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

Chapter 17

Neither of them moved.

The fire was laid but unlit in the grate, and the afternoon light came in flat and gray off the park, and Verity stood in the middle of the Duke of Winterbourne’s library with her hand still on the spine of his ledger and his own handwriting under her palm, and watched a man of thirty stand in a doorway with a carpenter’s rule in his fist like a man who had walked into a room and found his own ribcage displayed on the wall.

“You were not supposed to see the wall,” Sebastian said.

His voice was quiet and completely ruined.

“I saw it.”

“Yes.” He looked at the twelve sheets pinned above the desk, and then at her, and something in his face worked once and settled. “Mrs. Gable has been instructed to call it the map if anyone asks. On the grounds that a gentleman who pins campaign maps above his desk is eccentric, and a gentleman who pins letters is unwell.”

“How long have they been there?”

“Since September.” He came into the room, slowly, and put the rule down on the edge of the desk as though it were a weapon he was surrendering. “I read them again when I got here. All of them, in one night, in this room. And then I pinned them up, because I could not put them in a drawer, and I could not burn them, and I did not know what else to do with the only twelve objects in the world that had ever told me the truth.”

Verity looked down at the ledger.

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

She turned the page. There were other notes. Some of them were one line. One said: This is the one about her father. I have read it eleven times. She writes about him the way I would write about mine if I were brave.

“Eleven times,” she said.

“You have gone through my ledger.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Sebastian said. “Then I do not have to explain it.”

She closed the book. Behind her, the twelve letters hung on the plaster in two rows of six, all of them hers, all of them unremarkable, all of them written by a woman in a dark bedroom who had believed she was shouting into a hole in the ground.

“Why did you pin them in order?” she said. “Why not the best ones at eye level? Why not—”

“Because it is not a collection,” he said. “It is a record of a year. I wanted to be able to see the whole of it at once, the way you would look at a map, and see where the road went.” He paused. “Also, the fifth one is at eye level. But that is a coincidence.”

Verity laughed, one breath of it, and it turned halfway into something else, and she put her hand over her mouth.

“That is not fair,” she said. “You cannot make me laugh in this room, in this house, standing in front of that.”

“I can make you laugh anywhere. It is the only talent I have.” He came another step closer. “Verity. Why did you come?”

She made herself say it out loud, because she had spent two days in a carriage rehearsing it and there was no other way to do it.

“Because I have been hiding,” she said. “For fourteen days and, if I am honest, for about four years. Because I have spent my entire adult life arranging to be uninteresting on purpose, so that nobody would look closely enough to find the parts of me that are rotten, and then a man read twelve pages of the worst of me and came to a ballroom anyway.” She looked up at him. “And because on the night of the storm, when you were standing at my father’s desk, I was not frightened of you. I was frightened of being seen. Those are two entirely different things and I have only just worked out which one of them I have been running from, and I worked it out in the second row of a musical evening while Lady Winchcombe said abandoned to my left ear.”

Sebastian did not move. “You said you would rather have my peace than my forgiveness.”

“I wrote that.”

“No. I wrote it. You distorted it.” His mouth twitched, briefly, and then the humor went out of his face again. “Verity. I will say the whole of it once, and then never again, because a man who makes a speech twice is a man who is asking to be pitied.” He drew a breath. “You are not a phantom, and I have not been in love with a piece of paper since the nineteenth of June, 1815, when I opened my eyes in a barn with a needle in my side and a bloodstained page in my breast pocket and discovered that what I wanted was not to be comforted. It was to arrive. To get up and walk out of that field and cross the water and find one woman in England who had already been told the worst about me and had not yet decided what to do with it.”

He stopped. Then he said, flatly, the way he said true things: “I have loved you since the fourth letter, when you signed your name. Everything since has only been the details.”

Verity stood still for a long moment.

Then she said, “Take your coat off.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your coat. Off.” She was already unbuttoning her own gloves, one finger at a time, and dropping them on the desk beside his ledger. “You wrote that a French bayonet opened your side. You have stood in front of me for a month in black evening clothes and a riding coat and a waistcoat, and I have watched you hold that shoulder like a man holding a door shut, and I have been told nothing. Take the coat off. I am not going to faint and I am not going to pity you.”

Sebastian stared at her.

