She learned that his name was Adrian. That he was twenty-nine. That he had been a captain in the Hussars and had left the army in the autumn with a sabre cut across the left hand that had taken two fingers and most of the strength of the rest. He did not say how it had happened. She did not ask. She learned that he had been at Hougoumont, and that he did not speak of it, and that when a door slammed anywhere in the house he went entirely still for a count of three.
And she learned, bit by bit, as the weeks went by, that the Viscount of Dunmere was lonelier than any person she had ever met.
It was a loneliness that had been there a long time, long before the war. It sat in him like an old foundation under a new house. She could hear it when he spoke of his father, whom he referred to as the late Viscount and never by name, and whom he had last seen eight years before, at a dinner at which they had exchanged exactly nine words. She could hear it when he spoke of the house, which he called this place as if it were a hotel. And she heard it, very clearly, the night he asked her about the post office.
It was the first week of May, a warm night, with the windows open on the limes. She had been working late again, and he had come to the study door and stood in it with his arms folded, a tall dark shape against the lamp.
"I have been wondering," he said, "what a postmaster actually does."
"Sorts letters, my lord."
"Is that all?"
"It is rather more than you would think." She put down her pen. "He knows everyone in the parish, because he knows their handwriting. He knows who writes to whom, and how often, and when it stops. He knows who has a son at sea, and who has a daughter in service, and who is waiting for a letter and has not yet had it." She hesitated. "My father used to say that a post office is the only honest confessional in England. You cannot hear what is said, but you know what is felt, by the weight."
"By the weight."
"A letter that carries bad news is lighter than you would think. People who are afraid of a letter write very short ones."
He was quiet for a moment.
"And the ones that never arrive?"
"The dead letters, my lord? There are a great many. A wrong address, a name that has changed, a house that has been pulled down. They go to the General Post Office in London, to the Returned Letter Office, and a clerk opens them and tries to find the sender." She smiled a little. "My father used to say that was the saddest room in England. A hundred thousand letters a year that nobody ever read."
"What becomes of them?"
"If the sender cannot be found, they are burned."
"Burned," said Adrian Ravensdale, quite softly. He was looking at the floor. "I did not know that."