said. “I looked her up online and tracked her down to a house in London. She’s very old, but still got all her marbles.”
Jonah raised his eyebrows.
“And this is where it gets really interesting . . . she’s asked me to help her find the person who wrote the letters to her. She never heard from him again—it was more than sixty years ago. He was a doctor—Richard Creswell.”
“Do you think she still loves him?”
Rachel scoffed. “Can love really last that long? I mean, without seeing someone?” It was such an abstract idea; she found it hard to imagine.
“Of course. Why not?”
“You are a hopeless romantic, Jonah, did you know that?”
He crossed one arm over his heart. “Owning it.”
They were both laughing and so didn’t notice a marauding seagull, keen for the last of Rachel’s ice cream, swoop down on them until it was too late.
* * *
When Esther had told Rachel and Eve about Richard Creswell, Rachel thought privately that the chances of him still being alive were slim. But the old lady had looked so hopeful that she hadn’t wanted to disappoint her and promised she’d do her best to try and track him down.
Starting with Google, Rachel whittled down the possibilities. There were plenty of Richard Creswells, but none of the right generation. Then after nearly an hour of searching, she came across a mention of his name in an obscure academic paper on treatment of shell shock during the Second World War. Bingo. That had to be him. She read the abstract, which led her to a hospital in Birmingham called Northfield. She searched again, but found that it had closed in 1995. There was little hope then of finding their records; she would have no idea where to start looking.
Esther had said she didn’t know where he might have settled after leaving Little Embers. “To be honest, I didn’t allow myself to wonder. I had my own life to get on with and looking backward would have only prolonged the pain,” she had said.
Rachel started with logic. Where had the doctor lived before Little Embers? Where did he grow up? She sent a quick text to Eve, to see if she could find out from her grandmother anything about Dr. Creswell’s background.
An hour or so later, her phone pinged. Eve had responded.
Cornwall. “Lost” something or other, and not far from Bodmin. She can’t remember any more than that.
It wasn’t much to go on, but Rachel was up for the challenge—it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do until her wrist healed.
Another search yielded a town called Lostwithiel. That looked promising. There was a local library and she looked up the phone number. She was just about to call to see if she could speak to someone when there was a loud knocking on the door.
Janice was there, holding a plate covered with a tea towel.
“Hello love. I thought you might like a bit of cake. Baked fresh this morning. Can’t eat it all myself.”
Rachel stood back to let her in.
“So Jonah tells me you found some letters.” Janice had taken a seat at the kitchen table while Rachel put the kettle on. Her eyes were alight at the prospect of a juicy story. The cake had obviously been a pretense, not that Rachel minded.
“I did,” Rachel admitted, explaining that they’d been in the suitcase of clothes that Leah had given her to wear on the island. “And I found the woman to whom they were written.”
“Ooh, do tell,” she said, leaning forward on her elbows as if she didn’t want to miss a single detail.
Rachel recounted how she had gone about finding Esther, adding, “And now she’s asked me to help her find the writer—a Dr. Richard Creswell, the one who was at Embers all those years ago.”
“That name rings a bell,” said Janice.
“He’s got to be in his nineties by now, and might not even still be around, but I have to find out—I couldn’t really say no to her, not after reading them.”
“Why not?”
“They were the most beautiful love letters I’ve ever come across. Not that I’ve read many, but you know what I mean.”
“Ooh,” said Janice, taking a large bite from the slice of cake that Rachel had placed in front of her. “I don’t think anyone’s ever written me a love letter.”
“Me neither,” said Rachel, feeling a sudden yearning for something she’d never had.
“So where did you start?”
“Google.”
“Any luck?”
“Not really. People that old don’t generally have much of a