13 Little Blue Envelopes

The morning after the night out at the beer hall with her new friends, Ginny reads Aunt Peg’s letter and announces to her friends that she needs to go to Corfu. They are curious as to why, and when she tells them, they ask if they can tag along.

They book train tickets. Their itinerary is determined by the trains that the four Australians can book with their Rail Passes. The train journey will take 25 hours, passing through Germany, Austria, and Italy.

After a long journey, they leave the train in Venice and race to the ferry terminal to catch the overnight ferry to the island of Corfu. Their tickets for the ferry are deck tickets, which means that they must find a place on the deck to spend the ride; they can’t go inside the boat cabin. After getting some sleep, Ginny opens the 12th envelope under the hot sun on the deck of the ferry. The drawing on the front had always looked like a sea creature, but now she realizes that it is the profile of an island.

In her 12th letter, Peg describes meeting Richard in Harrods for the first time. Richard was kind to Peg, listening to her story before agreeing to let her stay in his spare bedroom until she got back on her feet.

Peg describes falling in love with Richard. He was falling in love with her too, but they didn’t act on it for some time. He found her a spare room in the attic at Harrods to use as an art studio. Peg panicked when Richard told her how he felt about her; she ran away while he was at work. Peg traveled for months but returned to Richard when she found out that she had cancer. Richard cared for her as her health declined.

Peg closes this letter by reminding Ginny that there is only one envelope left. She writes that her final letter is the most important of all and that it contains a task so big that Ginny can decide when she’s ready to open the envelope.

Ginny shares Aunt Peg’s letter with Carrie. Carrie encourages Ginny to open the final envelope right away, but Ginny wants to wait. She is worried that there is something in the last envelope that she doesn’t want to know.

Ginny and her friends disembark from the ferry at dawn. They aren’t sure where to go, so they ask a cab driver to take them to a nice beach that is close by. On the beach, the boys lay down to sleep. Carrie and Ginny leave their bags by the boys and scramble over some rocks to swim.

After swimming, the girls lay in the sun. They see some people with backpacks on a scooter on the road above them. Carrie goes to fetch her backpack only to realize that her bag, and Ginny’s, have been stolen by the people on the scooter.

Ginny is shocked to have lost Aunt Peg’s letters, including the last unopened envelope. She has her passport and her debit card in her pocket because she’d taken them out of her backpack on the train for safe keeping. Carrie is not so lucky. Her passport was in her stolen bag.

Carrie is frantic. The friends walk along the road in the growing heat of the day until they come to a small village with a few buildings. The situation of the stolen baggage feels somehow unreal to Ginny; she feels detached while also feeling terrible for Carrie’s predicament. The Australians discuss the need to get to the Australian embassy, which is likely in Athens.

Ginny goes to an ATM and discovers that she only has €40 left in her account. She calls Richard and asks for his help. He promises to get her a plane ticket back to London. Ginny says an emotional goodbye to Carrie and heads to the airport.

Ginny feels strange to be boarding a plane with nothing but her passport and in her dirty, rumpled clothes. Richard picks her up, and they ride the subway back to his house. Motivated by the news that Peg’s letters are lost, Richard tells Ginny, “[T]here’s something you should know. In case you don’t know. Do you know?” (283). He then reveals that he and Peg were married.

Surprised by the news, Ginny is angry at Aunt Peg for forcing Richard to tell her in this awkward way. The subway doors open, and Ginny runs out, leaving Richard behind.

Ginny walks to Keith’s house. She is surprised to find him home; she thought he was in Scotland, and she had only walked there because it was the only place besides Richard’s that she could think of going.

Keith tells Ginny that the school made a mistake in making the arrangements for him to perform his play in Edinburgh, so he came home. He leads Ginny to his room and asks her to update him on where she’s been. She’s too tired to say much and asks if she can sleep there. He agrees, but when she reveals that she ran away from Richard, Keith argues that she should go to Richard’s.

Ginny tries to explain how she’s feeling and why she bolted from Richard on the train: “You don’t get it,” she tells Keith, “She wasn’t dead before. She was just gone. I knew she was dead. They told me she was dead. But I never saw her get sick. I never saw her die. Now she’s dead” (289).

Keith comforts Ginny while she cries. They agree that she can rest, but in the morning, he’ll drive her over to Richard’s.

In the morning, Keith and Ginny use Richard’s spare key to let themselves in. He’s left a note on the kitchen table for Ginny, asking her to please stick around until he gets home from work so that they can talk.

Keith is amazed to see the paintings and decorations in Aunt Peg’s room. They discuss the poster of the Manet painting. Ginny points out Peg’s favorite detail, the pair of green slippers worn by a woman on a trapeze, visible in the reflection in a mirror in the corner of the painting. Ginny touches the poster to show Keith where the slippers are, and she feels something underneath. She finds a key.

Ginny and Keith search Peg’s room for a lock that might fit the key. Then they try all the doors in the house. The key doesn’t fit any of them.

