The Unsent Letter
The clock struck two.
Frederick had been staring at the blank page for forty-seven minutes. He knew this, having counted. He had also counted the logs in the fireplace (four), the books on the shelf nearest his desk (thirty-one), and the number of times he had told himself to go to bed like a reasonable person (twelve).
He had not gone to bed. He had not slept properly in weeks.
The problem, he had determined, was that his brain refused to cease its infernal cataloguing.
Tonight's inventory included: fourteen gold threads in her hair (still), seven instances of her laughter (echoing), forty-two seconds of direct eye contact (insufficient), and one extremely inappropriate thought about the curve of her neck that he was not going to examine further.
He was losing his mind.
This was, he reflected, what came of carrying women up and down staircases twice daily. One's thoughts became disordered. One's priorities became confused. One found oneself sitting alone in one's study at two o'clock in the morning, contemplating paper and ink like some sort of lovesick poet.
He was not a poet. He was a duke. Dukes did not write letters to women who were not their fiancées. Dukes did not lose sleep over the precise cadence of a laugh or the way a particular woman said "fourteen stairs" as though it were a private joke between them.
Dukes, apparently, were capable of spectacular self-delusion.
He picked up the pen.
He put it down.
He picked it up again.
"This is ridiculous," he informed the empty room. The empty room declined to comment.
He wrote: Dear Lady Florinda
No. Too formal. He crossed it out.
Florinda
Too intimate. He crossed that out too.
To the woman who has thoroughly ruined my capacity for rational thought
Accurate, but unlikely to be well-received. He crossed it out with rather more force than necessary.
The page was becoming a battlefield of ink. He crumpled it, tossed it toward the fire (missed), and started fresh.
He was writing love letters to a woman sleeping three doors away while engaged to another. This was either poetry or madness.
Possibly both.
He tried again:
I have made a list of forty-three reasons why this wanting must cease.
That, at least, was honest. He continued:
None of them are sufficient.
I have tried duty. I have tried honor. I have tried reminding myself, repeatedly, that I am engaged to a perfectly pleasant woman who has done nothing to deserve a husband whose thoughts are perpetually elsewhere.
I have tried counting other things—floor tiles, dinner courses, the number of appropriate topics for polite conversation. It does not help. You have colonized my arithmetic.
He paused, rereading. "You have colonized my arithmetic" sounded like the ravings of a bedlamite. He considered crossing it out. He left it.
Do you remember the stable?
Of course she remembered the stable. She had been seventeen and terrifying, and she had marched in with her list of one hundred and seven reasons and kissed him anyway.
For science, she had said.
He had been thinking about that kiss for nine years. Nine years of battlefields and ballrooms and perfectly sensible women who never once made him lose count of anything.
You kissed me in a stable and called it an experiment. I have been attempting to replicate the results ever since. (Unsuccessfully. I suspect the variable is you.)
This was mortifying. He was a grown man, a decorated soldier, a duke, and he was writing about kisses in stables like some sort of gothic heroine.
He kept writing.
I should have called on you before I left for war. I told myself I was being noble—sparing you attachment to a man who might not return. The truth is simpler: I was a coward. I was afraid of wanting what I might lose.
I lost it anyway. Nine years of it. And now here you are, three doors down a corridor, and I find I am still a coward—only now I am also engaged, which adds hypocrisy to the list of my failings.
The fire crackled. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked. Frederick's pen hovered over the paper, and he wondered if dukes could be committed to asylums for writing letters to women they had no business writing to.
Probably not. Dukes were permitted eccentricities. This was merely an extremely private eccentricity that no one would ever see.
I counted the gold threads in your hair today. Fourteen. I counted the times you laughed. Seven. I counted the seconds you looked at me. Forty-two.
I am losing my mind, and I find I do not care.
He should stop. He should burn this, go to bed, and pretend in the morning that he had never been fool enough to commit his foolishness to paper.
Instead:
You looked at my horse and knew his breeding from fifty yards. You count the stairs with me. You told Lord Ashworth that kindness was only threatening to people who lacked it, and I wanted to applaud.
You see me. Not the title. Not the estate. Me—the man who counts things and breeds horses and cannot seem to stop making lists of reasons to stay away from you.
Forty-three reasons. I wrote them all down. Duty. Honor. Promises made. Reputations. The fact that I am, objectively, a terrible prospect for any woman with sense.
None of them matter.
I shall not send this. I am not so far gone that I would compromise you with written evidence of my complete moral failing. But I needed—
He stopped. What did he need? To confess? To purge the wanting through ink? To have proof, however private, that these feelings existed outside the echo chamber of his own skull?
I needed to say it. Even if only to paper.
I have loved you since you were seventeen and told me you had made a list of reasons not to kiss me.
He stared at the sentence. It was the most honest thing he had written in years, and it looked absurd on paper.
He kept going anyway.
I have loved you through a war and a decade and an engagement I do not remember agreeing to. I shall love you tomorrow, when I carry you down fourteen stairs and count your breaths and pretend I am merely being helpful.
This is not poetry. I am not capable of poetry. This is simply the documented descent of a duke into complete irrationality.
Yours (inappropriately, impossibly, irrevocably),
F.
He set down the pen.
His hand was shaking. Ink stained his fingers. The letter—if it could be called that, if confessions of lunacy qualified as correspondence—lay before him, damning evidence of his own foolishness.
A gentleman did not write to unmarried women. A duke did not confess weakness. An engaged man did not pour out his heart to someone who was not his betrothed.
Frederick folded the letter with deliberate precision. Once, twice, three times. He reached for the sealing wax, melted it over the candle, and pressed his ring into the crimson blob before he could reconsider.
Then—since apparently he was committed to making this evening as pathetic as possible—he wrote her name on the outside.
Lady Florinda Ashbourne
His handwriting looked shaky. He had written battle reports with calmer hands. He had signed death warrants with less tremor.
The locked drawer of his desk contained estate documents, his father's watch, and a miniature of his mother that he had carried through the war. Private things. Important things.
He added the letter to the collection.
Never to send, he told himself. Never to be read. This was merely... pressure relief. A safety valve. Words that needed somewhere to go that was not out of his mouth in front of his fiancée and their assembled households.
He locked the drawer.
The key went into his pocket. It seemed larger than a key had any right to be.
The clock struck three.
In six hours, he would carry her down fourteen stairs. He would count her breaths and catalogue her laughter and pretend that he had not spent the small hours of the morning writing love letters he could never send.
He went to bed.
He did not sleep.
But the wanting had somewhere to live now—somewhere outside his own skull. It existed on paper, sealed and secret and absolutely, categorically never to be read by anyone but himself.
The locked drawer was louder than it should have been.