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

Chapter 9

The morning after the Earl of Wrenfield’s ball, Verity Marlow sat at the breakfast table and did not eat.

She had slept two hours. She had spent the rest of the night lying flat on her back in the dark with her eyes open, replaying a single sentence — twelve of them, sealed, every one of them unopened — and arriving each time at the same conclusion: that of all the men in England, her letters had been read by a duke, and that he had then spent a year finding her, and that he had come to her not with a demand, nor an offer, nor a threat, but with an accounting.

She had been awake long enough to watch the room change color, gray to blue to a pale, apologetic London white. She had dressed in her plainest morning gown — a slate gray that did nothing for her and was meant to say so. She had come downstairs. And now she was sitting at the table pushing a piece of cold toast around her plate while her father read the Morning Post with the aggressive concentration of a man who believed the world’s chief trouble to be other people’s debts.

Viscount Rowland Marlow had not noticed that his daughter had been awake all night. He noticed very little that did not wear a waistcoat and owe him money.

At exactly eleven o’clock, the brass knocker on the front door went off like a shot.

Verity’s hands closed around the arm of her chair. Down the hall, she heard the murmur, and then the rise and fall of the butler’s voice, and then nothing for a long minute.

Mr. Craddock appeared in the breakfast-room doorway looking, for the first time in his thirty years of service, like a man about to be the subject of a scene.

“The Duke of Winterbourne to see Miss Marlow,” he announced.

The Viscount’s newspaper went into his eggs.

“A duke?” he said, and his eyes came off the ruined paper and onto his daughter with a look she knew well: half astonishment, half the frantic arithmetic of a man working out what this might be worth. “Here? For you?”

“It would appear so, Father.”

“Winterbourne. Winterbourne. Verity — Winterbourne is—”

“Eleven thousand a year, unmarried, and the largest landholder in Somerset,” Verity said, standing. “Yes. I do read the papers too.”

Her knees were water. She locked them. She smoothed the front of the slate-gray gown — an absurd gesture, since the gown was beyond improvement — and walked out of the room at the pace of a woman going to a hanging.

She did not rush. She took the stairs slowly, giving herself the time to build the fortress back up, brick by brick, around her ribs.

He was standing at the window of the small green sitting room when she came in, his back to her, hands clasped behind him, looking down at the street. In daylight he was harsher than he had been by candlelight: the lines around his eyes carved deep, the jaw set, the collar of his dark blue riding coat turned up against a wind he could not feel indoors. The coat swallowed all the light in the room.

He turned as the door closed.

He did not bow. He simply looked at her, and the look had nothing of the ballroom in it.

“You look as though you’re preparing for an execution, Miss Marlow.”

“I am bracing myself for whatever extortion you have planned, Your Grace.” She crossed the room to the velvet armchair by the hearth and stood beside it, refusing to sit, so that the small height of the chair was on her side. “A man who reads another man’s letters is capable of anything, I imagine.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth — not a smile, but the shadow of where one would go.

“I did not come to extort you.” He took one step forward and stopped, as though he had marked out a line on the carpet and forbidden himself to cross it. “I came to apologize.”

Verity said nothing.

“I have had fourteen months to arrange my excuses, and they are all excellent,” he said. “The campaign was wet and the nights were long. I had signed the papers of nineteen dead men. I was drinking more than I should and sleeping less. I had a hole in my side and a fever coming on. If I were a cleverer man I would give you one of those and let you be satisfied with it.” He held her eyes. “I won’t. I read them because I was drowning and you threw me a rope. That is the whole of it. I took something that was never meant for me, and I have kept it, and I will not hand it back to you prettily wrapped.”

The words landed like hammer blows, and Verity discovered that she had no defense prepared against a man who simply stood still and told the truth.

She had spent four seasons being courted by men who spoke in circles. Men who said your beauty when they meant your father’s acreage. Men who said I have always admired when they meant I have been told to. She had learned to fence with flourishes, and here was a man who did not fence at all, who simply put the blade on the table and let her look at it.

“You are very sure of your own honesty,” she said, buying time.

“No. I am sure of very little. But I am sure that you deserve a straight answer more than I deserve to look well in your eyes.”

Before she could answer, the window shook.

