Chapter XLIII

3rd January 1945

Dearest Phillip,

I am more than tremendously happy that you're alright and that your melancholy state of mind is slowly going behind its curtain. You boys need all the light and merriness in the world and not a single bit of melancholy at all.

I wish you, dear friend, in this new year of 1945 only two things: one is for you to come back home safely and the second one is for you to be happy, always. I hope that those things will really happen to all of you, you dearest men, whom I love with all of my heart, each and single one of you.

It was a horrible beginning of the year with the news from overseas that the RAF has suffered serious losses in the air raid I can't even remember where anymore, it was either France or Belgium, where both Gil and Marshall were at the time. We all worried about them and cousin Tom too, of course, for the entire day which accidentally was the very last day of 1944. It was only on the evening of the very first day of 1945 when the telegram came and it said that all three of them were completely fine and back at their stations. Phillip, I can't express how grateful I was and still am for their safety.

I must tell you that after that sudden and unexpected loss of John I was never quite able to think about the war and all of you at the front in the same way ever again. It's as if his death caused me to experience an epiphany that truly anything can happen, both good and heartbreaking. Therefore, whenever I get a letter or a small note from any of you I literally sigh with relief and then dance with this one small envelope in my hands for the next good hour, pressing it to my heart and thanking God for this yet another blessing. Not to mention, it's a joy for both of my sisters Daria and Poppy because it gives us another opportunity to dance all together in the living room and make Selwyn laugh.

Selwyn… We said our farewells to him today as he boarded the train to go to Redmond College. It was a very different Selwyn we were saying our goodbyes to than the one we were saying our hellos to just a few months earlier. Yes, I do think that it was entirely Vance's doing, or at least, it was her part mostly which can be accounted for this miracle.

Ever since Selwyn got the courage to tell her he loves her, they were inseparable and for the first time in my life, I didn't mind sharing Selwyn with someone else. You know, Phillip, that I love my brothers equally but I have always shared a very special, quieter bond with Selwyn. It was him whom I worried about more when he was still at the front, it was him with whom I would sit at school breaks when we were still living in Toronto and neither of us had any friends there, and it was always him with whom I'd be reading poetry every evening, both in Toronto and Four Winds. But I don't mind sharing him with Vance, goodness, I encourage it if anything. He smiles now, in this old way he used to, he stopped worrying about his deaf ear or his blind eye, he started reading Keats again… He hasn't started writing poetry fully just yet but I know, and Vance does too, that this will come in time too.

Vance turned into a different person as well. She's more energetic and more ready for life than she ever was, this dear girl. She finished her novel, the one that she started writing somewhere around a year ago to get her mind occupied. She hasn't shown it to me yet and she says she will once she will edit it with the help of the best editor she could have ever hoped for, her very own fiance Selwyn. I cannot wait to read it and I am positive it's a masterpiece even though Vance isn't this sure about it herself.

She shall be waiting for Selwyn's return and it will be after his graduation when they will marry. Phillip, can you believe that Vance will be officially my sister? My third sister! I still remember the times when I had no sister at all! How crazy is this, you tell me?

It's so strange for me to think that my own children might be around fifteen years old when Poppy will have a wedding of her own one day. I'm not saying she will definitely marry, you know me, Phillip, and you know that I am completely open to the possibility that she won't marry at all but if she will then my own children would be older than she's now, at her wedding… See, my imagination is way too vast. It's both a gift and a curse at the same time, especially at this time of the world. But I can't help it. I am thinking about things like that, about my future life which I always imagine in the best light possible even though I know that I really shouldn't... should I? But, Phillip, I imagine your future life too and darling friend of my heart, it is always positive and I'm not able to imagine it in any other way, so please, dear, don't think about it in any different way yourself.

It's been such a long time since the last we saw each other, hasn't it? Yet, I'm sure that once I'll see you again, it will be as if we saw each other a week earlier. That was exactly how I felt like when I saw Selwyn back in August. Sure, he looked different and was different in general but I felt like I was kissing his cheeks goodbye only a month earlier.

