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

Chapter 18

They came back to London on a Thursday, in the rain, in the duke’s travelling carriage, with Letitia Danvers asleep against the squabs and Mrs. Gable’s cold beef wrapped in a napkin on the seat.

Grosvenor Square was exactly as Verity had left it, which she found obscurely insulting. The knocker was polished. The steps had been scrubbed. The world had gone on happening while she had been in a library in Somerset with a man’s bare palm on her ribs.

Mr. Craddock met her in the hall with the news, delivered in his usual professionally expressionless voice, that the Viscount had instructed him to say that Miss Marlow was not at home to the Duke of Winterbourne, that Miss Marlow was not at home to anyone, and that Miss Marlow would do him the kindness of being at dinner at eight o’clock sharp.

“Thank you, Craddock,” said Verity. “The Duke will call at nine.”

“Very good, miss.”

They dined in a silence like a sheet of glass. Viscount Rowland Marlow ate his soup, watched his daughter eat nothing, and said at last, laying down his spoon:

“I have had four letters about you in a week. Two from Lady Winchcombe, which I burned, one from Alderleigh, whose son-in-law I owe money to, which I read twice, and one from your aunt in Bath, which I have not opened and do not intend to.” He wiped his mouth. “You have made yourself the talk of the town, my dear. I have been a figure of fun in this city for eleven years on the strength of my debts, and I have borne it. I did not expect to be a figure of fun on the strength of my daughter.”

“Papa—”

“Your mother,” he said, cutting across her with a burst of grief so sudden and so unlike him that Verity’s hands went still on the tablecloth, “your mother would have known exactly what to do. I have never once known what to do. It is the whole of my character and I do not recommend it.” He picked up his glass, looked into it, put it down. “Edmund is in the newspaper. That is what I mind. He died in Spain for the sake of a paragraph about your letters.”

At nine o’clock exactly, the brass knocker sounded.

Craddock had evidently resolved the ethical question in his own way, because the Duke of Winterbourne walked into the drawing room unimpeded and stood in front of the Viscount with his hat in his hand and did not sit down until he was told to. Which he was not.

“Your Lordship will not receive me,” Sebastian said. “I am told so. I am here to be received anyway, and then never again without invitation.”

“Your Grace has a remarkable facility for walking through doors that have been shut in his face.”

“I am told so frequently.”

The Viscount looked at him — the black coat, the bad shoulder, the hands that had been in the mud of Belgium — and something old and tired moved behind his eyes.

“My daughter tells me you read her letters.”

“I did. Twelve of them. I had no right to the first and no excuse for the eleventh.”

“Then why did you come here?”

“Because I intend to marry her,” Sebastian said, “and I do not intend to do it in a way that lets anyone in this house pretend it was not known.”

The silence in the room went on for a long moment.

“You will be laughed at,” said the Viscount.

“I have been laughed at in better rooms than this.”

“You will be written about.”

“Yes.”

“Her brother is dead.” The Viscount’s voice cracked, once, and he covered it by picking up his glass again. “If you are a man who breaks, Your Grace, break now and spare me the play.”

“I do not break,” said Sebastian Ashford. “I am not a comfortable man, and I have not been a whole one since 1815, and I will not be able to give her a quiet life. I can give her the whole truth, all the way to the end of it, and I will. That is the entire inventory. I have nothing else to sell.”

Viscount Rowland Marlow set down his glass, looked at the man for a while, and then said the one sentence Verity would remember from that entire year of her father’s life:

“Then I hope you are worth her temper. God knows nothing else in this house ever was.”

He did not shake the Duke’s hand. But he stopped instructing Craddock to say that Miss Marlow was not at home, which in that house was the same as a blessing.

The invitation arrived the following morning on a card of heavy cream stock, in a hand that Verity recognized before she read the name.

The Marquess of Alderleigh and Lady Alderleigh request the pleasure of Miss Marlow’s company at a ball in honour of their daughter, Lady Clarissa Vance. Friday next. Ten o’clock.

“A trap,” said Letitia, reading it over her shoulder.

“Obviously.”

“You are going.”

“Obviously.” Verity turned the card over in her fingers. “She has spent five weeks telling two hundred people a story about me. I could sit in this house for a year and it would make no difference. She will say what she likes whether I am in the room or not.” She put the card down. “So I intend to be in the room.”

