Chapter Twelve
Wednesday morning, under a pale sky that held its breath in quiet anticipation, Quinton found Barrington in the study, already seated behind his desk with a folded sheet of thick parchment before him like a verdict waiting to be read.
The morning light cast a warm glow across the desk’s polished surface.
It was quiet except for the faint tick of the mantle clock and the distant call of gulls beyond the windows.
“You said there was news,” Quinton said as he entered.
Barrington gestured to the chair opposite. “From one of Edward’s contacts. This concerns your captivity, and the silence surrounding it. This came by courier before breakfast.”
Quinton sat as Barrington unfolded the letter.
“They’ve uncovered a cache of undelivered letters,” Barrington said. “Discovered in the back room of a shuttered coaching inn in Suffolk. Evidently, the place served as a temporary holding station during the war when the roads were impassable. Some of the bags were forgotten or never sent forward.”
Quinton frowned. “How many letters?”
“Hundreds. Perhaps more. Most from five or six years ago, wartime dispatches. Family correspondence, military reports, and personal notes. Some addressed to soldiers, others to their families.”
He pushed Edward’s letter across the desk. “The majority were water-damaged, but a few were legible. Nothing directly connected to us. Not yet. But the team is still reviewing them.”
Quinton scanned the document. The contact, someone identified only by initials, mentioned additional caches found in nearby towns. A pattern, perhaps.
He imagined what the paper might feel like, softened by time, curled at the corners, the ink smudged by dampness and neglect. What if his name was there? Or hers? He didn’t dare hope, but the hunger to look was already there, sharp and familiar.
One that had gone unseen for years.
“Edward’s working quietly,” Barrington said. “He doesn’t want to alert anyone until we know how widespread it is.”
Quinton leaned back in the chair, his brow furrowed.
“When I was in the camp, I overheard one of the guards say that the post was taken care of. At the time, I thought it meant no one had sent word or that it was merely a casual comment. Or that the mail has been intercepted or destroyed. But now, I’m not so certain. ”
Barrington’s expression turned grim. “It might have meant more than you thought.”
Quinton looked at the letter again, at the dates and places scrawled in tight, rushed script.
This wasn’t about anyone else. Not Mary-Ann, not the others left waiting.
This was about him. About silence so complete it had nearly erased him.
One of the mailbags had originated from a nearby town, no more than a day’s ride from Sommer-by-the-Sea.
“If my family had received word I was alive—”
Barrington cut in gently. “You can’t think that way.”
But Quinton’s voice remained steady. “If they had, they would have written. And Mary-Ann… she would have known. She would have waited.”
Silence fell between them.
Quinton turned to look out the window. A fishing boat drifted across the morning tide, the sails sharp against the pale sky.
“They buried me,” he said. “Not literally, but close enough. And they mourned me. All because someone failed, or chose not, to deliver a letter.”
Barrington set his cup down with a little more force than necessary. He didn’t speak right away. Instead, he crossed to the window, his back to Quinton, his jaw tight. “We trusted the system,” he said at last. “But someone manipulated it. That ends now.”
He had a way of speaking in absolutes. He was calm, reasoning, and never careless. But even now, Quinton saw the tension in his jaw, the barely masked concern that mirrored his own.
Quinton nodded. “And if it wasn’t a failure? If it was deliberate?”
“Then we follow the trail. Quietly.”
Barrington reached for the teapot on the sideboard and poured two cups. The gesture was domestic, steadying.
Edward’s contact believes that someone may have intentionally rerouted or withheld certain letters. He has reason to believe this wasn’t an isolated case.”
Quinton accepted the tea but didn’t drink it. His fingers curled around the warmth.
“How many people vanished without a word, without explanation? How many loved ones never knew what became of them?”
There had been one man, O’Dell. He was quiet and kind, with his eyes always fixed on the horizon.
He’d stopped talking after the second winter.
No word had ever come for him. They found him curled against the wall one morning, cold and still.
Quinton had wondered, later, if a single letter could have saved him. ”
“Too many.” Barrington’s voice was barely a whisper.
The warmth of the tea seeped into his palms, grounding him.
Quinton let the silence linger, unsure whether it soothed or strained him.
The silence had once been a torment, too loud, too long.
He had strained to hear footsteps, voices, even the wind through the stone, anything to prove the world still moved beyond his cell.
Now, even in safety, it followed him like a shadow.
The damp in the walls had carried mildew and iron, a constant reminder of where he was and what he was losing.
