and the water was mixed with something else, red and thin, running down his sleeve from under the wet wool.

“You are bleeding.”

“It is a scratch. I fell off the horse at the end of the street. It does not matter.” He lifted his eyes. “Verity. I have had a letter from the Horse Guards. My regiment is formally stood down. The commission is closed. It is over — the last of it — as of this morning, there is nothing left of the army that I belong to.” He stopped, and she watched him search for language and fail at it. “I am empty.”

“Then sit down, and take the coat off, and stop standing in the middle of my father’s library dripping like a corpse—”

“I am empty,” he said again, louder, and the thunder broke at the same instant, and neither of them flinched. “For three years I kept men alive. For fourteen months I kept myself alive with pieces of paper. And now I am the Duke of Winterbourne, and there is nothing else in me at all.” He looked at her. “I am exactly the thing you despise. I am a title with a rent roll, walking about the place, being counted.”

“I do not despise you,” Verity said.

“Don’t you?” He stepped forward, and the water came with him. “You keep me at the length of an arm and then you take my hand in a room full of people and then you send me away. In the glasshouse you looked at me as though I were a ghost that had walked into the light and you could not bear the glare.”

“That is not—”

“Tell me I am wrong.”

“You are wrong!” It came out of her as a shout, which she had never done in that house in her life, and the thunder rolled over the roof and swallowed the last of it. “You are entirely wrong. I do not look at you like a ghost.” She was shaking. “I look at you like a man in love with a phantom, and I am the phantom, and I cannot breathe for it.”

He stopped as though he had walked into a wall.

“You fell in love with ink on a page,” Verity said. Her voice cracked in the middle. “Sebastian — you fell in love with twelve letters written by a woman who was grieving and furious and alone in the dark, and everything you loved about her was safe, because she lived in a bundle of paper in your haversack and she could never disappoint you.” Her hands were clenched at her sides. “I writhed on the floor of my own bedroom for two years. I have a temper that frightens servants. I am selfish, I am idle, I ruin things before they can ruin me, and I have spent four years teaching every man in this city that I am not worth the trouble. You do not know me. You know a curated echo of my worst fortnight, addressed to a dead man.”

The rain pounded on the window. The candles guttered and one went out.

Sebastian Ashford looked at her for a long time.

Then he reached up and unbuttoned his soaked coat, and shrugged it off, and let it fall to the floor with a wet slap. Under it he wore waistcoat and shirtsleeves, both dark with water, and one sleeve dark for other reasons.

He walked toward her slowly, and Verity went back one step and hit the edge of the mahogany desk and could go no further, and he stopped there — hands coming to rest on the desk on either side of her hips, boxing her in the way a man holds a door shut.

“You think I don’t know you,” he said.

His voice was low now, dangerously quiet, with the storm beating on the roof above them.

“I know that you hate the color yellow, because you told the dressmaker in my hearing that it makes you look ill, and then you spent the rest of the visit apologizing for being particular.” His eyes went down to her mouth and back up. “I know that you read philosophy in the original Greek, because there was a volume of Epictetus on the shelf behind your head in the green sitting room with your bookmark through the middle of it, and you have never once mentioned it, because a woman who admits to Greek in this city spends the rest of her life being asked to prove it.”

Verity could not move.

“I know that you push people away when you are frightened,” he said. “Not when you are angry — when you are frightened. Because if you leave them first, they cannot leave you.” He held her eyes. “I watched you do it to your own father on Tuesday. You were three sentences from something honest with him and you made a joke instead.”

The air in the room had gone very thick. Rain hammered the glass, and the candles leaned, and Verity Marlow stood with her back against her father’s desk and discovered that there was no fortification left anywhere in her, not one brick, that he had not read straight through.

“None of that was in the letters,” she whispered.

“No.”

“How?”

“Because I watch you,” he said, and there was something almost violent in it. “Because I have watched you every hour of every day since I walked into that ballroom. I lived on the ghost of you for a year and a half — I read the woman who wrote in the dark and I kept her, and she kept me, and I will be grateful for it until I die. But I have not come to find her.” He leaned in, close enough that she felt the rain still cold on his hair, close enough that the words landed on her mouth. “I came for the one standing in the light. She is worse. She is a great deal worse. She is sharp, she is difficult, and she does not want to be loved, and I have spent the last month entirely unable to think about anything else.”

And then he kissed her.

It was not the kiss of a drawing room or the kiss of a man who intended to be forgiven for it. It was the kiss of somebody who had been holding his breath for eighteen months — hard, and unpracticed, and desperate, a man who had decided that whatever came after this he would have at least had the truth.

Verity heard herself make a small, furious sound against his mouth.

Then her hands came up — and instead of pushing him away as she had meant, they went into his wet hair, and closed, and pulled him down, and she kissed him back as though she were pushing a door shut against a storm, and she was crying, and it did not matter, and the library, the thunder, her father’s carpet, the whole of London and the entire arithmetic of the ton fell away from under her feet.

He groaned at the sound she made and his hands came off the desk and onto her waist and lifted, and she was against his chest with the wet shirt sticking to her, and the whole world smelled of rain and wool and blood and him.

She did not know how long it lasted. Long enough that the candles went down another half-inch and the rain changed its rhythm twice.

When they broke apart, they were both breathing hard, and he rested his forehead against hers, and his hands stayed where they were, at her waist, holding her as though she might otherwise be taken from him by a current.

“Tell me again that I don’t know you,” he said softly, against her cheek.

And Verity, standing in her father’s library with her own heart going like a captured bird, opened her eyes and found that she had never in her life been so frightened.

Because he was right. He did know her. He knew her better than her own family, better than Letitia, better than she had ever intended any living person to know her — and now the last wall was down and there was nowhere in the world left to stand, and the one thing she had spent four years building, the one protection she had, was not being seen.

She had been seen. Wholly. In the light.

“Please leave,” she said.

He went still.

“Please,” she said again, and her hands came up to his chest and pushed, gently, because she could not push hard. “Sebastian. You have to go now.”

He drew back. His eyes were dark and for three seconds she saw the wound go in — the shock, and, underneath it, that particular stillness of a man who had been shot before and knew what to do about it.

“Yes,” he said.

He did not plead. He picked up his soaked coat from the floor and put it on, and the water ran off him onto the Turkey carpet. He walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the brass knob, and he looked back at her over his shoulder, and his face in the candlelight was the face of a man taking a wound on purpose and keeping his feet.

“I am not a ghost, Verity,” he said. “And I am not going to vanish just because you are frightened.”

He opened the door and went out, into the rain.