I don't know about you, Phillip, but I feel like this war is coming to an end. Maybe it's just the "New Year" head of mine speaking, however, I do think this might be it. I've prayed for it every night for the last six years so I think it's time anyway, don't you agree?

Marshall recently wrote to me that he agrees with me on that. I didn't even have to ask him because somehow I can "feel" what he feels through the letters he sends me. I can't do it with everyone, you know. I'm pretty sure I can read your letters like that too… I think! Gilly's letters are the ones which I can't understand a word of, not properly anyway, only Daria can do it… His letters simply jump from one thing to another, almost from a sentence to a sentence! I love reading them because of that but their messiness makes me unable to process his thoughts as completely as Daria can: she reads them and it's almost as if her and Gilly's minds click and she knows exactly what each of his sentences mean. I can "feel" and understand Marshall's letters like that, though, and I'm glad because of that as otherwise what kind of a fiancee would I be if I couldn't?

Recently Marshall has been very jolly in his letters and every time I read his letters I must tell you that I have tears of merriness in my eyes. Nowadays, I cling onto anything that's in the slightest way happy. I suppose each of us has to do it in order to stay sane, don't you think, Phillip?

I'm very hopeful recently also, hopeful about the end of this horrid war, I mean. I am especially that when I'm playing with Poppy, Fleur and Vera on the blankets spread over Ingleside's ancient wooden floor near the fireplace. There's something magical about those three angels, each with a different coloured hair yet each just as beautiful inside and out. We're all so positive that they'll be now and always called the new generation of the "Three Musketeers" to somehow fill in the void John left in his trio of Walt and Selwyn… No one can ever replace him, but it is a nice view to look upon... Three little baby girls, a blonde tiny head of Vera, red locked Poppy and a dark brown, fluffy hair of Fleur; all combined together in their small is exactly why I am attaching a photograph of them three in this letter to you.

I'll be going now, dearest. I have to prepare a lesson for a sweet six-year-old Daisy whom I will be teaching today in just three hours time. I left it all for the last minute, and for the first time ever too, I'm not really sure why. It's almost as if the air around has changed, I just can't tell why and how.

Take good care of yourself, dear.

Always waiting for you,

Hester

It was three days after Fleur's second birthday and on the same day when Peru declared war on Germany and Japan when Hester was sitting on the windowsill of her bedroom and looked out the window at the peacefully falling snow. The glass of the window hurt her bare fingers with its coldness but Hester didn't mind that at all. She was enjoying the calmness of the House of Dreams and her day off work too. She was awaiting the postman to bring her the new letters to which she could finally respond to as soon as she would get them into her hands.

She could hear Poppy playing with little Vera downstairs as Rilla and Una talked together with hot drinks in their hands, in the heart of the kitchen. Their distant voices made the air in Hester's room thicken with a sudden tranquillity which she still couldn't quite understand because it didn't fill her with it. She was like a still tree in the middle of the snowstorm, unmoved by it in any way. She has felt like this for a few weeks now as if awaiting the snowstorm to come either in reality or just metaphorically. To be quite frank she wanted neither but she knew that God already fixed a plan for her so she couldn't do anything to change it anyway.

There was silence in Hester's bedroom but not in her head. She could hear faint and slow sounds of the piano playing by her own fingers, in her own imagination, a melody which she was planning on putting down on paper that day. It was a song that had come to her two months earlier and she thought it through so deeply that she was finally brave enough to write it down with ink, paper and the use of her own hands. She could do it now if she only wanted to. However, something in the bottom of her stomach was stopping her from doing so and she couldn't for the life of her figure out what it was. She hoped that feeling would come away quickly for it made her heart beat faster with each minute passing on the clock that hung on the wall behind her, ticking its old song of all the past, present and the future.

Suddenly the postman came and Hester jumped up from her seat at the window. She put a scarf around her neck in haste and flew out of her room with Daria flying out of Gilly's. "I'll be there first!" Daria winked at her younger sister and Hester laughed whilst starting for the stairs.