A coal wagon went past at a hard trot, iron wheels striking the frost-heaved paving, and one wheel found a pothole directly under the window with a crack like a musket.

The Duke of Winterbourne flinched.

It was not a small movement. His entire body jerked as though pulled by strings. His shoulders came up, his head snapped toward the glass, and his left hand dropped like a stone to his side and closed on nothing at all — the exact height and angle at which a sword belt would hang. His breathing went short and fast. He stared at the window, at the pale gray street beyond it, at the perfectly ordinary London morning, and Verity understood with absolute clarity that he was not seeing any of it.

She had grown up with it. She knew the face exactly.

She crossed the room in three steps, and she did not shout his name, and she did not touch his arm, because she knew better than to grab a man who was somewhere else. Instead she put her palm flat, hard, against the center of his chest, over the heart, feeling the entire ribcage going under her hand like a bird in a box.

“You are in Mayfair,” she said. Quiet, steady, low, the voice you use for horses and frightened children and, apparently, for colonels. “It is a coal wagon and a bad road. You are in a sitting room that smells of lemon polish and my father’s cigar smoke, and you are entirely safe. Feel the floor. Come back.”

He came back.

She watched it happen: the gray of his eyes going from smoke to slate, the focus arriving, the shoulders coming down by an inch and then another inch. He became aware of the hand on his chest before he became aware of anything else. He looked down at it — small, pale, gloved, pressed flat over his coat where twelve folded letters had once been — and the breath went out of him in one long, ragged rush.

“My apologies,” he said. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw. He stepped back carefully, so that her hand fell away, and a dark flush climbed his throat. “The noise. It catches me unguarded.”

“Don’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t apologize.” Verity folded her hands tightly together at her waist, so that he would not see how badly they were shaking. “My brother flinched when the hounds barked too loud at Marlow Hall. For a year after he came home from his first campaign, the sound of a dog went through him like an arrow. He used to pretend he had not moved. He would sit there with his ears scarlet and finish his sentence.” She looked at him. “You have nothing to apologize for. Not in this house.”

The Duke of Winterbourne stood very still, and she watched a man who had been braced for mockery receive something else entirely, and not know what to do with it.

“Edmund,” he said.

She stiffened.

“Your brother. You wrote that he laughed in church, and that your father went scarlet, and that your mother used to bite her lip until it bled to keep from joining him.” He paused, and his voice went gentle in a way that hurt more than cruelty would have. “You wrote that you missed that laugh more than you missed God.”

“I know what I wrote.”

“You said you were not certain what it said about you.” He took one step closer. Not a seduction; a disclosure. “Here is what it says. It says you are honest to the bone. It says the only thing you have ever truly wanted in your life was to hear the person you loved laugh again.”

Verity stood in her father’s green sitting room with her hands knotted at her waist, and could not speak, because if she spoke, her voice would break, and if her voice broke, everything would follow it.

“I did not come here to haunt you with your own words,” he said. “I came to say the thing I could not say at a ballroom door.” He drew a breath. “You are the only person in this city who makes any sense to me. I would like permission to call on you properly. In daylight. With your father’s knowledge, groaning and counting his money, if that is what it takes.”

She looked at him — scarred, ruined, thirty years old in the eyes and not-quite-nineteen in the set of his jaw when he asked for a thing he thought he would not get.

“You may call on me,” she said, and heard her own voice come out barely above a whisper. “On one condition.”

“Name it.”

“No flowers.”

He blinked.

“I mean it,” she said. “You have read the letters. You know precisely what I think of silken transactions and symbolic gestures. If you bring me a bouquet of roses in the language of courtship, I will have Mr. Craddock show you out and you may explain yourself to your own horse.”

And the Duke of Winterbourne did the thing she had not once seen him do properly at the ball: he smiled. Not the flicker at the corner of his mouth. A full smile, unguarded, faintly astonished, and it transformed his harsh face into the face of a man she would have crossed a room for.

“No flowers,” he said. “You have my word.”

Verity watched him bow — properly this time, a deep and rather reckless bow for a man with a sewn-up side — and watched him leave, and then she stood alone in the green sitting room with her hand still feeling the shape of his ribs under her palm.

No flowers. It was a good condition. A sensible condition. A fence.

She had ten seconds of believing it would hold.