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

Chapter 20

She was married on the eighth of July, 1816, at eleven in the morning, at St. George’s in Hanover Square, in front of three hundred people, which was more than she had ever wanted and fewer than the ton had demanded.

The morning had begun badly and then beautifully.

The bad part was the dressmaker, who arrived at half past seven in a state of hysteria over a hem, and the good part was that Verity’s mother’s old maid — seventy-one years old, retired to Clapham, brought back for one day only — sat down on the floor of the bedroom with a needle and did the hem herself in twenty minutes while telling everybody in the room exactly what she thought of the modern trade.

And then, when the maid was done with the hem of the crimson silk — for Verity had insisted on crimson, and had won that argument in one sentence, which was I have been invisible for four seasons and I am not starting now — Verity took out a small scrap of old silk and unwrapped what was inside it.

A brass button, tarnished, dented at the edge, packed with black earth that had dried in the crevices of the stamp.

She handed it to the maid.

“Here,” she said. “Fold the hem over it and stitch it so it cannot move.”

“Miss Verity—”

“I know precisely what it is. Put my brother in the hem of my gown.” She looked at the button in the older woman’s hand, and her voice came out entirely steady. “He found apples in ditches and ate them. If he cannot walk down the aisle, he can at least come with me.”

The maid cried. Letitia cried. Verity did not, which she put down to having spent every tear she owned on the third step of a mews stair two weeks earlier.

The Duke of Winterbourne stood at the altar with his bad shoulder squared and his hands still, and he did not once look at the three hundred faces.

His mother sat in the front pew.

The Dowager Duchess had come to call on Verity ten days after the Alderleigh ball, unannounced, in a carriage, with a footman, in the manner of a woman who had not knocked on a door in thirty years and did not intend to begin. She had sat in the green sitting room for forty minutes and had asked precisely four questions, all of them about the letters.

Then, at the end, she had said: “My brother died of fever in a barn at Talavera in 1809. Charles Ryland. He was thirty-one and he could not read either — the family kept it quiet; you cannot imagine the expense of keeping that quiet in a house like ours. He died with his own letters home still in his pocket, and I never knew, and I found out four years later from a sergeant who was drunk.” She had looked at Verity with her son’s gray eyes. “I have been arranging that boy’s life since he was eleven. I do not intend to stop. But I will not be arranging yours against you, Miss Marlow. I read the letters. Sebastian did not know I did. I read all twelve in his study in Somerset in March and I sat down on the floor.”

At the altar, in front of three hundred people, the Dowager Duchess of Winterbourne wept openly into a handkerchief, and nobody dared to comment, because she was ninety percent of the reason the pews were full.

The service was short.

When the ring was on, and the last prayer said, and the whole church had stood up, Sebastian Ashford turned to his wife, and leaned down, and said, into her ear, quietly enough that only she could hear:

“I have never told you what I did the week after the battle.”

“You promised to tell me today.”

“I did.” His voice was low and flat. “I wrote to Isaac Hooper’s mother.”

Verity’s breath stopped.

“She lives in a village outside Lincoln. I wrote in my own hand, because I had made it my habit to write to the mothers myself, and I told her the truth — that her son had died of fever in a barn, in three days, watching a door; that he had cried for her, though he had been nine years without her; that he had been twenty-two years old and could not read.” He paused. “And that a lady in London had written to him for twelve weeks, and that her letters had been found unopened in his pack.”

“Sebastian—”

“She wrote back,” he said. “Three weeks later. She asked me to bring them.”

The whole church was waiting, three hundred heads turned, and Verity was standing in the middle of the aisle with her husband’s hands around hers, and everything else in the world had gone silent.

“Did you?”

“Yes.” His eyes were on her face, and there was no guard on them at all. “I rode to Lincolnshire in September of 1815 and I sat at a kitchen table for four hours and I read your twelve letters aloud, all of them, from the first to the last, while an old woman with her hands in her apron listened to every word and did not once ask for a lie.” He drew a breath. “She made me stop at the fifth one. She said, That is about his brother. She understands. And at the end of the twelfth, when I had finished the last line of it, she sat there for a long while and then she said — well, at least he was loved by somebody clever.”