“You will be destroyed.”

“I have been destroyed,” Verity said. “Four seasons ago. It took me about two months. It is not nearly as dramatic as people think.”

She wore crimson.

That was the first thing anyone noticed, and the thing they talked about for a year afterward: Miss Marlow, who had spent four seasons dressing like a piece of slate furniture, walking into the Marquess of Alderleigh’s ballroom in a gown of deep crimson silk with no ruffle on it anywhere, with her hair up plain and her chin up, on the arm of the Duke of Winterbourne, whom she had arrived with in an open carriage in front of forty witnesses.

The room went quiet in rings, from the door outward.

“Oh, my dear,” said Lady Winchcombe, from twenty feet away, with her fan arrested mid-flutter. “Oh, my dear.”

Clarissa Vance came to meet them at the head of the room.

She was magnificent, of course — she was always magnificent, she had been built for exactly this — in white and silver with her gold hair up and her father’s diamonds around her throat, and she had the field, and the crowd, and her brother-in-law’s office files, and every advantage that eleven years of expectation could give a woman.

“Miss Marlow,” she said, with the smile that had never once slipped. “How brave.”

“Lady Clarissa.” Verity curtsied, exactly deep enough. “I received your card. I have been looking forward to it all week.”

“Have you indeed.” Clarissa’s eyes went over Verity’s shoulder, to the Duke, and lingered there with something that was not quite hatred and had never once in eleven years been love. “Your Grace.”

“Lady Clarissa.”

“I must say, you have both given the Season its finest hour.” Her voice had risen slightly; she meant it to. A ring of people had gathered, the way they always gather, in that idle, greedy, hungry way, at the smell of a wound. “I confess I have been fascinated by the tale. Twelve letters, was it not? To a soldier the poor woman had never clapped eyes on? And then — forgive me, I am only repeating what everyone says — His Grace happened to be in possession of them.” She opened her fan. “It is either the most romantic thing I have ever heard or the most enterprising. I cannot decide which.”

“You may ask me,” Verity said.

The fan stopped.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You have been repeating what everyone says for five weeks,” Verity said, in a clear, carrying voice that was pitched for the room and not for the woman. “So I will spare you the labor of repeating me.” She turned, unhurriedly, to face the crowd — two hundred faces, all of them listening, several of them enjoying themselves enormously — and the Duke of Winterbourne stood at her left shoulder and did not move one inch.

“My name is Verity Marlow,” she said. “I am four-and-twenty years old, I have no fortune, I have a temper, and in the spring of 1815 I wrote twelve letters to a corporal of the One Hundred and Eighth Foot, whose name the War Office chose for me from a list, and whom I never met. Not one word of that is a secret. I sat in a lavender-scented drawing room with twenty women in silk who told me to write about glory, and I wrote the truth instead, because my brother died at Vitoria for a word I have hated ever since and I could not bring myself to send a stranger another lie.”

The room was entirely silent.

“The corporal’s name was Isaac Hooper. He was twenty-two. He could not read, and he could not write, and he carried my twelve letters in a piece of oiled canvas for eleven weeks because he did not want them spoiled by the wet, and he died of fever in a barn in Belgium with them still sealed. The gentleman who found them did an unforgivable thing: he opened them. He has told me so to my face, in daylight, and he has never once offered an excuse I could accept, and I have chosen, with my eyes open, to forgive him for it.” Her voice did not waver. “I am not ashamed of the letters. I am not ashamed of having written the truth to a stranger when the truth was the only thing I had. If there is anyone in this room who has never once been honest in the dark, let them come forward and say so, and I will apologize to them personally.”

Nobody came forward.

“Miss Marlow,” said Clarissa, and there was a small crack now in the enamel of the smile, “that is very affecting, but the fact remains that a correspondence of that character—”

“The correspondence never left the office,” said Sebastian.

He said it without volume and the room turned to him anyway, the way water turns downhill.