In a moment of quiet, his mind returned to the prison walls, to the scratch of stone beneath his fingers, and the desperation of remembering names, places, anything to keep the darkness at bay.
Letters would have been salvation. A name, a scrap of handwriting, would have given him something to hold onto.
“I used to imagine letters coming,” he said after a moment. “That someone out there still believed in me. I made up entire conversations with Mary-Ann. It kept me sane.
“I imagined her handwriting, neat, precise, always slanting slightly to the left. Her letters began, My dearest Quinton, and always ended, Yours, until you return. I used to whisper them aloud at night, just to remember what it felt like to be wanted, to be known.”
Barrington’s voice was softer now. “It wasn’t your imagination. She never stopped hoping. Not until hope had nowhere left to go.”
The words caught something raw inside him. He didn’t respond.
Then Barrington cleared his throat and stood. “There’s a dinner next week. A charity event. You’ll receive an invitation soon.”
Quinton glanced at him. “And she’ll be there.”
“Likely.”
“Do you think I should go?”
Barrington shrugged. “Do you want to see her again?”
Quinton looked down into the cup. “I don’t know. I mean, yes. But I don’t know if I can face what I lost.”
“Then go. Don’t speak if you’re not ready. But don’t avoid it, either.”
Quinton gave a faint smile. “You sound like Mrs. Bainbridge.”
“We’ve all been listening to her long enough to learn a thing or two.”
Quinton stood and glanced out the window. The sea was calm, the morning deceptively serene. He rested his hand on the frame.
“If the truth is buried in these letters,” he said quietly, “then I intend to read every one of them.”
Barrington nodded, the quiet oath settling between them like smoke.
As he turned to leave, Barrington paused beside him. His hand landed briefly on Quinton’s shoulder, steady, silent enough. Then he turned away without waiting for thanks.
Later, in the solitude of his room, Quinton sat at the writing desk. The letter from Barrington’s contact lay beside a blank sheet of paper. He picked up a pen but didn’t write.
Outside, the world continued its quiet rhythm. But something had shifted.
He had been forgotten once. He would not let it happen again, not to himself, and not to her.
He set the pen down and pushed the letter aside.
His eyes drifted to the edge of the desk, where a faint scratch in the wood caught the light.
It reminded him of the crude markings carved into the stone wall of his cell, tallies of days, names of men, fragments of memory etched in desperation.
He had nothing left from those years but scars and recollections, yet they had become as real as any object he could hold.
He leaned back in his chair, eyes closing briefly.
There had been no books, no flowers, no comfort.
Only silence and what he could summon from within.
The soft lilt of Mary-Ann’s voice. The curve of her smile.
He remembered one summer evening. Mary-Ann was reading aloud by lamplight, stumbling over a word only to laugh and make up a new one entirely.
That laugh had stayed with him longer than any scripture or sermon.
They had come to him not as ghosts but as lifelines. He didn’t need relics to remember her. He didn’t need pages or portraits. She was there, stitched into his memory with a thread no time could fray. He had remembered despite everything.
If she had waited, if the letter had come, would they already be married? Would he have avoided the long nights filled with nothing but stone and silence?
He shook the thought away. The truth was, they were both changed. But perhaps the pieces still fit, just differently than before.
He stood and crossed to the small washstand, splashing cool water on his face.
The simple ritual helped him shake loose the weight of reflection, though it didn’t lighten the pressure in his chest. As he reached for a towel, he caught sight of his own face in the mirror, a face that bore shadows deeper than time could smooth.
There was a pale streak near his temple that hadn’t been there before.
A ghost of the years he’d lived but not lived through.
There were moments in the prison camp when he hadn’t expected to see his own reflection again. He’d prepared himself for death more than once, and when hope faded, it was the memory of Mary-Ann’s laughter, bright, sudden, impossible to bottle, that had called him back.
He no longer looked like the man who’d left for war.
There was steel in his jaw now and quiet defiance in his eyes.
He had faced silence, starvation, and solitude and survived.
This wasn’t a return. It was a reckoning.
And if the world expected him to pick up his old life as though nothing had changed, they would be mistaken.
He would not simply drift back into place.
There were questions to ask and truths to uncover. And somewhere, woven between every silence, every unanswered letter, every breath he’d fought to hold, was Mary-Ann.
He returned to the desk and picked up the pen again, holding it above the blank page. Not yet. But soon. Because he wasn’t about to let the silence that had once swallowed him do it again.
Not while there were still words to speak. Not while Mary-Ann remained part of the story that was unfinished.