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

Chapter 8

“A year,” Verity said. Her voice came out flat, which was a mercy, because everything behind it was not.

“A year and two months.”

The ballroom carried on around them — violins, laughter, the small dull thunder of a hundred feet on a waxed floor — and none of it reached her. There was a pressure in her ears, like being underwater. She was aware of her own pulse in her throat, and of the fact that her hand had begun to ache where she gripped the glass.

“You are going to tell me,” she said, “precisely, how you come to know a sentence I wrote in my own room in the middle of the night, and posted to a man I have never met, in an envelope you could not possibly have opened.”

“Yes.”

“Now.”

“Not here.”

“Now,” Verity repeated, and something in her voice made him incline his head a fraction of an inch, the way a man concedes a point of tactics.

“Very well.” He glanced past her, once — an old habit, she would learn; a man checking the exits before he told the truth. “His name was Isaac Hooper. Corporal. The Hundred and Eighth Foot. He was twenty-two years old and he could not read.”

Verity’s mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.

“I found your letters in his pack,” the Duke of Winterbourne said. “Twelve of them. Sealed. Every one of them unopened. He had carried them for eleven weeks, wrapped in canvas, because he did not want them spoiled by the wet, and because he intended to find someone to read them to him when the fighting stopped.” He paused, and his jaw moved once, as if he were setting something back into place. “The fighting stopped on the eighteenth of June. He died on the seventeenth. Of fever, in a barn, three hours before I opened his pack.”

The music swelled. Somewhere behind her, a girl shrieked with laughter at something a man had said.

“He never read them,” Verity said.

“He never read them.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“All of them.”

She closed her eyes. It was the only defense she had left, and it lasted perhaps a second and a half — behind her eyelids she saw, with the vividness of a lit stage, a candle, a sheet of paper, and the things she had written on that paper in her own hand: her brother’s laugh, her mother’s painted eyes, her father’s debts, the cruel sharp sentences about the season, about dancing, about a room full of people she belonged to none of, the sentence about missing Edmund’s laugh more than she missed God.

A stranger had read all of it. A stranger had held the ugliest, most unguarded pieces of her in his hands in a tent in Belgium, in the rain, and read them by lantern light.

“You opened the letters of a dead man,” she said. Her voice was quiet and it shook with a fine, cold fury. “You read twelve pages of a woman’s private grief, written for somebody else, and you have carried that knowledge around for over a year, and now you have walked into a ballroom and used it on me like a card at the faro table. That is not merely improper. It is contemptible.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

She had not expected that.

She had expected excuses — the arrogance of his rank, an apology made of flourishes, some elegant performance of regret designed to let everyone leave with their dignity intact. Instead the Duke of Winterbourne stood in front of her in his plain black coat, with the whole ton watching from the corners of their eyes, and agreed with her.

“I stole them,” he said. “I knew what I was doing when I broke the first seal, and I knew it again every time I broke another. I could tell you about the rain, or the mud, or the fact that I had just signed the papers of nineteen dead men in a fortnight, and that I had begun to think that the whole of the world was a hole that men were being poured into.” He stopped. “But those are the reasons I give myself. The truth is simpler. I was drowning, and your letters were the only thing that floated.”

Verity looked up at him.

“You cannot possibly expect me to be flattered by that.”

“I expect nothing,” he said. “I have owed you an accounting for fourteen months and I have just paid it, which is more for my benefit than yours, and I know it. I am sorry for the theft.” His gray eyes did not move from her face. “I am not sorry that I survived.”

The lemonade glass shook again, and this time she could not stop it, so she set it down on the sill behind the fern, deliberately, with the small click of a woman putting down a weapon.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

“I know that you wrote the truth to a stranger rather than a comfortable lie to a friend, and that you sealed it without your name on it, and that you went out into the rain to post the last one.” He said it quietly, without triumph. “I know you did it twelve times. I make no claim beyond that.”

The music changed. A country dance, brisk and bright, the kind designed to make everybody feel that a party was happening and that they were part of it.

The Duke of Winterbourne looked at her for a moment longer, and then he did something that Verity would think about, off and on, for the rest of her life, in the middle of the night, in church, on her wedding day, and once on a beach in Cornwall with the sand cold under her feet.

He reached up and, very slowly, with the hesitation of a man who knew exactly how much he was not entitled to, brushed back a curl that had come loose from the pins at her temple. His fingers did not quite touch her skin. And then they did, for a fraction of a second, and the touch went through her like a struck bell.

She heard her own breath catch — an audible sound in the middle of a crowd — and her hand came up to strike his away, and she stopped, inches short, with her fingers curled and suspended in the air between them like a question.

“Do not presume to know me, Your Grace,” she said. Her voice had lost its bite and she knew it. She sounded, to her own ears, like a woman in a dream.

“I don’t,” he said. And he lowered his hand, and the cold air arrived between them where his warmth had been. “I know the woman who writes in the dark. I would like to know the woman standing in the light.” He shifted, and offered her his arm — a plain movement, no flourish, the movement of a man presenting a fact.

“Walk with me, Verity.”

It was not a question. It was a plea that had been fitted out in the grammar of a command, and she recognized it as such, and she took a moment to be angry about it, and the anger did not hold.

She looked at the offered arm.

The black sleeve was flawless. And yet she saw now what a hundred women in that ballroom had not noticed: the way he held his right shoulder, a certain stiffness, a permanent half-inch of guardedness. He carried the war in his posture — not the swagger of a man with a medal, but the readiness of a man who has learned that the world hits without warning. He was, she thought, more damaged than she was. And he had spent a year with her worst confessions folded against whatever was left of him, and had not told a soul.

“No,” she said, and watched the light go out of his face by exactly one degree. “Not like that.”

Then she took his arm.

She set her gloved hand on his forearm — the left one, the good one, which she chose deliberately — and felt the wool and the muscle and the warmth underneath it, and she stepped out from behind the fern and into the full, glaring, unforgiving light of the ballroom, with her head up.

“If you quote my letters to me in public again, Your Grace,” she said, as they walked, and fifty pairs of eyes went with them, “I will not merely step on your foot. I will ruin your boots entirely.”

Beside her, the Duke of Winterbourne looked down.

And Verity Marlow, who had made a study of men’s faces for four seasons and had never once been surprised, saw something crack open in that harsh, tired, closed-up face: a smile — a real one, unguarded, brief, and blinding.

“I would expect nothing less,” he said.

Behind them, the whispering began in earnest, and it followed them all the way to the doors.

She was not afraid of the whispering. She had spent her whole adult life arranging to be invisible, and she had just walked out from behind a fern in front of the entire ton with the most notorious man in London on her arm.

What frightened her was that it had felt like stepping off a ledge into the dark, and that some part of her, some part she had not spoken to in years, had wanted to do it.