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

Chapter 3

She sealed it with plain wax and dropped it in the satchel at Lady Winchcombe’s the following Tuesday, and nobody in that lavender-scented room noticed anything at all, because nobody ever really looked at Verity Marlow. That, she had long since decided, was her single greatest advantage.

By April, she had written four. By May, seven.

The letters became a habit the way drink becomes a habit: at first a small, private indulgence, then the thing that made the rest of the day possible. She wrote about her father, Viscount Rowland Marlow, who conducted his affairs with the solemnity of a man reading a will and the competence of a man reading it upside down. She wrote about the way her mother’s portrait in the hall had begun to fade at the eyes, so that when the candles were low it seemed to Verity that the painted woman was looking away from her.

She wrote about Edmund.

You asked nothing and so I will tell you everything. My brother laughed in church. Not quietly — he laughed the way a man laughs when he has decided that the sermon has gone on long enough for God to forgive him. My father used to go scarlet. My mother used to bite her lip until it bled to keep from joining him. After Vitoria, what I missed most was not the comfort of him. It was that laugh. I missed it more than I miss God, and I am not certain what that says about me.

She read that one over twice before she sealed it, and then she sealed it quickly, before she could change her mind.

Twelve weeks passed in that rhythm: Tuesday, the drawing room, the bandages, the trill of Lady Winchcombe’s voice discussing the war as though it were a weather event. Then the slow ache of the week, accumulating like silt, until she could sit down with a candle and a sheet of paper and be honest with a stranger in a ditch.

The news from the Continent got worse in a way that London managed to find exciting. Napoleon had left Elba in February and come back to France as though he had only stepped out for air. By March he was in Paris. By May, the newspapers had begun printing maps, which the ton found thrilling and which made Verity’s hands go cold. Maps meant movement. Movement meant battles. Battles meant tin boxes.

Letitia Danvers came to call on the last Thursday in May, in the rain, wearing a bonnet that had clearly lost a fight with the wind. Letitia was a widow at twenty-six — her husband had drowned in a duck pond of all absurd things, three months into the marriage, and society had never quite forgiven her for the inconvenience of it — and she was the only person alive to whom Verity spoke without a fence around her words.

“You have the look of a woman keeping a secret,” Letitia said, settling into the window seat and shaking out her skirts.

“I have the look of a woman who has eaten nothing but toast since Tuesday.”

“That is not a secret. That is a menu.” Letitia squinted at her. “Are you writing to someone?”

Verity’s heart did something uncomfortable. “I am writing to the war effort.”

“The war effort,” Letitia repeated, in the tone of a woman tasting milk to see if it had turned. “Very well. Keep your secret. But I will tell you this much, my love: you have stopped being angry at the world and started being interested in it again, and that frightens me far more than the anger did.”

Verity did not answer. She looked out at the rain instead, and thought about a name in a ditch somewhere, and wondered whether anyone alive had ever read a single line she had written.

The twelfth letter was written in the first week of June, 1815, in a house so quiet she could hear the candles breathing.

Outside, the newspapers were shouting. Wellington’s armies were massing in Belgium. The Emperor had crossed into the Low Countries. Every drawing room in London was suddenly full of experts.

Verity did not write about the Emperor. She wrote about the way her hand had shaken that morning when she had taken Edmund’s button out of its scrap of silk and held it in her palm until the brass grew warm. She wrote about how much she hated the word glory, and how it had been carved in stone over the door of a school where they taught children that dying loudly was the same as dying well.

And at the bottom of the page, she wrote the only instruction she could think of that was not a lie.

Live. Not for the Crown. Not for the banners. Live to spite the men who sent you there.

She sealed it with plain wax, thumb flat, no crest, and she walked it to Mount Street herself rather than trust it to a servant, because it was raining and she wanted the cold on her face.

It went into the satchel with the other eleven, and the satchel went to the War Office, and Verity Marlow went home and slept for the first full night she had slept in a week.

Two hundred miles away, in a sea of mud that had once been a rye field, a colonel was opening the rucksack of a dead man.