Several weeks later, the man dropped off another letter at the house on Pidgeon Avenue. This time Gem wasn’t home. But Aunt Wren, who’d been working on a hat order, heard the mailbox open and close. Autumn had settled in, but the days were still warm enough to keep the windows open in the upstairs flat. The mail had already been delivered that day, so she wondered what was going on, laid aside her millinery and tottered downstairs to the front door. She reached into the mailbox and found a sealed letter addressed to Miss Gemma Sullivan. No stamp. Wren took the letter upstairs, left it on the kitchen counter, and all afternoon its contents itched at her. Her guilt over steaming open the cryptic note her niece had received a while ago still prodded Wren’s conscience—she’d no business doing that!—so this one she left sealed. Private.
When Gem returned home from work, Birdie said, “A letter came for you—kitchen counter.”
Gem snatched the letter and took it to her bedroom.
Rooney had just blown in, with a bouquet of flowers, chrysanthemums the shade of gold coins. As she arranged them in a vase, she quipped that she’d been feeling outpaced by the gorgeous weekly rose delivery.
“Not at all,” Aunt Wren said. “Your rustic bouquets balance the formal elegance of a rose perfectly—and one can’t have too many flowers.”
Rooney beamed and took a seat at the kitchen table. Wren had shuffled things around to free up space on its surface.
Just then Gemma emerged, rosy-cheeked, from her bedroom. She made toast and joined them at the table.
Winking at Rooney, Wren said, “Seems our Gemma does indeed have an admirer. Fan mail arrived for her.”
Rooney’s eyes widened.
Crunching toast didn’t hide Gem’s annoyance at being exposed so . . . openly. But she needed to find out more. “Did you notice who delivered the letter, Birdie?” she asked.
“By the time these creaky old joints of mine made it downstairs and reached the mailbox, the delivery person was far down the street. Maybe your admirer is someone from your office?”
“Then why wouldn’t that person just give her a letter at work?” asked Rooney.
“And why no return address or stamp?” This from Aunt Wren.
All Gem managed to say was, “Can’t a girl have a pen pal?”
Her tone, acerbic, deflecting, stoppered both of them from pressing further.
Gem went to bed early. Cocooned in blankets, she read the latest missive again:
G. The good fight continues. Hope you are well. Look up into the night sky, to the most luminous star, and remember the one who loves you. Yours, T.
Scant on information. It was a security risk to disclose too much, Gem supposed. She grew more convinced he’d had to scale things back, for safety. Gem understood this, but a pang of disappointment surged through her nonetheless. How she’d enjoy an effusive, soul-baring love letter that went on for pages. But she’d have to make do with scraps, like the cribs and stock phrases in her codebreaking work. Then, switching off her bedside lamp, she chastised herself, thinking about all those waiting to hear from a sweetheart overseas and who received nothing at all.
On the verge of sleep, it struck Gem that if she could discover the identity of the messenger who dropped the letters, it might shed some light on Toby’s situation. Because, presumably, Toby and the messenger knew each other.
The next morning, Birdie was already at work at the kitchen table when Gem shuffled, in her bathrobe, to put the kettle on the stove. Rooney’s cereal bowl, washed, rested on the drying rack; she’d already left for the tannery. Gem bid her aunt good morning. Then, while the water heated, said, “Auntie, if someone delivers another letter for me—just saying if—can you try to engage him, please, ask who he is and his business, in bringing these letters. I want to know where they are coming from.”
Aunt Wren fiddled with the partly felted posy in her hand. “I’ll try, but last time he bolted with almost superhuman speed.”
The kettle squealed.
Gem stirred her instant coffee, blew on it then drank it, hurriedly, leaning against the counter. She observed how expertly her aunt cut a leaf from felt.
Wren laid the leaf down and regarded Gem with surprise. “You mean you, the recipient of this mail, know neither its sender nor source, and this mail is a complete mystery to you?”
“Lots of things are mysteries, Birdie,” Gem said. “Keats the poet tells us we should accept this, and forge onward in the face of these unsolved elements. But my craving to know, and understand, dies hard. So, will you be vigilant on the letter delivery front, for me, and try to find out who’s bringing this mail—if more mail is forthcoming?”
“I’ll do my best,” Wren said. “But my old legs don’t move as quickly as they once did. Often I play the radio while working, in which case I wouldn’t hear anyone drop a letter in the mailbox, so to help you solve this puzzle—and I confess I’m curious myself—for the next while I’ll keep the radio off and my ears open. Unlike my eyes, my ears are strong; I hear like a midnight owl.”
Gem thanked her aunt, kissed her cheek lightly then washed and dressed for work.