Verity Marlow, in the aisle of St. George’s in Hanover Square, in a crimson gown with her brother sewn into the hem, cried for the second time in a fortnight, and did not care who saw it.

“That is why the fund,” she said.

“That is why the fund,” said Sebastian. “Because there is a barn in Belgium with forty boys in it who never learned to read their own names, and there is a woman in Lincolnshire who had to hear her son’s letters from a stranger four months after he died, and I have decided that this is the one thing in my life I am going to fix.”

They went down into Somerset a fortnight after the wedding, and did the work.

The east wing was let to a family in Bristol, the coal mine was sold, the steward who had been robbing the estate gently for a decade was pensioned off with a letter that made him weep — Sebastian had a gift for that kind of letter — and the accounts were put into the hands of a sixty-year-old clerk from Taunton who was honest, humorless, and cheap.

The yellow room was repapered in green.

And the fund was founded in the last week of August, at a meeting in a room above a saddler’s shop in Brussels Street, with four hundred pounds a year behind it and a plain statement of purpose, and it was called the Hooper Readers, and it did one thing: it paid for schoolmasters and literate pensioners to be attached to every regiment of the line, so that any man could learn his letters, or have his letters read to him, free of charge or shame.

The Horse Guards refused to allow it for two years. It was, they said, irregular; it was, they said, the business of the Church and not the army; it was, one general wrote, liable to make the men reading and thinking fellows.

Sebastian Ashford took the refusal to the House of Lords in the spring of 1817 and stood up with his bad shoulder and spoke for eleven minutes about a boy of twenty-two who had carried twelve unopened letters in a piece of oiled canvas for eleven weeks and had died in a barn in Brussels watching a door.

It was permitted in September.

Matthew Stubbs — healed, kept, and taught to read properly by the vicar at Winterbourne over the course of a winter — became the first reader attached to the 108th Foot, at two shillings a day, and wrote Verity a letter about it that was four lines long, misspelled in three places, and the most beautiful document she had ever received.

They were married in July. By the following winter, she had written him forty-one more letters.

She wrote them on wet days, and on the days the coach came, and always when he was away — to London for the Lords, to Taunton for the assizes, to Brussels Street in the spring for the fund. He never once received one without reading it aloud to her on the evening of his return, sitting in the library under the wall of twelve, in the light of the fire, in his flat unhurried voice, while she sat with her feet tucked under her and pretended not to be watching his face.

It was a strange and entirely private habit, and neither of them ever explained it to anyone.

On the night before their first anniversary, he came back from Bristol through four hours of rain, and found her at the writing desk in the library with a single candle, a sheet of thick cream paper, and a lump of cheap red wax.

She had just pressed the seal flat with her thumb.

He came in dripping, and stood behind her chair, and did not ask.

“Read it,” she said, and handed it up to him without turning around.

And he read it aloud, in the wet dark, with the rain coming down onto the park outside and the twelve letters hanging on the wall above them in two rows of six — the whole of it, from Sebastian to the end, while the fire went down to embers and the whole valley went quiet.

When he had finished, he folded the page, and put it in the breast pocket of his coat, over the left side of his chest, and said nothing at all for a while.

Then he said: “There is a book on the shelf.”

“I know. I have been looking at it all evening.”

He took it down and put it in her hands. It was a small book, bound in plain dark leather by a man in St. James’s who had worked on it for three weeks in June and had refused to be paid twice: her twelve letters, in their original order, on their original paper — creased, soft at the edges, all of them, including the twelfth, with the brown stain through the middle of the word spite — bound in with ninety blank leaves behind them, the plainest possible cover, and no title on the spine.

“There are ninety pages left,” he said. “You will want more than that. We will bind another when it is full.”

Verity sat in her father-in-law’s chair with the book of her own words in her hands and turned the pages slowly.

“It is not a relic,” she said, repeating it back to him.

“It is not a relic. It is a thing you can hold.” He came around the desk and sat down on the arm of the chair, wet and heavy and warm. “You told me twelve times that you were writing into the dark. Now you can write into a book, and I will read every page of it, and I will be here when the pages run out.”