CHAPTER 26 

November 1946

At twenty-one, Hazel had been in her third year at university and living in rooms at Newnham Hall of Cambridge. As she entered the building one autumn day, the porter handed her the mail, damp from that November’s incessant rain. She entered her room and tossed her mail onto a round coffee table in the center of the seating area. Preoccupied with the coming Michaelmas exams and distracted by too-loud music coming from two doors down where a freshman girl from Lancashire cared little for anything but pubs and the boys from Hughes Hall, Hazel didn’t notice the letter for a bit.

The war was over now, Germany was defeated, but rationing of items like sugar and chocolate continued, and in the cobblestone streets of Cambridge were the ghosts of boys who hadn’t returned, and the hollowed-eye looks of those who did. Her papa was gone and not even enough of his body to bury, and Flora remained a mystery that even the best of Oxford’s detectives couldn’t solve. They’d given up, even as every few months Hazel took the two-and-a-half-hour train ride to Oxford and stopped by Aiden Davies’s office and asked for updates.

There never were any.

Meanwhile, Hazel had disappeared into the books and stories she studied. She walked the green paths of Cambridge, past glorious and ancient buildings, yet she barely noticed the scenery. There were boys to be sure, but her heart was unavailable to them—also to herself. She would never tell or write stories again, that was clear. Making stories brought misery but reading and studying them provided comfort. In the stories of others, there were endings without loose ends, those who were missing were found, and the world made sense.

Tonight there was a visiting lecture by the professor J. R. R. Tolkien from Oxford—she planned to be early and find a seat near the front. Tossing her knapsack on the floor, she sat on an overstuffed chair with tea stains from generations of students, sifting through the envelopes to see if Mum had written from London.

No.

But there was a letter from Scotland, the red stamp damp where she’d touched it. No return address. She ripped it open, knowing before she read the signature that this was the letter she’d been waiting for. All this time, she’d been waiting to hear from Harry Aberdeen. The rest of the world faded away, time and Tolkien forgotten as rain struck iron-paned windows and the autumn night descended.

Dear Hazel,

I hope this letter finds you. I have wanted to write to you for many years now but haven’t known what to say or where to find you. Ethan told me he saw you in Cambridge and that you are now a student at Newnham. So if this reaches you—bravo to Ethan!

Hazel let the name Ethan run past her. Ethan Baldwin was the boy she’d pinned to the ground at school with her boot. The boy who’d called her a “vaccie” but then had helped them search for Flora. The boy who’d wept when he realized they could not find her.

She read as quickly as possible, then read again slower this time, then another time, shifting her mind from how she’d imagined Harry’s last six years to the man he might be today.

She read that Bridie had sent Harry to boarding school at the same time Hazel had returned to Bloomsbury with her mum. Bridie had wanted to protect him from gossip and innuendo. He’d graduated, and now attended University of Edinburgh, studying mathematics. He had never stopped thinking about Hazel. Not ever. And he wondered if she might tell him how she herself was doing in the world.

She closed her eyes, fell backward in time, remembering the vow in the stone church when, crying in her delirium, blood on the altar, she’d promised to never see Harry Aberdeen again.

But a letter was not the same as seeing him. The promise would not be broken if she wrote back to him, would it?

It was a week before she penned a letter, as the remembrances of his kindness returned with the ache of missing him, joining the yearning that had never gone away. What to write to him consumed her thoughts, her schoolwork neglected.

Their correspondence continued for three years. They told each other of their lives, Hazel found herself jotting down things she noticed each day to share with Harry: a speckled thrush rising from the river’s edge, a blooming rosemary bush that made her think of Bridie and how she’d tucked bundles of it in their pockets, a new Agatha Christie just out, the burst of blue cornflowers, ones that Bridie once told them healed Achilles.

And Harry told Hazel of his life: his studies and his journey to America to visit Princeton, where he studied a semester under James Waddell Alexander, the world-famous mathematician. He wrote of adventures with Ethan Baldwin, hiking in Scotland and learning to hunt the Monarch of the Glen, even attempting to sneak onto Balmoral’s hunting fields to catch a sight of King George! But not once did either Harry or Hazel write about Flora or that awful day that ripped their idyllic world to pieces.

Hazel graduated in 1948, moving into a flat above a dry cleaner in London City Centre. She took a job at a pub called The Crown, drawing Guinness and pouring whiskey.

Over the course of that year above the dry cleaner, she told Harry about all of it—the odor of chemicals rising through the floorboards, the books she read. She asked him questions, which he always answered. Do you still sketch? (Yes, he did.) Do you still look for walking sticks when you hike? (Yes, he did.) What she didn’t ask: Do your lips still move while you read? Do you hike at the edge of the river and think of Flora?

Do you miss me?

He asked her questions about her life, and she began answering with stories, taking the dullest detail of her day and turning it into a sensational tale, exaggerating for the fun of it and describing every color, aroma, and sound.

She felt a bit more like herself when she wrote to Harry.

One of his letters to her read, “You make life magical, Hazel Linden. Did you know that?”

The thrill of reading this compliment brought back the afternoon in the riven tree, his lips on hers, his body…

Finally, he wrote, “May I visit you in London?”

She almost wrote back. She tried to answer. If she said yes, she’d break her own blood vow. If she said no, she would always regret it. In the end, she never answered him, and he stopped writing to her. Just like that, he quit. When she wanted to mourn him, she just tapped into the anger like she’d tap into a draft of beer, reminding herself that he just up and quit when she didn’t answer him. He didn’t fight for her.

And her vow in a church on St. Frideswide’s Day of 1940 remained unbroken.

So, she made a new promise: to be the Hazel who Harry knew in letters, a person who could make life magical. She was determined that—without Harry and without his letters—she would change. It was then she took her mum’s offer of the flat and applied for a job at Hogan’s. Possibly, in the end, that’s all the communication was meant to do: push Hazel toward the right direction in her life.

Or so she told herself.