Through autumn’s days of dimming light and drifting leaves, an unstamped letter came for Gemma every two weeks like clockwork. Yet no one could apprehend the messenger. Aunt Wren and Gem prevailed upon their landlady, Mrs. Deluca, to ask this fellow his name and where he came from if she saw him approach the house or heard him at the mailbox. Because she lived downstairs, she’d be more likely to reach him quickly. She’d heard the mailbox’s lid open, close, and peeked out between the curtains, saw a tall man on the front porch, but by the time she’d put on her slippers, thrown her shawl around her shoulders and made it to the front door, he was gone. It would have been pointless trying to chase him, she added.
To inject some levity into the postal situation, which was, in certain respects, downright eerie, the inhabitants, both upstairs and downstairs, of the house on Pidgeon Avenue began to call the mysterious messenger, instead of the postman, the ghost-man.
I suppose if you’re going to be haunted by a ghost, a ghost who delivers love letters beats most other kinds of hauntings, Gem thought. Each letter she received was the same as the one before. Still, Gemma saved them all. Quite a stack accumulated, and so she tied them with a special length of coloured yarns she’d woven, much like the cat collar Toby wore as a wristband.
When snow began to fall lightly over their town, the letters still arrived. One Sunday, Gem thought she heard a click and, not even throwing on her wool coat and scarf, dashed downstairs in her pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, and of course the messenger had eluded them yet again. But he’d left footprints—large ones—in the snow. Gemma trailed these prints along Pidgeon Avenue, but after about a block they dwindled, and she’d lost him.
Aunt Wren hadn’t held back in telling Gem how foolish she’d been to go tearing outdoors with no coat, boots or scarf. And slippers in snow, of all things! To reinforce this scolding, Gem caught a wretched cold, which kept her home from work, and as she sniffled, sneezed and sulked in her bed, she wondered if she should start folding the letters into birds. Ada Swift had taught her this craft during lunch hours at the office, the cold season now confining them indoors. She could take string and hang the birds from her ceiling, and if she folded them just so, it might be possible for the word love to display on one or the other wing. And when she cast her eyes upwards, she’d see this word, peppering the air above her everywhere, in its own firmament. But she thought better of it, secreting the letters away.
Grace, the erstwhile kitten, had grown, sleek and lithe, into their adored cat who enjoyed perching on the windowsill, watching birds perched in the backyard trees.
As one season shunted to the next, and an Allied victory began to look more assured, Gem’s letters continued to be delivered but said very little of Toby’s circumstances. But so long as they existed at all, Gem felt quite sure Toby was alive. Loving him spurred on Gem’s work at The Cottage, too, because how many others must be praying for a father or son or sweetheart or mother or daughter or someone else to be safe while crossing the Atlantic Ocean? Not to mention all the other war zones. She’d known this, of course, but since Toby came into her life, she’d felt it on a much deeper, more visceral level.
So Gem bent into her work like a fiend, to keep safe so many who were loved. No one would ever know about their work. Codebreakers having been sworn to secrecy, their working days would fade away like paper birds dissolving in the rain. They’d meld into the streets, ordinary women doing ordinary things. Though perhaps not Beatrice Fearing—she’d never be ordinary, would likely become a renowned lady mathematician. And, if she had her way, Cora-Lynn Ponder, too, following in her mentor’s footsteps.
On clear nights, in all seasons, Gem often stood in the Delucas’ backyard and stargazed. The galaxy never disappointed her, and she’d become adept at locating the most dazzling star, the North Star, blinking down at her, pulsing reassuring signals. One such night, Gem felt a hand’s light touch on her shoulder. Startled, she turned. She hadn’t heard anyone creep up behind her. It was Aunt Wren, bundled in scarves and her overcoat.
Gemma pointed to the North Star.
“So very luminous,” remarked her aunt.
They stood there, not speaking. Their breaths frosted plumes in the cold night.
Then Aunt Wren said, “It’s gone, Gemma.”
Alarm stabbed at Gem. “Oh dear, what’s gone, Birdie?”
“The millstone, sorrow, bottomless chasm of loss—Adam—that’s lived within me for so many years, that weighed me down, that wound, like iron. But just today I thought, Something is missing—and it was that. The old, habitual, gnawing grief. I had drawn a good tarot card this morning, but this new feeling in my core transcends any message from the tarot deck.”
She stepped away from Gem, as if doing so would facilitate words she’d yet to speak. “To have the old sorrow vanish is”—Birdie’s voice suffused with astonishment—“liberation. I feel so light, niece of mine, I’m like a balloon, and I might lift off right this minute—and fly away!”
Gem reached out and grabbed her aunt’s hands. “Oh no you don’t, Birdie. You’ll stay right here, on earth. We need you here. Dr. Fox needs you. Grace the cat needs you. All your hat customers need you—your craft brings them joy. You can be free, and light, on earth, right here with us,” Gem said.
“All right, I’ll stay,” Wren said, laughing. “For as long as I can.”
They stood together, looking at the night sky, their arms entwined.