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

Chapter 7

London, in the spring of 1816, was a city trying to drink itself into forgetting.

The war was over. The victory had been won. Napoleon was a rumor on an island six thousand miles away, and the ton had thrown itself into the new season with the desperate glitter of people who had lost a generation and intended to cover the sound with music. Every ballroom was hot enough to grow orchids. Every ballroom smelled of wax, wine, and women’s hair. Every ballroom was full of men who had not been there, wearing medals for battles their brothers had died in.

Sebastian had been back in England for six months and had not gone to a single one of them.

The estate in Somerset had held him the way deep water holds a stone. His father, the tenth duke, had died three years before of gout and forty years of port, and had left behind him a mountain of unfinished business: a steward who had been robbing him gently for a decade, a coal mine that had been mortgaged to a man in Bristol, and a ledger of rents so chaotic that Sebastian had spent the entire autumn of 1815 and all of the winter in a study that smelled of damp plaster, learning the trade of being a duke.

It suited him. He was not sure he liked himself for it, but it suited him.

He had expected to come home a hero and found that he came home a piece of furniture: the Duke of Winterbourne, unmarried, twenty-nine, worth eleven thousand a year and one bad shoulder, the most valuable vacant position in the marriage market of the United Kingdom.

Mothers looked at him the way furriers look at a fox.

It was the Earl of Wrenfield’s ball, in the second week of April, that finally pulled him to London. He went because his solicitor told him he must, because the bill for the Somerset coal mine was going to require a vote in the Lords, and because a duke who never appeared in society eventually became a story, and stories of that kind were expensive.

He arrived late, in black — severely cut, unadorned, no paste, no color, none of the sugared plumage the dandies of that hour favored — and the room went quiet at the edges the way rooms do when the rumor of a wolf walks through the door.

“The Duke of Winterbourne. So changed. So grim,” whispered a woman behind her fan, at a volume meant to be heard in Calais.

Sebastian ignored her. He had been ignoring that particular sound for fifteen years, and the war had finally taught him the trick of not hearing it.

His eyes went around the room once, in the same pattern he had used on the Peninsula: doorways, exits, the corners where a man sat alone.

He was hunting. He had been hunting for eight weeks.

It had not been difficult. Money and a title open certain doors, and the War Office has clerks, and the clerks have lists. A ladies’ comfort committee on Mount Street, a roster of the women who had signed their names, a column of names with one column beside it. He had learned that her father was Viscount Rowland Marlow, that the family lived on Grosvenor Square, that her mother was dead, that she had a brother buried in Spain, and that she had, in her fourth season, declined to dance at four separate assemblies, which had made her notorious for a fortnight and invisible ever since.

He had also learned, from a footman paid handsomely for gossip, that Miss Marlow attended perhaps one event in ten and left early at most of them.

Which meant that if she was here tonight, he would find her the way a man finds water in a desert: by looking for the one place where nothing is flourishing.

The music ended. Partners changed. The floor filled with pastel silk and diamonds and the particular piping laughter of girls who had never heard a cannon.

And there she was.

She stood near an alcove at the far end of the ballroom, half behind a spreading fern, wearing a gown of deep emerald green — a color too dark, too severe, too serious for an unmarried woman of four-and-twenty, a color that announced, in a language everyone in the room could read, that she had no interest whatsoever in being looked at.

She held a glass of lemonade in one hand and had not drunk from it.

Sebastian stopped where he stood.

He had imagined her a hundred times, in a hundred poses. He had pictured a spinster with severe hair and a face made bitter by disappointment. He had pictured a radical, wild-eyed, spilling pamphlets. He had pictured, God help him, a saint.

She was neither. She was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with restraint — dark hair pinned up without fuss, a spine like a plumb line, hands still.

But it was the eyes that pinned him.

They were moving across the ballroom, taking in the whole glittering spectacle the way a woman reads a page she has read before: with total politeness, and total indifference. She looked exactly like a person who had been told to be grateful for a party and had decided, privately, to be bored instead.

It was the face of the woman who had written the letters. He would have known it in a crowd of ten thousand, in the dark, at forty paces.

Sebastian Ashford pushed away from the pillar.

The crowd parted for him the way water parts for a keel — mothers stepping aside with their mouths opening on introductions; dandies with their fans halfway up, reconsidering; old men who had known his father turning to watch. He noticed none of them. He heard, in the vault of his own skull, the clicking of a lock turning.

He stopped three feet from her, close enough that she had to raise her eyes.

Miss Marlow blinked and looked up, and registered him in order, the way she registered everything: the height first, then the breadth of the shoulder, then the mouth, and then the eyes — gray, and, she would think later, the color of weather.

“Your Grace,” she said. Her voice was low and entirely steady. The glass of lemonade did not move. She executed a curtsy that was shallow, precise, and somehow also a dismissal.

Everyone in London knew the Duke of Winterbourne had come home.

“Miss Marlow.”

“We have not been introduced,” she said. “Though I am flattered that my reputation precedes me. Or perhaps it is my father’s debts.”

Sebastian felt something loosen in his chest. It was her. It was the voice in the letters, the dry nerve of it, the immediate defense thrown up like a portcullis, and it was so exactly what he had carried across a field of rye that he had to remind himself to breathe.

“I prefer to skip the theater of introductions,” he said, and stepped half a pace closer. He could smell her soap now — plain, paper, and something faintly green, bergamot, or a lemon left too long in a bowl.

“It is rather like a transaction wearing silk, is it not?”

She went absolutely still.

He watched the sentence land in her the way a stone lands in a window: first the small crack and then, one heartbeat later, everything behind it showing through. She stared up at him and her dark eyes widened, and her fingers tightened around the stem of the glass, and the lemonade trembled once — one small, microscopic betrayal of a hand trained never to betray anything.

“I am sure I do not know what you mean,” she said slowly, but her voice had gone quieter, and the bottom had dropped out of it.

“On the contrary,” Sebastian said. “I think you do.”

The orchestra began a new measure behind them, and the noise of the strings and the laughing and the coin-tapping of glasses rose up, and the two of them stood inside it as if behind glass. Nobody in the ballroom was looking at them. In another thirty seconds, everybody would be.

“You step on feet,” he said, “when you are forced into transactions, Miss Marlow. I would ask you to dance. But I value my boots.”

Her breath caught.

He saw, in order, the confusion, then the search, then the arithmetic. He watched her mind run through every place she had ever written that particular arrangement of four words, through every person who could possibly hold them — a servant, a secretary, a printer, a stranger, a dead man — and he watched her arrive, in a single terrible instant, at the only answer that fit.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

The words came out without the title, without the curtsy, without the armor. She looked, for the first time, not bored, and not bored was far more dangerous: she looked like a woman discovered in a hiding place she had believed was safe.

Sebastian held her gaze and did not blink.

“Sebastian Ashford,” he said. “Duke of Winterbourne. And for the last year, I have owed you my sanity.”