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

Chapter 21

Their son was born in the yellow room — the green room — on the eleventh of May, 1817, in the middle of a thunderstorm that put the household in a state of great excitement and did absolutely nothing to disturb the infant, who slept through the whole of it and continued to do so for most of his first year.

They named him Edmund.

He was christened in the village church at Winterbourne in June, in front of a small party: Letitia Danvers, who had married a Cornish widower the previous autumn and had come all the way from Penzance with a bonnet that had clearly lost a fight with the wind; the Dowager Duchess, who held the child for forty minutes and told everyone who would listen that he had the Ashford jaw and absolutely nothing of the Marlow temperament, which was a lie and was also a kindness; Viscount Rowland Marlow, who arrived late, drank two glasses of wine, said he looks like his uncle in a strange cracked voice, and then went outside and stayed there for half an hour; Matthew Stubbs, who came down from the depot at Maidstone in his new coat; and Lieutenant Miles Carew, who had left the army and become a coal merchant in Yorkshire and could hear almost nothing in his left ear and shouted everything.

The brass button stayed in the hem of the crimson gown, which was wrapped in paper and put in the chest in Verity’s room, along with the watch with the broken face and a letter about wet feet and a rotting apple.

She took it out, sometimes, on the twenty-first of June.

The Hooper Readers were, by 1819, in fourteen regiments.

It is not a great thing as history counts great things. It did not win a battle or redraw a border. It cost four hundred pounds a year at the start and rather more by the end, and all it did, in practical terms, was arrange for somebody — a pensioned sergeant, a schoolmaster, a chaplain’s clerk, occasionally a literate private with a good hand and a patient temper — to sit down once or twice a week in a barracks room with any man who wanted his mother’s letters read to him, and say the words out loud, slowly, twice if necessary, without one drop of mockery in it.

In the first four years, the fund taught nine hundred and forty men to read their own names.

It also — and this was in the third annual report, and nobody in Parliament understood what it meant, and Verity cried for an hour when she read the sentence in proof — read forty-one thousand letters aloud.

On a warm evening in the September of 1819, Verity Ashford, Duchess of Winterbourne, sat at the writing desk in the library at Winterbourne Hall with a single candle burning and a sheet of thick cream paper in front of her.

The house behind her was quiet in the way a house is quiet when everything in it is well: the baby asleep upstairs with the nurse, the servants’ bell silent, the fire banked low in the grate. Outside, the park went down to the lime avenue in the last of the light, and the windows of the east wing showed a lamp in the Bristol family’s parlor, which had been repapered and painted and now had a piano in it.

The wall above her desk still had the twelve letters on it. They were the originals, pinned in two rows of six, in order — she had refused to take them down when the book came, and Sebastian had not argued, and it was understood in the house that the wall was a wall of campaign maps and would remain so until one of them died.

The book itself — the little dark leather book with the ninety blank leaves — sat open on the desk beside her elbow, half full now, with a ribbon in it.

Verity took up her pen and began to write.

Sebastian,

You are in London for the Lords and this is the third day, and I find that I have nothing to tell you and am writing anyway, which I have decided is the whole point of marriage and not a waste of paper.

Edmund has learned to say the word “no” with tremendous conviction. He said it this morning to a spoon. He said it to the dog. He said it to Mrs. Gable, who was delighted. His tolerance for being contradicted is entirely his mother’s and I do not intend to apologize for it.

The lime avenue is going gold early this year. I walked it this afternoon with Mrs. Gable’s hand on my arm and we discussed the drainage of the lower field for a mile and a half and I found it, God help me, genuinely absorbing. You have ruined me. I am now a woman with an opinion about drainage.

Here is the true reason I am writing and not waiting for Thursday.

This morning I found the first letter. It was in the box in my room, with Edmund’s watch, and I have not looked at it since the day we were married. I unfolded it and read it in the light of the window.

I had expected to feel the way I felt at twenty-four. I did not. It was not a wound. It was simply — a girl, writing in the dark, doing the best she could with a great deal of sorrow she did not know how to carry.

I am glad she wrote them. I hope she would be glad that they are pinned on a wall over a desk in Somerset, and that a man in Belgium read them by lantern light, and that an old woman in Lincolnshire heard all twelve of them read aloud at her kitchen table by a stranger who loved her son’s handwriting enough to keep it dry.

Come home on Thursday. The road is good and there is no moon, and I will leave the lamp in the window and the fire banked.

Lately you have asked me, twice, whether I am happy. I keep meaning to answer properly, and then the baby does something, or you do.

I was writing into the dark for two years, and the whole time there was a man in the mud at the other end of it, holding the pages. That is the entire story of my life and I intend to be buried with it, along with the button, which is still in the hem and will not come out.

Yes. I am happy. It is a much less interesting subject than grief and I thoroughly recommend it.

Yrs, and yours, always, V.

She folded the page in thirds.

She did not seal it with the family crest. She took the lump of cheap red wax — she had bought it by the pound from the stationer in Taunton, who thought she was mad and had never once asked why — held it over the candle until it wept, and pressed it flat with her thumb.

She wrote the direction on the back in her sharp, straight hand, and left it on the hall table for the post, and went up to bed.

The rain came in on Thursday afternoon, an hour before he did.

Verity heard the horses on the gravel and came down into the hall as the door opened on a wall of wet gray light and a man of thirty-three with mud to the knee, hair flattened to his forehead, hat lost somewhere in the avenue, giving his soaked coat to a footman with the automatic gestures of a soldier handing over his kit.

He saw her.

And Sebastian Ashford, Duke of Winterbourne, who had come home from a war with a wound in his side and twelve letters in his breast pocket, who had been told for eleven years what he was worth, and who had spent the half of his life being carefully, decently, entirely unknown to everyone in England — came down the length of his own hall in his wet shirt, took his wife’s face in both of his hands, and kissed her, in front of two footmen and a housekeeper and a very confused dog.

“The letter came,” he said, against her mouth. “I have it in my pocket.”

“Then go and change, and come into the library, and read it to me.”

“I have read it eleven times on the road already.”

“Then read it twelve.”

And he did.

He sat in the firelight with his wet hair still dark on his collar and read her letter aloud from Sebastian to the end, in his flat, unhurried, ugly voice, while she sat with her feet tucked under her, watching his face the way she had watched it in a ballroom four years before and never once stopped watching it since.

When he had finished, he folded the page and put it into the breast pocket of his coat, over the left side of his chest — a habit of his, twenty years old now, that had begun on a night of rain in Belgium with somebody else’s letter and had never once been broken.

Then he reached up, and took hold of the corner of the first of the twelve pages pinned to the wall, and said, as he said every year:

“This one is loose at the pin. I shall have to do something about it.”

And Verity Ashford said what she always said, in the room where she had never once in her life been invisible:

“Not tonight.”

The fire burned down. The rain went on over the park, over the lime avenue going golad early, over the east wing with the piano in it, and over the small wet road that ran down from Somerset toward London, where the lamps of the house behind them threw one square of yellow light out onto the gravel.

She had spent two years writing to a stranger in the dark, and he had spent one of them reading in a tent in the mud, and neither of them had known, at the time, that they were the same conversation.

They had been. They went on being.

The End