My Richard,
My Richard. What else is there? You haven't read me wrong, you must know you haven't. I knew you would. You always did, you see.
Oh, Richard, I feel like I've just stepped into sunlight for the first time in six months. More than sunlight, even. Are there words for this? It's a radiant beam of light into a world so dark and cold I can hardly bear it even on the best of days.
No, that doesn't say enough. Nothing can say enough, except perhaps for this: my dear man, my dear, darling, wonderful man, I love you. There it is and I will scream it from the rafters if you'll let me, my darling, because this is mine. This is mine and this is ours and nothing has ever felt like this.
I love you. I love you. And again: I love you. I am so in love with you.
Never mind reserve. Never mind propriety. Here in the privacy of letters I can scream and shout with joy.
The candles are dying, Richard, but I am more alive than I have ever been.
And here's something you didn't know: I have loved you since 1912. Almost from the first. There were days I wanted to hit you and days I wanted to strangle you but never a day went by that I didn't love you. I didn't know it then, of course. How could I? Reggie and I had been a gentle affair, based on affection and common interest. I loved him, of course I did, in the only way I knew how to love at eighteen. By twenty-eight I was a widow with a toddler and no conception of who I was outside my husband and son. So I turned back to nursing and I raised my son and I never looked outside of my little boy and my work at the hospital. They were all I needed until he was grown and I had to learn, really and truly, just who Isobel Crawley was and what she was made of. And so I did, in a clinic in Yorkshire with a maddening healer who lit a fire inside me that never seemed to die.
Never did I dream this kind of love would find me. It was the stuff of poetry and fairy tales, after all, certainly nothing that could ever happen to a middle-aged single mother. And then you became my confidant and my lifeline through the horror that is this war and everything I thought I knew about love was turned on its head. For the first time I know what it is to burn.
I cannot be sorry, Richard. If it took France for me to find you then France it had to take, and I'd do it a hundred years more if I could come home to you at the end. I want to come home to you. I need to come home to you. I have been many things to many people over the years – nurse, mother, daughter, wife. Never have I been simply Isobel, not to anyone. But to you, I think, I can be. And oh, Richard, I want to be.
The first instant, Richard. The first instant I am free I will be on the next train north. Nothing, my darling, could make me love you more than your understanding of why I have to stay. And the only reason I can survive the duration is knowing that when I come home it will be to your arms. Until then,
I am forever,
Your Isobel
