9th January, 1888
Dearest Carmelina,
It is terribly sad to miss each other so soon, and yet it is a sadness we share. To return to a place where our whole lives were ahead of us, only to know that we are tethered to our chosen paths until our fateful ends.I remember well how insensitive fellow students could be! Few slights cut as deep as the injustices of youth. Who dare besmirch Goodluck? They must just be jealous – no doubt their life would flash before their eyes on a broom!
I worry about Goodluck. It seems but to tempt the fates to give a child such a name, that it might put flights of fancy in one’s head. How fortunate for us he manages to live up to it. He still is, is he not? It was an awful storm tonight, and death is ever looming.
You wear gloves handling those artifacts, do you not? That archeologist (Macbeth? Macbain?) who licked that fossilized Bosnian cookie or whatever it was still has a curse running through his great grandchildren.
May your grading not involve the Lindevalds. Never have I been more grateful for the finite state of living as when I have to decipher a Lindevald’s dragon scrawl.
With love beyond my last dying, sputtering breath,
Duke