Dear Future Husband

23. Easter

6 April 1890

Dear future husband,

How are you faring? I must say, it feels very strange to miss someone that one has never met, whom one may not even (but hopefully does) love. Yet I confess that is the state that I find myself in.

Do not be mistaken! I adore my life at present. I do enjoy my time with Papa although it is rather upsetting to be at home, without girls of my own age again, now that Anna has decided to abandon me to the wretched solitary existence of friendless isolation. Pray, do excuse my melodramatics, as I would excuse yours if your only friend had not only left you but accused you of the vilest and most unforgivable actions. Truly, I assure you that my straits are far from dire. Yet I cannot help but long for a place I have never been, for acquaintances I have laid eyes on, and even emotions I have never felt.

Perhaps it is only the routine that I have fallen into at the Sherborne Girls School, and it is possible I have grown bored with it. After all, doing the same things day after day and night after out, following the same schedules, and being around the same people, does tend to have a rather stagnating effect on one's mind. I had hoped that reading a good novel might cure such boredom and dissipate my state of tedium, but unfortunately, I cannot sit still long enough to properly finish any novel. Instead, I find myself leaving Mary Shelley's Frankenstein half-open and unfinished, right next to Bram Stoker's Dracula and even the far slimmer tome, Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. Despite the supposedly riveting adventures that these characters take, I am unable to follow through to see any of their ends!

Hopefully, you will forgive me for these slights against literature and you will not be an immense fan of these novels yourself. If not, then, I at least hope you would accept me, even with all my faults and with my inability to finish a novel being one of them.

At least we have plenty of Easter festivities to keep us occupied. Our annual egg-jarping competition has taken place and I found myself the victor! Father insists that he graciously allowed me to win, but I believe that the force of my boiled egg (dyed a lovely pink, of course) was enough to crack his (which he had varnished a brilliant blue). Do you have any such festivities or do you consider these games beneath you? At Grenledge, even the household staff will play these games. I saw one stable boy crow victory over another as he splintered the shell of his friend's egg and I thought of you and how you might be celebrating. Of course, I do not mean to insinuate that you are a stable boy-perhaps that leads me to end my letter here.

I must be going as it is tea time, but I wish a happy Easter to you.

I remain,

Yours sincerely,

Rosalie Winthrop

***

Rosalie folded up the letter, sealing it tightly with her own personal wax seal-a gift from her father for her birthday last year-and tucked it away into the box where she had placed the rest of her notes to her future husband.

"Rosalie, your father requests that you join him for tea," came a voice from her bedchamber door.

"Tell him I shall be there directly," she responded, quickly placing the box on a high shelf. She nearly tripped over a pillow that had somehow made its way to the floor and the box spilled from her hands. Rosalie yelped.

"Is everything quite in order, Miss Winthrop?" the maid asked.

"Yes, yes, nothing is the matter." She felt bad for lying, but something in the box caught her eye. Though she had originally believed the hatbox filled with letters to be empty, it was now clearly not the case.