"You wish!" she chuckled and Daria, squeaking with joy, ran downstairs after Hester. It was as if the two of them turned into small ten-year-old girls even though they were in fact twice older than that. Rilla and Una smiled at the two young women passing through the hall hurriedly, laughing so merrily that they laughed themselves.

"I won!" Hester chuckled breathlessly and so did Daria.

"Next time I will." she said and Hester patted her sister on the arm, looking around in the dream of a poem of winter spread all around them "Go on, open it." she encouraged her and Hester immediately opened the mailbox, still seeing the mailman walking away on the horizon.

"Ah, Gilly!" Daria exclaimed as she snatched the letter hungrily, her eyes twinkling as she started opening it.

Hester smile vanished, however. In her hands was a telegram addressed to her, in an orange envelope. She could feel her pupils enlarging and her hands starting to tremble as she began ripping off the envelope slowly, the music in her head slowly turning into silence.

Suddenly, Daria heard a loud gasp as if Hester was being strangled. "God, help me." she managed to breathe out. Daria dropped Gilly's letter and caught her sister swiftly enough as she fainted right in front of her. Daria felt her own body shaking, tears slowly falling down her own cheeks as she snatched the telegram from Hester's hand, whilst patting her cheeks quickly "Hester! Hester!" she cried out helplessly.

Daria stopped abruptly as soon as she read the first and only line of the telegram informing Hester of her fiance being reported missing in action.

14th February 1945

Diary,

It's Valentine's Day. Dresden is being bombarded, Prague is being bombarded and so I am led into a belief that my very life at the moment is being bombarded.

I thought I could write in here on the day of the telegram but it took me two days of complete isolation in my bedroom and two sleepless yet overfilled with tears nights to get me out and about again, even though my life isn't the life it was just three days ago.

It's Valentine's Day.

I already wrote Marshall a letter from my heart to his because of this occasion. I'm sure he didn't get it, he couldn't have, he didn't have time to.

Where is my love? Where is he? What is happening to him? Is he alright? Does he now that I think about him all the time and pray for him stronger than ever before? Does he know that I still have this tiny ridiculous amount of hope that he's fine?

I don't care that everyone tries to comfort me because it won't work, it just won't work. In time I will get used to days and nights again but I feel as if I've been in a horrible car accident and had each of the bones in my body broken. Now, I am trying to recover from those injuries and I'm trying to re-learn how to use my limbs and body again. I know I will manage to re-learn it all again but it will take time and it will leave scars which won't go away, ever, I am sure of that.

Vance and Lily are the only people with whom I can truly talk about this at the moment. Vance is equally depressed and frightened as I am and Lily has been to a hell of a depression and back so she knows exactly what to say to me. "It's not certain that he won't be found," she told me today "-you still have this uncertainty and I didn't. Don't ever forget that, dearest." and I was almost ashamed for being so depressed whilst sitting next to this woman, whose heart has never been the same since last June.

However, at the same time as I was sitting next to Lily, I felt like I was looking into the mirror of my future if Marshall… won't be found. I can't even imagine this possibility because it would ruin my entire future, every joy and dream within it. My heart will into pieces and my life will collapse if this will happen. I'm not saying it will though because I have hope… I do!

I can't write here anymore, the tears won't let me.

Please, my dearest Marshall… I can't write to you directly but I can talk to you in my mind still, even if this might cause someone to think that I'm going mad. I can hear your voice and I can see your eyes smiling back into mine. You're with me. I am with you. Always, darling. Please, come back to me because in whatever form you'd come back to me, be it physically or emotionally, I'll always take you for there's no one else on this planet, never has and never will be who can hold my heart the way you can. The one who can write a sonnet about me like you can… Remember that sonnet? Do you remember, darling?

God, I can't! Enough! I need to go outside and breathe in some fresh air, I feel like I'm suffocating withing myself.

I shall write in here tomorrow, or at least I hope that my teary eyes will let me.

Desperately in need of even more hope,

Hester