“Twelve letters, from a committee roster, are logged in, filed, and packed out to the Peninsula in a sack. A sack that was inventoried at Ostend, and at Brussels, and at the field depot, by me, because I had made it my practice to inventory the effects of my dead personally.” He paused. “When Miss Marlow’s letters went astray, they did not go astray from her house. They went astray inside my own regiment’s mail, and the only list of names in England that could have told a stranger which woman in Mayfair had written to which soldier is the Comfort Committee roster, which is kept at the War Office under lock.”

He turned his head, and looked down the room at a pale, thin man in spectacles standing at the edge of the crowd beside Lady Clarissa’s sister.

“Mr. Hollis,” he said pleasantly. “Of the Adjutant-General’s office. Good evening.”

The man in spectacles went the color of a candle.

“I will not trouble the room with the details,” Sebastian said. “I will only say that Mr. Hollis has been paid four times since March for a list of names, that he signed a deposition to that effect on Tuesday morning in the presence of my solicitor, and that he will be answering to his superiors before the week is out. The rest of it, Lady Clarissa, is not my business and not this room’s, and I have no intention of naming anyone who did not take money for it.”

He let that sit for one full second.

“But I would ask you all,” he said, “to notice who it was that needed a spy to find out a thing that Miss Marlow had already told a dead man for nothing.”

The silence held.

And then, from twenty feet away, Lady Winchcombe burst into tears.

“Oh, the poor boy,” she wailed, into a room of two hundred people. “Twenty-two, and he could not read! And there we all were with our linen!”

The world, being what it is, turned over like a leaf.

By midnight, the two of them had been approached by nine separate hostesses, four dowagers, an elderly general who wanted to shake Sebastian’s hand, and the Duchess of Ardgour, who said that she had thought the whole story nonsense until tonight and that she now intended to have Miss Marlow to her table on Tuesday. Clarissa Vance stood at the head of her father’s ballroom with her fan crushed flat in one hand, watching eleven years of arrangement evaporate in front of her, and by one in the morning she had gone upstairs with a headache, and by the end of June she was in Bath with her aunt, and by the winter she was engaged to a baronet of fifty in Norfolk, which was, everyone agreed, a very good match.

Verity did not enjoy any of it. She stood in the middle of the floor in crimson silk with her hand on Sebastian’s arm and felt, for the first time since she was nineteen years old, entirely and unmistakably visible — which was terrifying, and also, she discovered, a kind of relief she had no words for.

It was nearly two in the morning when the footman came to her with a card.

“There’s a man at the servants’ door, miss. Says he must speak to you and no one else. He has a discharge paper and the look of a soldier.”

She went down the back stairs with Sebastian behind her and her heart in her mouth.

He was thirty or so, hollow-cheeked, with a greatcoat that had been mended with string and a cough he could not stop, and he took off his cap when he saw her, and stood there in the lamplight of a Mayfair mews with his hands twisting it round and round.

“Miss Marlow. You’re the lady that wrote to Isaac.”

“I am.”

“Matthew Stubbs. Private, Hundred and Eighth.” He coughed. “I was in the next cot, miss. In the barn.”

Verity could not speak for a moment.

“He talked about you,” Stubbs said. “I’d not lie about that. First night, when he still had words left, he showed me the canvas packet. Wouldn’t open it — said they weren’t to be spoiled. He said he’d have them read to him when the fighting stopped and he could find a man who could read better than he could, and he made me promise to remind him.” The former private laughed, and it turned into the cough. “He was that proud of them, miss. A boy who couldn’t read a word, carrying twelve letters he couldn’t read, showing them off like a watch.”

“He never heard them,” Verity said.

“No, miss.” Stubbs looked at the ground. “But here’s the thing I came about.” He reached inside the ragged coat and brought out a folded scrap of paper, gone soft as cloth, and held it out to her with a hand that shook. “On the last night, he was going on, saying things. And I asked one of the hospital orderlies who could write to put them down, because I knew he had a lady, and I thought somebody ought to have them.” He ducked his head. “It’s took me a year to bring it to London, miss, and I saw the paper this week, and the name, and I thought — well. Here.”

Verity unfolded the scrap, alone on the third step of a mews stair at two in the morning, with the rain starting again overhead.

Four lines, in a stranger’s hand, copied from a dying boy’s mouth.

She read them.

Then she sat down on the steps, in crimson silk worth more than the man’s coat, and cried like a child.