━━━━━━ ༻ 012 ༺ ━━━━━━
" Letters Almost Lost in Time "
"AND ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE back then?" Arthur leant forward, his right elbow sliding a little further across the table filling the majority of space in their little private corner besides the bar of the Garrison. Far more extroverted regarding his emotions than all his younger brothers combined, Arthur had been ecstatic from the moment Tommy gave them the news that the Alloways' were alive, with their last known location Guatemala. It was a place which sounded distant and foreign, one that Arthur was rather certain he couldn't even point on a map if he was to give it a try.
"Write back?" John puffed, rolling his eyes shortly at the sound of his brother's stupidity. "Are you out of your fucking mind, Arthur? How is he supposed to write back to her?"
"With a fucking pen and a piece of paper," Arthur responded outraged to be talk to as if John was some superior of his. To support the point he was about to make, he gestured towards Tommy, "Ain't he the one growing posher by the day? Seems only fair he starts using these skills for more than signing documents, aye."
"And these letters will be sent through gypsy magic to her, correct?" John shook his head, a disappointed chuckle filling in his pause. "Jackie said nothing about where she is going, only where she's been. Have you really heard nothing he just said of her letter?"
Above his moustache, as below, Arthur was all a frown; with some of his features twitching and his hands forming fists that whitened his bruised knuckles, Arthur Shelby looked very much like a ticking bomb, that even John got the hint that he should sigh this subject off, brushing it aside, at least the part concerning the eldest at the table.
Instead, John turned towards Tommy, relaxing back in his seat. "It's good to know she's alive," he nodded, "but ain't your hands just as tied now as they were before?" He sought some confirmation in his brother's eyes, but he should have known better than to expect anything more than a cold numbness, unapproachable by any means meeting him. "The letter," he continued, "it was dated three months ago. She's been gone for longer. The letter arrived with at least one month of delay and it's—"
A knock on the door of their private compartment interrupted John's attempt to make sense of a complicated equation with a minimal knowledge of numbers restricted mostly to the registers he kept for their company blossoming in profit. After that prelude to the full intrusion, the door was quick to be opened by Balthasar, holding a small packet to his chest. "Mr. Shelby sir," he nodded first in greeting towards Tommy, then shortly towards the two other Shelby's at the table, before returning his attention to his initial focus. "You were right," he handed over the small package, consisting of two letters tied together. "They were holding them at the office. Odd stamps."
John shook his head some pride liftin a corner of his lips.
"Don't act so surprised, John," Tommy sighed, taking the two letters from Balthasar with a nod of gratitude at him, "thinking is my job in this company and in this family." He secured the two letters beneath his palm, pressed on the table, and finally looked up at Balthasar, "Keep watch of the office personally from now until the Alloways' arrive."
"Yes, sir," Balthasar embraced his order instantly, relieved perhaps more than his eye could let it be known that he was allowed the single post from where he'd know regularly that the Alloways' were still alive.
After he left the room, Tommy watched expectedly for his brothers to do the same as well. Though John was quick to get up and follow that silent order, Arthur groaned instead. "I want to know what she has to say too," he complained.
"Yet the letters are written for me," Thomas reminded him, a hint of pride bringing his chin upwards. Truth was, he would have indulged with his brother's complaints had he not already known Jackie's letters to be capable of completely undoing every single façade and mask he's made for himself with tact his whole life. On waters of such vulnerability, he had to chart alone, in a certain degree of privacy, for there was a high chance something between the news she'll share and the terrible suffocation of missing her voice attached to her carefully crafted words will bring him to tears.
Since her last letter, Tommy hasn't slept much, perhaps especially for what John had managed to figure out as well: though he knew she was alive, nothing changed of his condition of uselessness in aiding her return to safety. No matter how many times he reread that first letter, nothing new was revealed to him and he was still as far away from her as ever before.
For such reasons of emotion, it was paramount that he waited for his solitude to be complete before opening the first letter, containing several pages, with certain paragraph more calligraphic than others too. The first part of the letter was a mess that had slowed down his reading to try and make everything out.
MY DEAREST HUSBAND TO BE,
In my hours of hopelessness, I find myself writing to you though I have no guarantee you'll ever read any of this. It is easier, I believe, for me to take account of my emotions by imagining I am speaking them to you. I would conjure up your ghost from the depths of my memory and have it keep me company while these metal walls suffocate me into delusions, but my mind is too scattered to form vivid images anymore. So I write... with no hope that I will survive this journey and that this letter will not sink with us to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, I write to you.
My father was a sailor by passion. He'd speak of the ocean, much to my mother's disdain, as a man would speak of his first love they never forgot. On his line, the Alloways name goes back entire generations of men who have answered the call of the waves and conquered the ocean's many faces. It is the pride with which he talked about our legacy that I recall now, when I know my underestimation of the ocean's wrath makes my ancestors turn in their graves.
All these advancements in nautical travel, but when the storm rages on the ocean, even the sturdiest ship groans and creaks and reminds us all that we are human and mortal, and that the ocean is filled with rotten corpses of men braver than ourselves. After seeing waves the size of mountains, I am left a shivering mess.
And our fuel is running low.
