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

Chapter 14

For fourteen days, Verity Marlow did not leave the house.

She told her father she had caught a cold in the wet weather, which was true enough in form if not in substance. She told Mr. Craddock that she was not receiving callers, and Craddock, who had served the family for thirty-one years and had been the one to open the door to a dripping duke at nine o’clock at night, received the instruction with an expression of professional blankness and did not ask a single question, then or ever.

She told Letitia Danvers, by note, that she was tired.

She told herself that she was regaining her equilibrium.

It was a lie, of course. She was hiding. Verity Marlow, who had spent four seasons saying exactly what she thought to anyone within earshot, had discovered the shape of her own cowardice at nine o’clock on a Saturday night in her father’s library, and she had run from it straight into a bedroom, and had stayed there.

Safety, she discovered almost at once, was a tomb with better furniture.

The house had never been so quiet. Her father was out from eleven in the morning until two, at his club, doing whatever men with debts did at clubs. The maids crept about. The clock in the hall struck the hours into a silence that swallowed them whole. Verity sat in the morning room with a piece of needlework she had begun in 1813 and would never finish, and stared at the rain-streaked glass, and the days went by like beads on a string.

And every morning, the same two thoughts arrived before she had opened her eyes.

The first was a small, searing memory: a hand coming off a desk and onto her waist, the rain on his hair, the sound he had made against her mouth.

The second was that he had not written.

Not a note. Not a message. Not a call. He had walked into the rain from her own door and had simply — entirely, patiently, in the way of a man who kept his word — done exactly what she had asked him to do.

Which meant that the letters she thought she had been protected by had gone silent too.

On the ninth day, Letitia came anyway.

She came in without being announced, in a bonnet that had clearly lost another fight with the wind, sat down on the end of Verity’s bed with her boots on the counterpane, and looked at her friend for a long, level moment.

“Right,” she said. “Describe him.”

Verity did not pretend to misunderstand. “Tall. Six foot. Gray eyes. He holds his right shoulder as though it has been sewn back on, which it has. He speaks slowly and does not waste words. He looks at people the way a man checks a room for exits.” She put down the needlework. “He read my letters and he told me so the first time we met. He is not gentle. He is not charming. He is the most frightening person I have ever stood near, and I have not thought about anything else for a month.”

“And you have not answered a single one of his calls.”

“He has not called.”

Letitia’s eyebrows went up a full half inch.

“Verity. You told me yourself that he forced his way past your butler in a thunderstorm with blood on his sleeve and told you he loved you. Which, incidentally, is the only interesting thing that has happened in this house since your mother died. And you sent him away.”

“I asked him to leave.”

“You asked him to leave,” Letitia said. “He left. And he has stayed left, which is the only honorable thing I have heard of any man in this city doing in three years.” She leaned forward. “Do you know what I think? I think you have spent so long defending a fortress that you cannot bear the peace treaty. I think that man read the worst of you, liked it anyway, and is standing outside the gate, and that you have decided this is somehow a trap.”

“It is not a trap. It is worse than a trap.”

“Then explain it to me, because I am a widow with nothing to do and I love a story.”

Verity looked out of the window at the rain going sideways down Grosvenor Square.

“He knows me,” she said at last. “Do you understand? He has read the letters, and then he stood there in my father’s library and recited the things he had noticed about me with his own eyes — my temper, my Greek, my cowardice — and it was not admiration. It was an inventory. He has been watching me, Letitia, for a month, the way he would study ground before a battle.” Her hands closed on the arms of the chair. “I have spent my whole adult life making myself uninteresting on purpose so that nobody would ever look closely enough to see the parts that are rotten. He looked. He saw everything. And I do not know what a person like him does with that.”

Letitia was quiet for a moment.

“He marries it,” she said.

The tenth day passed. The eleventh.

On the twelfth day, Verity stopped lying to herself, and did the thing she had been circling for a fortnight: she sat down at her writing desk at eleven o’clock at night, with a candle, and took out paper and a pen, and discovered that she could not write a single word.

She sat there for an hour. She got as far as Sebastian — twice — and threw out both sheets.

