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

Chapter 6

At half past eleven in the morning, the world ended on schedule.

The guns began on the ridge to the south, and Sebastian Ashford, Duke of Winterbourne, who had spent nine years being told that his title was the most important thing about him, learned in the first four minutes that a title weighs precisely nothing when the ground begins to jump.

He did not run. That was the strange gift of it. He had spent two years learning the trade of killing men at a distance with a cool hand, and on the day of all days, the trade came to him like a tune memorized long ago. He moved along the line, told the men what they already knew, steadied three who shook, sent a boy back for cartridges, checked the priming of his own pistol twice, and all the while there was a folded page flat over his heart, and every time he drew breath he could feel its edge against the inside of his ribs.

They came at the farmhouse on the left first, again and again, waves of blue coats against stone walls, and the smoke rolled over the field in long gray ropes. Then the cavalry came, and the squares formed, and Sebastian stood inside a square of men with bayonets pointed outward and understood that the world had a floor, and that the floor was here, and that the horses would break against it or they would not.

When the horses broke against it, the men cheered. Sebastian heard himself cheering, a sound like something torn out of a box.

The afternoon went on and on. He remembered it later in pieces, the way a man remembers a fever: the smell of wet cloth burning, a drummer boy of thirteen sitting in the mud with his drum on his knees, playing nothing, weeping without any noise at all; the sergeant who had been with him since he was a boy shouting something at him about the powder; the Frenchman who came over the wall of the farmhouse and died on the bayonet of a man who then vomited into his own hands.

At about six, the cavalry came for his artillery, and the horse under him was shot.

It went down hard and fast, and Sebastian went down with it, one leg trapped under a hundred stone of dying animal, and he remembers hearing, very clearly, a small voice in his own head saying the sentence as though it belonged to somebody else: live to spite the men who sent you there.

He cut the girth, dragged himself out from under, and fought the rest of it on his feet.

At about seven, a French bayonet opened his side. He felt it as a blow, the way a man feels a door slammed into him in the dark, and he turned and put his pistol into the face of the man who had done it and fired, and then discovered that he was bleeding badly and that he could not sit down, because sitting down meant lying down afterward, and lying down meant being stepped on.

He stayed standing. He does not know for how long, exactly. He knows that the light went orange and then gray, that the smoke thickened and then thinned, and that at some point the guns stopped, and the silence arrived.

He had feared the silence all campaign. He had been wrong about it. The silence was not the absence of the noise.

The silence was the noise subtracted from the field and leaving the field behind.

Sebastian stood in the middle of what had been a rye field and looked at what men had done to each other in one day, and his hands began to shake so hard he had to put them behind his back, like a man at a funeral.

Forty thousand dead and wounded, they said afterward. He never learned the number precisely and never wanted to. What he wanted was to count his own, and he did, walking from rank to rank of his regiment as the lanterns went up, writing names in the ledger in his head, and at every step the folded letter moved against his ribs, wet now, tacky and warm.

The blood on the page, as it turned out, was his.

Carew found him at midnight sitting on an upturned limber with his coat open and his shirt open under it, staring at the letter in the lantern light. The page was brown at one corner and along one old fold. The words were still there. Live to spite the men who sent you there. His own red had soaked into the edge of the second word and made it heavier, as though the sentence had been underlined by the field itself.

“Sir, you’re bleeding through the dressing,” Carew said.

“Yes.”

“You should let Mr. Reeve—”

“Presently.”

Carew stood there, nineteen years old, half deaf from the guns, and looked at his colonel, and said nothing else, which was the wisest thing anyone said to Sebastian Ashford that year.

Sebastian folded the letter along its creases, one careful movement after another, and put it back in the breast pocket, and buttoned everything over it, and only then permitted himself to be led away to have his side sewn shut.

He had gone to war to find something real. He had found it: a field, a mud, a butcher’s bill, and a girl’s handwriting.

Somewhere across the water, on a quiet street, in a house that smelled of beeswax, there was a woman of twenty-four who believed that she had sent twelve pieces of herself into a furnace and that no one would ever know what she had written.

Sebastian Ashford lay on a cot under a lantern with a needle going through the skin of his ribs and a fever starting in his blood, and made a decision that no honorable man would have made and that he was going to make anyway.

He was going home. He was going to find her. And he was going to tell her the truth, whatever it cost him, on the day he could stand up straight.