I set us all on this course and should this journey lead to our demise, I'll have their names drag me to the bottom of this dark ocean. So I turn to you in this hour, though my brothers have plagued my mind with facts that dismantle my better illusions... I trust you to be the keeper of my dreams, of my thoughts, of my emotions, though I have nothing but my foolish hope reassuring that you're alive and that you do not yet hate me. This letter might never reach you, my love, but even so, my love for you persists to fuel an impossible optimism.
After all, if I am to drown, I would prefer my last words to be written to you. I only wish I could have your hands cover my ears safe from this thunder one last time.
THOUGH THE LETTER DID NOT END there, Thomas Shelby took notice of the messiness of the writing coming to an abrupt end. The next paragraph started with a much more chiselled calligraphy, reassuring him right away that the storm had passed.
My brothers are right. I do not say this often and I almost never write such obscene admissions down, but here's a truth I will only ever offer you: they were right that I have been wasting money by sending you that first letter the way I had, selfishly and desperately, even if those two flaws meant that I was having a conversation with someone given no means to talk back. What I am trying to say is perhaps different from what my brothers hoped of me to understand, but regardless, it is true.
I was, per say, afraid. I still am. Afraid to be alone. So I hid behind my justified paranoia and refused to know whether or not you are still out there, still interested enough in me to read anything from me. My older brother believes that as soon as I gave you my transport and left, your interest in me had vanished too. My younger brother thinks none of my letters really reach their destination anyway. But I would like to prove them wrong on those matters — they can only be right about so much.
So, it's time for a gamble, my love. I'll tell you more about my plans, in hopes that, by knowing ahead of time where I am sailing, you'll leave me a sign, anything at all, of how you are feeling, of whether or not you are still there for me.
Right then... My initial plan was to sail us from Guatemala to Japan, to meet my contact there. However, this bad storm we've encountered forced us off course and we are now in Australia. Thanks to the goods we've been given from my Guatemalan friend, I believe in two weeks time I will be able to fuel up our ship and make for Japan again. So there it is, my love: Japan. If you are alive and well, if you are still reading my letters and you still think of our last kiss, I will wait to hear from you in Japan's Tokyo. Send your letter to 'Lady Luck' dockside. I'll tell my contact to expect it.
WITH LOVE,
YOUR WIFE WHO DESPISES STORMS
YET SAILS INTO THEM CONSTANTLY
HIS HEART TWISTED IN AGONY to open the second letter, knowing all too well he's received the other too late to reply to her, as she had requested he did. Jacqueline, he wanted to cry out until his lungs bled in hopes his pained voice might reach her across the oceans, I would do anything for you and I curse myself for not receiving this in time. As slow as he had been to unfold the pages of the second letter, Thomas discovered a certain perfume scent attached to them.
MY LOVE,
A fear of being alone has haunted me since I watched dirt being shovelled over my mother's grave. All of a sudden, for that moment, everyone was gone and I, alone, stood like some pillar to a legacy that felt too big to uphold. I had no husband, no relative, no one but the face in the mirror whose tears have started to sting, so I decided I did not want that responsibility that comes with solitude. I volunteered to be a nurse on the front because I was desperate to cease being alone, to reunite with my brothers and quench that terrible horror in my soul. Little did I know.
You asked me, when we first met, why I let my brother act like he is the true coordinator of my business. I never answered, because the truth laid a little deeper than perhaps the more obvious reasoning you too assumed. It has always been less about being a woman in a men's world, and more about being afraid that my forefront position was a path to solitude.
This fear has almost driven me insane while incarcerated, but in that darkness I held you close to me, because while I had many gimmicks and attempts to trade parts of who I am for reassurance that I won't be abandoned by my own, that I will never be left behind by them, it was by your side that I ceased having this ridiculous fear. You and I will always be alike. You would have always been written for me, regardless of the heartbreak and the disappointment I now face with less of a reason than ever to believe you are still alive or that you still love me.
Wherever you may be, my love, whatever you may think of me, my emotions cannot be changed even as my soul bleeds it so seems, so I am writing still, despite my brothers righteously shaming me for my only delusional weakness — you.
My letters may be less frequent now, but I will write them still, because I find in the memory of you the closest I ever got to an escape from my own fears.
There were lilac trees here. My contact discovered my love for them and he gifted me a perfume reminiscing that carried by the flowers of these trees. I've puffed some of it on this paper, because you told me you've never smelt lilac before.
Things are looking good again, business wise. We've sold half the Guatemalan cargo in Australia and saved on fuel enough to be equitable for a deal with a local name of importance. We've arrived in Tokyo with enough Australian merino wool to dress the whole city and we've sold it to factories working through my contact in almost no time. This success has gained us an invitation to more restricted circles and I am confident I can lull some of these businessmen into the export temptation. Raw silk, tea, machinery. They are building sturdy ships over here. I am thinking of investing before charting to sail again.
From our stop in Australia, the profit has been insignificant, but I have high hopes from Japan.
I am still planning on returning to England, regardless of how I might find you once I do. I once promised that I will return your hat to you and though I am many things for you by now, a liar shan't be one more attribute added to that list.
WITH LOVE,
THE WOMAN WHO WILL ONE
DAY RETURN YOUR HAT
THOMAS BROUGHT THE letter up to his nose and inhaled ever so softly the perfume faintly lingering between her letters. The scent of lilac. The scent she loves the most. With his eyes closed and that perfume parading memories before his eyes, Thomas Shelby vowed: this was the last time he failed Jacqueline Alloways.