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

Chapter 15

Verity,

I am not a man with words. You will read that sentence and smile, because you will know it is the first thing I have ever written to you that is not true, since I have spent a year and a half reading your words and wishing I could answer them, and there is nothing in my head on any subject that is not, in some way, a reply to you.

But you will also know what I mean, so I will not waste your time on it.

Here is what I want to tell you, and I have been writing it out in my own head for fourteen days, and I will put it on paper once. I will not write you a second letter. Not because I do not want to. Because a second letter would be me asking again, and one thing that I have learned from your letters is that a person who is asked twice has been asked once too often.

The handwriting was worse than his speech. It ran uphill on the left, the letters crowded, as though the hand doing it had learned to write at a desk in a barn. And there were places where he had stopped, and a small ink blot, and then carried on.

You asked me once why men go to war if they know it is a lie. I did not have an answer then. I still do not. But I can tell you why I went, and it is worse than the lie.

I went because I could not bear the life I had been given. My father died three years ago, of port and gout and thirty years of being agreed with, and when they put the coronet on my head I discovered that I had inherited a title, an estate in Somerset that is falling down at the east end, eleven thousand a year, and a position in society as a piece of livestock to be bid on. I bought a colonel’s commission to get out. I told myself it was duty. It was not duty, Verity. I ran away from a drawing room and I dressed it up as honor, and then I stood in a field in Belgium with men dying around me and learned what honor costs, and it cost more than I had.

You were not the only one who wrote to a stranger because the stranger could not answer. I have never told anyone this. There is no one to tell.

Here is the rest of it, and then I will stop.

I read your first letter on the night of the rain, three hours after a boy of twenty-two died watching a door, and I laughed out loud for the first time in a year, and the laugh hurt my ribs and I did not care. I read your second letter on the march, your third in a ditch with water in it, your fourth in a farmyard where I learned your name and had to sit down. I rationed them. One every three days, from a bundle of twelve, which is a mathematics you will find obscene, and I did it because I understood that when the letters ran out I would be alone again, and I would rather be alone slowly.

I read the last one on the night before the eighteenth of June, in the rain, and I folded it and put it in the breast pocket of my shirt.

You wrote: Live. Not for the Crown. Not for the banners. Live to spite the men who sent you there.

I carried it there through a day in which a horse died under me and a French bayonet opened my side, and at the end of it the page was brown at the corner and along one crease, because the blood on it was mine. I have not washed it. I have not cleaned it. I do not intend to.

Verity lowered the letter to her lap and sat perfectly still for a long moment, in the dark of her own room, at a quarter past midnight, while the whole city slept.

Then she turned the page.

Something fell out of the fold into her lap.

She looked down.

It was a sheet of cheap paper, folded in thirds, gone soft at the creases from long carriage in a haversack, with a thumbprinted seal of red wax long since broken — and a brown stain along one corner and one old fold, dried nearly black, that had eaten four letters of her own handwriting without quite destroying them.

Her twelfth letter.

Verity picked it up with both hands. She had to hold it that way. She read the last line of it, the line she had written in the first week of June 1815 in a house so quiet she could hear the candles breathe: Live. Not for the Crown. Not for the banners. Live to spite the men who sent you there.

And the word spite had a hole through the middle of it.

She put the letter down on the counterpane, very carefully, as though it might break. Then she put both hands over her mouth, and sat there for a long time, breathing through her fingers, and did not cry, because crying would have been far too small a response to the thing that was happening in her chest.

Then she picked the letter back up and read the last page.

I have enclosed your twelfth letter. It has been next to me for eleven months, in a haversack, in a box, in a drawer in a house in Somerset, under my shirt for one day in June that I have not been able to talk about with any living person. I have decided that it belongs to you and that I have no right to keep it, and I am sending it back to you because it is the only thing I ever stole that I am able to return.

I will be at Winterbourne Hall in Somerset by Friday. I am going down to see about the east wing, which is falling into the cellars, and to see about my father’s coal mine, and to spend the summer being what he was, which is the thing I have been running from since I was nineteen.

I will not call on you again. I will not write to you again. You asked me to leave, and I did, and I want you to know that I would rather have your peace than your forgiveness, and that I mean that, though it costs me a good deal to write it.

But you told a stranger, in the last letter of your life so far, to live out of spite for the people who sent him into the mud.

So here is my one request, and it is the last thing in this letter.

Not for me. Not for the man who took your letters when he had no right to them, and who can never give back the year he spent with them in his breast pocket.

Live out of hope, instead. It is a better engine. I have tried both.

— S. Ashford

Verity sat on the edge of her bed with both letters in her lap, her own and his, and looked at the window, where the sky over London had gone from black to a very dark blue.

The hall clock struck four.

She stood up. She set both letters flat in the drawer of her writing desk, closed the drawer, and pulled the bell rope so hard it nearly came off the wall.

By the time the maid arrived, white-faced in a wrapper, Verity was already pulling the pins out of her hair.

“Wake Craddock,” she said. “Tell him to have the travelling carriage at the door by five, and to send to Mrs. Danvers for her maid and a change of clothes, and to tell her that if she is any friend at all, she will be sitting in my carriage at five o’clock with her boots on.”

“Miss—”

“And send a boy to the stable to have my father’s horses put to, and tell the kitchen to pack food for two days on the road, because we are going to Somerset.”