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

Chapter 19

(transcript of the orderly’s paper, written at Brussels, on the night of 17 June 1815)

Tell her I kept them dry. That’s what he kept saying. Tell the lady I kept them dry.

Verity sat on the third step with the paper in both hands for a long while, while Sebastian stood above her in the rain and did not touch her, because he had learned by then that she needed a moment’s silence the way other people needed air.

“Say it out loud,” she said at last.

He took the paper from her — gently — and read it aloud in the wet dark of the mews, in his low flat voice:

“Tell her I kept them dry.”

She nodded. She stood up, and wiped her face with the back of one bare hand like a girl of twelve, and looked at Matthew Stubbs, who was still standing there with his cap crushed in his fists, terrified he had done the wrong thing.

“Mr. Stubbs,” she said. “You will come to Grosvenor Square tomorrow at eleven o’clock, and Mr. Craddock will make you a bed in the servants’ wing, and you will stay until that cough is seen to by a physician I am paying for. And I will not hear a single word of argument, because my brother died of the same neglect in the same country and I am not going to stand about weeping over it twice.”

Stubbs opened his mouth and shut it.

“Miss,” he said.

“Eleven o’clock.”

The proposal was made, as Verity had required, in the light, in front of witnesses.

It was made on a Tuesday, at the Comfort Committee, in Lady Winchcombe’s drawing room on Mount Street.

The Committee had not recovered from its own tearful conversion, and had in fact grown considerably: there were now thirty-one women in the room, and they had abandoned the linen entirely at Lady Winchcombe’s instruction, because Lady Winchcombe had declared that if one more person asked her to roll a bandage she would go and live in a cottage in Sussex. They were now engaged in the far more useful work of collecting the names of soldiers’ widows in the London parishes and finding out which of them could read.

At eleven o’clock, in the middle of the meeting, the door of the drawing room opened, and the butler announced the Duke of Winterbourne.

Verity, seated nearest the window, went very still.

He came in wearing the same plain black he had worn to the Wrenfield ball, and he went straight down the middle of the room, past twenty-nine astonished women and Lady Winchcombe, who dropped an inkstand, and he stopped in front of the chair by the window where a woman with a sharp jaw and dark eyes was sitting with her hands folded in her lap.

He did not kneel, because he was thirty years old and had been shot at, and Verity would have laughed at him.

He said, in his low, flat, entirely unperformative voice, so that all thirty-one of them could hear it:

“Miss Marlow. You told me once that you would be proposed to in the light, in front of witnesses who would hold me to my word.” He took one folded page out of the breast pocket of his coat — not the left breast; he had moved it over, she noticed, and had to bite the inside of her cheek. “So here is the whole of it, in this room, with these ladies to keep me honest.”

“Say it, then,” said Verity.

“I love you. I have loved you since the fourth letter, when you signed your name, and I will not pretend to know how it happened, because a man who explains love is a man selling something.” He unfolded the page; it was in his uphill, crowded hand. “I am worth eleven thousand a year, which is less than people say and more than I need; I have an estate in Somerset that is falling into the cellars; I have a bad shoulder, four hours of sleep a night, and a mother who will put up a fight about the wedding breakfast. I cannot give you an easy life. I can give you every honest thing I have, from now until the end of it, and I will never once ask you to be anyone other than the woman who writes in the dark.”

He held out the page.

Verity took it, and looked down, and found that he had not written a proposal at all.

He had written her a list — in the same hard hand as the ledger, on one sheet, numbered like a campaign plan.

1. The fund. £400 a year, in the name of Corporal Isaac Hooper, to place a schoolmaster and a reader with every regiment of the line, so that no man carries letters he cannot read.

2. Winterbourne, restored, to be run by us, with the east wing let, and the coal mine sold to the Bristol company, and the accounts put in the hands of a steward who does not steal.

3. A bed in the yellow room, which you will not use, because you hate yellow, and which I have had repapered green.

4. No flowers, ever, on pain of the study window.

Verity read all four items twice.

Then she looked up at him, in the middle of Lady Winchcombe’s drawing room, in front of thirty-one women, one of whom was already sobbing into a reticule.

“You listed the fund first,” she said.

“I did.”

“Before the house. Before the coal mine. Before me.”

“You would have refused me,” Sebastian Ashford said, “if I had listed anything else first.”

Verity stood up and tucked the page into her sleeve.

“Then yes,” she said. “Yes, and no flowers, and you will never regret it, and you will never once get a quiet evening out of me.”

The drawing room of Lady Winchcombe’s house on Mount Street — thirty-one women, one inkstand, one duke — celebrated for forty-five minutes and had to be sent home.

The Viscount gave his consent in his own way, three days later, in his library, with a glass in his hand and his eyes on the fire.

“You will take her brother’s things,” he said, without preamble. “The watch and the button and the letter. She has had them in her room since the day they came and I have never once asked to see them, which is the sort of thing a man tells himself is decency and is actually cowardice, and I would rather she had them than I had.” He drank. “She’ll tell you about Edmund. Let her. I never could listen to it. It is the only thing in my life I have failed at that I have not been able to pay off.”

“I will,” said Sebastian.

“You know what I said to her, in this room, when she was nineteen, and refused the Ardgour boy, and told me she would not be sold like a parcel of land?” The Viscount laughed, and there was nothing in it. “I told her she would end up alone. It was the most honest thing I have ever said to anyone and I have been sorry for it every day since. Tell her that. Or don’t.” He set the glass down. “Get out of my house, Winterbourne. You are going to marry her, and I have run out of ways to be unpleasant about it.”

Verity wrote her first honest letter to a living man the night before her wedding.

She wrote it at her own desk, in her own room, with one candle, in her own hand, and she sealed it with a lump of cheap red wax and pressed it flat with her thumb, and she sent it by Craddock to the house on Berkeley Square where the Duke of Winterbourne was staying, two streets away, at eleven o’clock at night.

Sebastian,

Twelve times I wrote into the dark, and not once did I expect an answer. I am writing this one expecting one, and I find that much harder, so if the handwriting is bad you will know why.

I am not frightened of the wedding, which surprises me. I am frightened of the years after it — of becoming ordinary to you. I have spent my life believing that I am only worth looking at from a distance, and I have watched you look at me closely for two months, and I still do not entirely know how to survive it.

So here is my condition, and it is the last one: do not become careful with me. You may be tired, and bad-tempered, and silent, and drinking too much on the anniversary. You may be whatever the war has left you. I have met all of it and I am not afraid of it. But if you begin to protect me from the truth, I will know, and I will be gone, and there is nowhere to go, so I would rather you simply did not.

And there is one other thing. I have let you carry my twelfth letter over your ribs through a cannonade and I have never once asked you what you did with it after. Tomorrow, at some point, when everyone has gone home, I want you to give it to me.

Yrs, with everything, V.

He answered within the hour, in his uphill hand, on one sheet, and Craddock brought it back with a face like a stone.

V,

You shall have it. I am having it done properly — it is with a bookbinder in St. James’s tonight, and I will bring it to you myself, and it will not be framed, and it will not be in a glass case, and you will not be able to pretend it is a relic, because I intend it to be a thing you can hold.

And to the rest: I have no intention of becoming careful. I have been careful with everyone in England for fifteen years, and you are the first person I have not had to be careful with, and I am not giving it up.

S. Ashford

P.S. — There is one thing I have never told you. I will tell you at the wedding, when I have a ring on your hand and there is nothing you can do about it.