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

Chapter 16

They left London at ten past five in the morning, in a cold gray light, with the streets empty except for night soil carts and a single drunk asleep against a pump.

Letitia Danvers was in the carriage in her boots, as promised, with her hair done up badly and her eyes entirely awake. She had not asked one question on the doorstep. She had taken one look at Verity’s face in the light of the carriage lamp and climbed in, and had then spent the first ten miles silent, which was the single greatest act of friendship Verity had ever known.

“Right,” Letitia said at last, somewhere past Hammersmith. “Is he worth it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain? Because I have packed for four days and I would like to know whether I am witnessing a romance or driving you to a duel.”

“Both,” Verity said. “Possibly.”

They stopped twice to change horses and once to eat bread and cold beef on a bench outside a coaching inn while the sky went from gray to a thin, watery blue. The road west was rutted from the spring rains, and the carriage swayed, and Verity’s hands stayed clenched in her lap the entire way.

She had left a note for her father. It said that she had gone to Somerset with Mrs. Danvers, that she expected to be back within a week, and that she would explain everything on her return, and it was the first honest thing she had written to him in six years.

They came into the valley below Winterbourne at four in the afternoon on the second day, and Verity leaned out of the window, and understood for the first time the scale of the thing she had walked into.

The hall stood at the end of a long avenue of limes — a great pale stone house with a front of eleven windows and a roof that needed work; behind it, folded into the hills, the park went on for a mile. From the road she could see the whole of it, and she could also see, with the practiced eye of a woman who had grown up watching an estate fail: the weeds standing in the gravel, the mud at the gate where it had not been raked, one whole wing at the east end of the house with its windows blanked out by boards.

The Duke of Winterbourne was at home, and the Duke of Winterbourne was bankrupt in the particular way that aristocrats are allowed to be bankrupt, which is to say he still had the horse and the roof and the creditors, and none of the money to hold them apart.

“Good God,” Letitia said, looking out. “He lives here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it is his,” Verity said, and got out of the carriage before the footman could reach the step.

The housekeeper was a small, square Yorkshirewoman named Mrs. Gable, who received them in the hall with the look of a woman who had not had a caller in nine months and did not intend to start enjoying it. She said that His Grace was out on the estate, at the east end, seeing to the roof; she said that he might be back at seven; she said this in a tone that suggested he might also not be.

“Then I will wait,” Verity said.

“Miss—”

“I will wait in the library, if there is one.”

There was one. It was on the south side, a long room lined with books that had not been read in forty years, with a fire laid but not lit, and a window that looked out over the park.

And it was there that Verity Marlow stopped in the middle of the floor and stood utterly still.

Because the wall above the writing desk was covered in paper.

Twelve sheets. Twelve cheap, cream-colored sheets, gone soft at the creases, each one pressed flat and pinned to the plaster in two rows of six, in the order she had written them — she knew the order, she would have known it blind — with the wax seals broken and the pages opened out like maps.

They were the only pictures in the room. There was no portrait in the house, no landscape, no engraving of a stag in a glen. The wall above the Duke of Winterbourne’s desk was a war map made of a woman’s handwriting.

Underneath them, on the desk itself, lay a ledger, open, with a pen laid across it.

Verity took one step toward it, and then another, and looked down at the page.

It was a list in a hard, uphill hand: 1. The velvet coat. 2. The waltz. 3. The season. 4. The name. 5. Edmund. 6. The portrait in the hall. 7. The dowry.

And there were notes in the margin, some of them years old, some of them written only days ago, in ink of a different color, in the same hand.

Read 20 June, in the ditch before the crossroads. Read aloud to myself. Could not stop.

Read 23 June. Read it twice. Told Carew it was a letter from my aunt.

Read 2 July, in the barn at Brussels. Could not read it again until the winter.

Verity put her hand flat on the desk and stood over it with her head down and her eyes closed.

Somewhere behind her, the door of the library opened.

She heard it. She heard the step — a man’s step, unhurried, coming in from the passage — and the small caught breath of a person who had found a stranger standing in the one room in the world they had never expected anyone to enter.

She turned around.

Sebastian Ashford stood in the doorway of his own library in a workman’s coat with mud to the knee, his hair wet, a carpenter’s rule in one hand, thirty years old and looking ten years older than he had in London — and his face, for the first and only time since she had met him, was entirely open, with no guard on it at all.