A letter, written in full but never sent, had vanished. A letter addressed to Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Wilgrave, no less.
Eloise went pale and turned everything on the table over.
Nothing. She pulled out every drawer, pushed the table from the wall, and dropped to her knees to check the floor. She even peered into the gaps between the floorboards, which she knew was absurd.
The letter was not there.
She pressed her hand over her face and stood very still.
*I haven't written in so long. So much has accumulated.*
---
Eloise had begun writing to Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave quite some time ago.
When the war began and young men from across the country went to the front, letters became one of the few genuine pleasures soldiers had — a thin thread connecting them to everything they had left behind. Then one day, a small notice appeared in the newspapers.
A child from a family in the capital had sent the famous colonel a letter: carefully written, accompanied by a sweet, clumsy drawing. It had been addressed only with the unit name and the colonel's name, nothing more. Normally his adjutant would have sorted and screened such correspondence, but the unit had been moving too quickly, and all the post was packed and carried along without review.
During a brief rest, the colonel worked through his mail himself — and found the child's letter among the dispatches.
A man of his rank might easily have set it aside. Instead he was moved. When he returned to the capital, he went personally to the address on the envelope to thank the boy, and brought him a small toy soldier figurine.
When the story reached the newspapers, it spread like wildfire. Writing letters to soldiers became fashionable all across the country — children, ladies, whole families sending words of comfort and encouragement to every soldier they knew or half-knew. There were so many letters that the postal service made a public appeal for restraint. The military command initially considered a ban, but the soldiers themselves were so visibly lifted by the correspondence that no one had the heart to follow through.
The moment Eloise read about it, she went straight to her room, took out writing paper, and sat down.
She was going to write to Lieutenant Ryan Wilgrave of the 57th Infantry Battalion.
He was only a lieutenant then, not yet a lieutenant colonel. But she already knew his name. She had seen it several times in the military papers — connected to an operation that had caught her attention, appearing repeatedly on the lists of those receiving commendations.
Her first letter took an entire week to write.
Her heart was pounding when she finally sent it.
*Lieutenant Ryan Wilgrave might reply to a stranger's letter, at least out of politeness.*
From that day on, she waited for the postman every morning. The small gosling she had just acquired circled her each time, as though keeping watch.
A month passed. No reply.
*Letters to military units probably take a long time.*
She went around asking everyone in the village with relatives in the army. They told her it could take months. She resolved to be patient and kept waiting. The gosling grew into a goose of considerable size and considerable aggression toward all persons except the Severton family, and was formally named Lancelot.
Six months passed. Still nothing. During that time, Ryan Wilgrave had been promoted from lieutenant to senior lieutenant.
Eloise wrote again. She congratulated him on his promotion, mentioned that she had already sent one letter previously, and wrote about a recent operation he had taken part in. She sent the letter in time for the winter festival.
By spring, he had accomplished another notable feat and been promoted to captain. Under ordinary circumstances such a rise would have been remarkable. Wartime made many things possible, and with losses among the officer corps so heavy, gaps had to be filled by whoever proved most capable. Ryan Wilgrave proved more capable than most.
Eloise kept writing. His name began appearing in the papers with increasing frequency — not only military publications but general ones, all carrying praise for his rapid advancement and his actions in the field.
She wrote more diligently still. She had fallen seriously ill around this time and could not leave the house. After reading every book in the library three times over, she asked her father to buy her more writing paper, and used up a supply that might otherwise have lasted several years in a single spring and summer.
And still no reply arrived.
*Nothing to be done.*
She read in one paper that he now received over a hundred letters a day. When was a man on the front lines supposed to read them all? He almost certainly handed the task to his adjutant, and responded only occasionally — or perhaps not at all.
Perhaps he never even saw hers.
The thought, which might have been upsetting, produced in Eloise something closer to relief.
*If he doesn't read them...*
*...then I can write whatever I like.*
Her letters grew longer after that.
She wrote about whether she thought the command decisions in a distant engagement had been sound. She wrote about Julia growing colder toward her by the week for reasons she could not fathom. She wrote about Lancelot falling deeply in love with the neighbor's goose and clearing the fence every morning without fail. She wrote about how the summer had seemed unusually rainy.
None of the letters were ever returned.
*That means they're arriving somewhere.*
Whether Ryan Wilgrave read them was beside the point. The absence of any reply was, in its own way, perfect. She could write freely, without performance or restraint. In that sense, he was an ideal correspondent.
In her letters, Ryan Wilgrave became many things: a friend, a respected soldier, sometimes a steadying presence she wrote to when she wanted advice from someone calm and experienced.
And — she could admit it, though she found it faintly ridiculous — he had become the subject of her first, tentative, entirely one-sided affection.
She had laughed at herself when she first noticed it. Falling for a man she had never laid eyes on!
But she had spent so many hours studying the dispatches and battle reports that came from the capital, tracing his decisions through the dry military language, that she felt she had begun to know the shape of his thinking. A picture had formed — vague and assembled from fragments, but persistent.
The newspapers offered descriptions, but they contradicted one another hopelessly. Some said black hair, some said dark brown. A retired officer she happened to sit beside in Cambon insisted he changed his hair color regularly for covert operations and was actually red-haired. His eyes were reported variously as black, brown, blue, and green.
*How many Ryan Wilgraves are there?*
In the end, Eloise had decided to imagine him as she liked.
Tall. Black hair. Blue eyes. A strong build, forged by years of campaigning. A gaze that was sharp and watchful—
She stopped dead.
*The Ryan Wilgrave she had imagined looked exactly like Sergeant Ryan Thornton.*
"I think I am going mad."
The vague mental portrait dissolved the moment she had managed to obtain his actual likeness. Eloise looked at the framed portrait on her wall.
A handsome man with golden hair and a kind, easy smile looked back at her.
She stood before it for a long moment, then turned back to the table — and remembered, all at once, what she had been doing there.
"Oh—"
The sound escaped before she could stop it.
She had spent the entire previous day working through the Blissbury documents. Then she had packed them in a frantic rush this morning.
*Did it get swept up with them?*
The realization hit her like cold water. Eloise sank onto the sofa.
Sergeant Thornton, who had not only expected a reply but dispatched a messenger to collect one. Who had received a fat parcel of documents from her this very morning and would, almost certainly, begin reading through them immediately.
And somewhere inside that parcel, tucked between pages of ball arrangements and grocery suppliers and warehouse inventories—
Her letter. Signed, at the top, in her own handwriting:
***"To my Ryan."***