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

Chapter 4

The mud in Belgium did not behave like earth. It behaved like something alive with an appetite. It pulled at boots, swallowed wheels to the axle, and smelled of rot, gunpowder, and the inside of a slaughterhouse at the end of a hot day.

Sebastian Ashford had been in it for a fortnight when Corporal Isaac Hooper died.

He had not died charging a French battery with a shout on his lips. He had died of typhus, in a field hospital that was really a barn with better manners, over three days, sweating through a straw mattress that had already absorbed two other men. Sebastian had been told about it by the surgeon, Mr. Reeve, who reported deaths the way a man reports the weather in a country he intends to leave.

“Ordinary fever. Nothing to be done.”

Sebastian made it his practice to inventory the effects of his dead personally. It was a penance he had set himself at Talavera and never lifted: if he could sleep in a tent while his men slept in water, then he could at least be the man who wrote to their mothers. Twenty-six letters he had written in three years. He knew the exact weight of the paper he preferred for it.

Hooper’s rucksack had come to him at dusk, damp at the seams, and he had opened it on the crate in his tent with a lantern hooked above him and Lieutenant Miles Carew asleep, or pretending to be, in the corner.

Inside: one spare shirt, gone gray. A razor with a chipped handle. A tin of grease. A lock of pale hair tied with butcher’s twine. And, at the bottom, wrapped in a square of oiled canvas and bound with cord, a bundle the size of a bible.

Sebastian unwrapped it with cold fingers.

Twelve letters. All of them addressed in the same sharp, slanted hand to Corporal Isaac Hooper, 108th Foot, The Peninsula, and after, wherever they send him. Every seal intact. Every single one unbroken.

He sat there for a long moment with the cold coming in around his collar, understanding something that made his chest feel like a room with the windows open.

Hooper could not read.

Sebastian knew it in the way a man knows a thing he has been refusing to see: the way Hooper had always handed over written orders to be read aloud by whoever stood nearest. The way he had once asked Sebastian, scarlet to the ears, to sign his own name for him on a pay chit, muttering something about his hand being cramped. The boy had carried twelve letters across a country at war like a man carrying relics, waiting for a quiet hour and a literate friend.

The quiet hour had never come.

Three hours ago, in the barn, Hooper had stopped sweating and started calling for his mother, and then he had stopped that too.

Sebastian should have burned them. He told himself this with total clarity while he held them. They belonged to a dead man and to a woman he had never met. Honorable men did not read other men’s letters, and Sebastian had spent four years being the kind of officer who did the difficult and correct thing in the difficult and correct order.

But the fire in the brazier was dying. The rain was drumming on the canvas like a drummer who had forgotten the tune. And the silence in the tent was a weight he had learned to dread more than cannonade, because cannonade at least meant someone was still alive to make it.

He reached for the top letter.

The paper was soft at the folds from its journey. The wax was ordinary red, the cheapest kind, pressed flat and unmarked by a thumb — no lion, no coronet, nothing to say who had sent it. He turned it over once, as though it might object.

He broke the seal.

Dear Corporal Hooper. I am instructed by a room full of women in silk to tell you to be brave. I will spare you the insult.

Sebastian stopped breathing for a second.

Then he read the second line, and the third, and the one about the man weeping over his boots in the London mud, and by the bottom of the page he made a sound that was half cough and half laugh, loud enough that Lieutenant Carew sat up in the corner and stared at him like a man watching a statue move.

“Sir?”

“Nothing,” Sebastian said, and his voice came out strange. “Go back to sleep.”

He held the paper closer to the lantern. The writing was sharp and purposeful. There were no flourishes, no delicate loops, none of the pretty fainting prettiness he had been trained by the ton to expect from a woman’s hand. The crosses of her t’s looked like small swords.

He read it a third time. Out loud, quietly, tasting the mockery of it, the honesty of it, the sheer unladylike nerve of a woman who had been told to write a prayer and had written the truth instead.

Outside, the guns were quiet for the first night in five days, and the rain had turned to something finer and colder that would be freezing by morning.

Sebastian Ashford turned the letter over, set it down on the crate, and looked at the other eleven.

He knew, in a way he could not have explained to his own conscience, that he was about to commit a theft that could not be undone by giving anything back.

He picked up the second letter.