Ginny takes a bath, needing time to think things over and feeling grateful to be clean after days of travel. Afterward, she and Keith make a cup of coffee, and the Harrods label on the coffee tin makes her realize that Richard had mentioned that Peg used a cabinet to store her supplies in her Harrods studio. The key is likely to that cabinet.

Ginny leads Keith to the chocolate counter at Harrods so that she can ask the same store clerk to call Richard. Keith is surprised and confused at Ginny’s seeming connectedness with the inner workings of Harrods.

Ginny fights the urge to disappear into the crowd as she and Keith wait for Richard. She is unwilling to meet Richard’s eyes once he arrives, and she tells him about the key. He takes them upstairs to the storage room that Peg had used as a studio.

After trying several cabinets, they find one that fits. Inside are 27 of Aunt Peg’s paintings on rolled-up canvases like scrolls. The paintings depict sights from Peg’s (and Ginny’s) whirlwind tour of Europe. Taped to the inside of the cabinet is a business card with the words “call now” written on the back.

They return to Richard’s office and call the man listed on the business card, Cecil Gage-Rathbone. He’s an art dealer and has been expecting Ginny’s call. He has been planning an auction for Peg’s paintings, per Peg’s request. However, he doesn’t tell Ginny this on the phone, assuming that she knows already. He asks her to come meet him, and she agrees.

After Ginny hangs up with Cecil, Keith makes excuses to leave the room so that Ginny and Richard can speak in private. She apologizes for running away. He jokes by saying that it is “in her blood” because Peg is her aunt (301). He apologizes for telling her so bluntly. Ginny confides in Richard that Peg’s death felt more real after she heard that Peg had married Richard and that Richard had cared for her while she was sick. Ginny tells Richard that it is nice to have him as an uncle despite everything, and he agrees.

Keith and Richard accompany Ginny on the day of the art auction. The auction house where Cecil works is luxurious and understated. Cecil informs Ginny that people have started referring to Peg’s paintings as “The Harrods Paintings” and that he thinks they’ll receive a generous offer for the whole collection.

Aunt Peg’s paintings have been framed and are displayed all in a row. Seeing them like this, Ginny notes how the earlier paintings are “bright and clear and powerful,” then some are “done in angry, quick slashes,” then toward the end of the collection, the colors become “faded and muddled together,” before the final pieces in which “the bright colors and strong lines [a]re back, but the images [a]re fantastically wrong” (307). It is like looking at Peg’s illness as it progresses. This helps Ginny internalize, more than anything else, that Peg had been truly sick.

Cecile tells Ginny that Peg had started to get attention for her art even before the public knew she was sick and that people had been calling her “the next Mari Adams” (307).

The auction is a strange experience for Ginny. She has doubts about whether she wants to, or should, go through with selling Aunt Peg’s paintings. She notices that the process is also painful for Richard; he is mostly quiet and doesn’t look at the paintings often.

Once the auction is underway, Keith tries to make a few jokes to lighten the mood, but Ginny asks him to be quiet. Silently, she grabs Richard’s hand and holds on. The paintings sell for £70,000.

Ginny wakes the next morning, wondering if everything had been a strange dream. She reflects that it is odd that, at the end of her adventure, the big reveal had been money, something so abstract as a large number in a bank account. £70,000—$133,000—is more money than she can imagine, so she imagines it as a collection of burlap sacks, like bags of gold in a cartoon.

Ginny wonders what Peg would have wanted her to do with the money. Keith encourages her to think about what she wants to do instead.

Ginny asks Keith if they’re dating. He tells her that they are “definitely kind of something” (314), even though she’ll have to go home to the States soon. His response makes her happy, and that moment of happiness makes her imagine what Peg’s 13th letter might have said. Although the text doesn’t state it explicitly, Ginny’s actions in the next chapter reveal what she thinks the letter would have told her to do: It would have told Ginny to tell Richard that Peg loved him.

Ginny returns to the chocolate counter at Harrods. After the shop employee calls Richard to come down, Ginny asks her what her favorite chocolates are. Ginny purchases a box of the woman’s favorite truffles and offers it to her as a thank you gift.

Next, Ginny takes Richard out for lunch at Harrods’s fancy tearoom. When Ginny expresses some lingering doubt about having sold the paintings, Richard reassures her by telling her that the paintings document the pain and confusion of Peg’s sickness and that that’s not how either of them wants to remember her.

Ginny tells Richard that in Peg’s 12th letter, she had written that she loved him and that she was upset at herself for leaving him. He hugs her, and seeing his joy gives Ginny a powerful sense of satisfaction.

The 13th letter is from Ginny to Aunt Peg since Peg’s original 13th letter is gone.

Ginny tells Peg that she “figured it out,” that she told Richard Peg loved him, and that they sold the paintings. She tells Peg that she’s angry with her for leaving without a word. Ginny then thanks Peg for setting up the trip for her and for helping her realize that she could do things on her own.

Ginny tells Peg that she’s going to leave half the money for Richard, and then she’s going to go home.