She had written twelve letters to a man she had never met, and could not write one line to a man she had kissed. She had been braver at twenty-four, when the words went into a satchel and a war and could never come back to her. That was the whole of it, and she finally saw it clearly at midnight with the candle guttering: her letters had only ever been safe because they were unanswerable.

On the thirteenth day, Lady Meriden sent word that she expected Miss Marlow at her Tuesday musical, and Verity, out of a perverse and stubborn need to prove something to someone — herself, most likely — accepted.

She regretted it the moment she walked in.

The room was warm and gilded and full of music, and the moment Verity came down the aisle between the chairs, she felt the whole assembly tilt toward her like a compass needle. She heard her own name, twice, in the hum. She took the chair she was given in the second row and sat with her spine straight while an Italian soprano made a spirited attempt on Mozart.

To her left, two rows back, came a voice at exactly the volume that carries.

“Abandoned,” Lady Winchcombe said. Her fan was painted silk and her diction was extremely clear. “Entirely abandoned, poor thing. And after all that business in the newspapers. One did wonder.”

“Oh, one did,” said a dowager beside her.

“I said to Lord Winchcombe at breakfast — I said, my dear, a broken man is very romantic until he remembers who he is. And there were four gardens, I’m told. Or was it five.”

Verity kept her eyes on the soprano and did not turn her head.

A month ago this would have been a knife. She would have carried it home and turned it over and over, soothed by its familiar shape: yes, of course, this is what they are, this is what I said they were, this is why I never bothered.

Now it simply felt hollow.

She looked at the empty chair beside her — gilt legs, gold silk cushion, entirely unremarkable, one of forty such chairs in the room.

And for a single, savage second she saw him in it: his long legs cramped up under the little gilt frame, the shoulders too wide for the space, his gray eyes going around the room with that layered contempt he had for the entire theater of the season; and she knew — knew with the certainty of a woman who had watched him do it — that he would have leaned over halfway through the aria and said something devastating and quiet about the soprano’s upper register, and that she would have had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing in the second row.

But the chair was empty.

He had done exactly what she asked. He had left her alone.

And Verity Marlow sat in the light of two hundred candles, surrounded by three hundred of the best people in England, and understood — with a clarity that went through her like a blade — that she had made a very expensive mistake, and that it had been made out of nothing but habit.

She stood up in the middle of the second song and walked out.

The carriage put her back on Grosvenor Square at twenty minutes to midnight. The rain had finally stopped. The house was dark except for the single oil lamp left burning on the entry table, and the whole of it smelled of damp brick and cold ash.

She was unfastening her cloak, fingers clumsy with cold, when Mr. Craddock spoke from the shadows at the foot of the stairs.

“Miss Marlow.”

Verity jumped half a foot and put a hand to her chest. “Craddock, you terrified me. Why are you still awake?”

“A courier came, miss. Shortly after you left for the musical.” The butler’s face was a mask of long professional practice — thirty-one years of it — and he extended a small silver salver with both hands, the way he had once carried her mother’s ashes. “I took the liberty of bringing it in out of the wet.”

On the tray lay a single folded sheet of thick, cream-colored paper.

There was no crest pressed into the wax. There was no monogram, no ribbon, no card, no seal of any house in England.

There was a plain, unmarked dollop of red — the cheap kind, the kind a man buys by the pound at any stationer’s in London — pressed flat, and inside it, printed with the ridges of a thumb, the unmistakable signature of a human hand.

Verity stood in her own hall and looked at it, and the floor went out from under her.

She had made that seal twelve times. She had made it with her own thumb, in that exact size, with that exact cheap red wax, in that exact shape of unmarked silence, and she had never once in her life told another living soul the reason for it.

Only one person alive had held twelve of those seals in his hands and broken every one.

“Miss Marlow?” said the butler, quietly.

“Thank you, Craddock.” Her voice came out thin. “You may go to bed.”

She took the letter up off the salver. It was warm from the lamp, or it was warm from her hand; she could not tell.

She went up the stairs to her room, and shut the door, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and slid her thumbnail under the wax.