Then, slowly, he shrugged out of the workman’s coat and let it fall over the back of a chair, unfastened the waistcoat beneath it and laid that on the desk, and stood in his shirt in the cold room, and turned, and lifted the hem of the shirt.

The scar ran eleven inches along the line of his lowest ribs and up under the arm — a white seam, thick as a pencil, puckered at both ends where the stitches had pulled, with three smaller marks around it where the surgeon’s work had been hurried.

Verity looked at it for a long time.

Then she stepped forward and put her bare palm flat against it, the way she had in her father’s green sitting room — no gloves this time, no wool between them, skin on the seam of him.

His whole body went rigid.

“I hate it,” he said, in a voice that had gone hoarse.

“I know.”

“It ruins clothes. It pulls in the rain. Carew says I stand like a man carrying a fence post.”

“You do.” Her hand did not move. “It is where the letters were.”

Sebastian Ashford made a sound that she had never heard from him.

He caught her wrist, lifted her hand away from the scar, and then did not let go of it — he held it between them in the gray light of the south-facing window, and looked down at her with an expression that had nothing guarded left in it at all.

“You are going to have to keep me,” he said. “I am not a good prospect. I am thirty years old, I sleep four hours a night, I have an estate falling into a hole, a mother who has been arranging my life since I was eleven, and a temperament that has driven off every friend I have except a lieutenant who cannot hear in his left ear. And I will never, ever be a comfortable man.”

“I know.”

“Then say it plainly.”

“No,” said Verity.

He blinked.

“You had your speech,” she said. “You will get no more of me than this, and this is all of it: I have been standing at the edge of a cliff for four years, entirely by my own design, and I did not come two days in a carriage over rutted roads to Somerset to be proposed to in an unheated library underneath a wall of my own temper. If you want the rest of it, you will ask me properly, in the light, in front of witnesses who will make you keep your word.” Her chin came up. “And there is a condition.”

“Name it.”

“Never a bouquet,” Verity said. “Not once, in the whole of our lives. If I ever find out that you have sent a symbolic rose to this house, I will have it delivered back to you through your own study window.”

And Sebastian Ashford laughed — a real one, thrown out of him like something escaping, loud enough that Mrs. Gable, crossing the hall with a tea tray, stopped dead and looked at the ceiling.

Verity did not laugh.

She stepped in, took his face in her two bare hands, and kissed him in her own time, slowly, deliberately, without one drop of surrender in it, in the cold room under her own twelve letters, and it went on long enough that the light on the park outside changed.

They were in the hall, an hour later, drinking the tea Mrs. Gable had eventually brought in with the expression of a woman who intended to write to her sister in York about it, when the hoofbeats came up the avenue.

A groom in Marlow livery, mud to the girth, rain-caked, three days on the road, with a letter, and a folded newspaper, and a face that said he had been paid to deliver both fast.

Verity broke the seal of her father’s note with fingers that had gone cold.

Come home at once. Be at Grosvenor Square before Thursday or I shall be obliged to take steps. Your name is in the Morning Post and so is your brother’s.

Below his signature, in the same rigid upright hand, one more line:

The Duke will not be received in this house.

Beside the note, the newspaper. Verity unfolded it, standing in the middle of the hall of Winterbourne Hall with a cup of tea in her other hand.

It was three days old. The paragraph was in the second column of the fashionable intelligence, and it had been written by somebody who knew precisely what they were doing.

The public will recall with interest the romance lately bruited between the Duke of W______ and a Lady of sharp Pen. We are now credibly informed that the whole of this Intrigue rests upon the most extraordinary Foundation. The Lady in question is said to have Directed, for some Months, a Correspondence of remarkable Intimacy to a Soldier of the Line, for whose Name she had no personal acquaintance. That Correspondence, we understand, fell after his death into the hands of the Nobleman, who made so industrious a use of it as to obtain thereby the Lady’s Favour. The brother of the Lady, it may be added, fell at Vitoria, and the tenderness of her Grief has lately been made the instrument of her Advancement.

Verity read it twice.

She folded the newspaper very precisely and set it down on the tea tray, and stood there in the wreckage of the last quiet afternoon of her life.

And Sebastian Ashford, who had read over her shoulder the whole way through — every colonel can read upside down, she would learn; it was the first thing they taught them — took her hand.

“London?” she said.

“London,” he said. “Tomorrow, at first light. But not to apologize to anyone.”