13th January

Dear Cecelia,
I have stumbled upon the most magical of places! Yesterday, I had intended to seek out Descartes with Rilla as you know, but as I rapped on the door to Rilla’s cabin I heard the most unlikely sound located somewhere behind me. I hastily scribbled a note of apology and pinned it to Rilla’s door before setting out in search of the mysterious sound. Am I being obtuse? I am sorry, darling sister. In any case, I shall endeavour to explain it to you.
Do you remember when we were children and Mother and Father used to take us to the beach at Scarborough for a paddle, long before we could swim, and the three of us children used to play the game with those enormous shells which would wash up onto the shore? Oh, but you must remember. How did the rhyme go?
To listen’s what you do
Do it if you dare
Dare you do it quickly
Quickly what is there?
The three of us would say the rhyme, one at a time, the youngest always last, and then listen very carefully to the sounds inside. That, my darling, is exactly what I heard yesterday. That old rhyme from our childhood, whispered hurriedly over and over. To hear it repeated in such a way rather gave me the chills.
I chased the whispers along the upper deck, towards the bow and down a flight of stairs to the floor below. Once there, I could scarcely believe my eyes. Beyond the last cabin was a room the likes of which I have not seen before. Glass surrounded me on all sides and as I stepped inside the room, it was as if I were not on a ship at all. One last time, the rhyme was sung to me in a voice not unlike yours, sister. A sob caught in my throat and I sank to my knees in the.. sand? I cast about me, but the glass was all but gone. Just sand and white cliffs and the ocean, as far as the eye could see. A room full of the best days of our summers, here on the Vulcania!
I closed my eyes momentarily and turned my face to the sun and when I opened them again, we were there, all of us, playing as children right there in the sand. I’d quite forgotten just how cherubic you were in those days. We laughed and sang..
To listen’s what you do
Do it if you dare
Dare you do it quickly
Quickly what is there?
And I remembered then, what it was that I’d heard when I put the shell to my ear. The sound of a child screaming and the ocean, waves breaking on the treacherous rocks below those startling white cliffs. The child was you, Cecelia. If I’d known then that it was you who would scream as you drowned, I’d have done anything to stop it. Anything. I’d have given my own life in your place. Dear one, how could I have known? I was so young then, and the screams inside the shell had frightened me so that I could not share them with anyone. I had thought that to speak of them was to make them a reality. But to keep them a secret has left me with the burden of a guilty conscience. If you’d only told someone..
What then? Father would have laughed and tousled my hair – ‘Elizabeth is quite the storyteller, isn’t she, did she inherit her grandfather’s talent for telling tall tales?‘ We would still have returned to the beach the next day. You would still have been paddling in water too deep. You still would have stumbled and been pulled beyond my reach by the powerful tide.

The truth of this knowledge struck me and my reverie was broken by the sudden sound of nothing. My face was wet with tears, but I was untroubled as I have not been in many a long year. What is this place I have stumbled upon, Cecelia? A glass garden which transforms and heals. So many questions, and rather inexplicably, I appear to have lost a day. Was I really gone for so long?

Your

Elizabeth