Gen —
I am, as ever, the one writing this. The eldest child does the work and the youngest receives it, and you have, in fairness, been receiving things from me with a grave little nod since you were two. Felix Pia Postuma, the literature called you; piae Postumae was what Mum actually wrote on the back of every photograph from that summer in Saint-Malo. Seventeen, then. We can stop saying piae soon.
You have, since I left for St Andrews, become the reader I always thought you would become and the writer I did not. The essay you sent me in March on the Mandelbaum Aeneid was, I want to say properly, the best paragraph anyone in this family has written this year — Mum included, who would, if she read this, tell us both to be quiet and pour the wine. I have, since March, been keeping it in the front of my Loeb and reading it to my supervisor in lieu of having opinions of my own.
I am sending up, with this, the small Cormorant Garamond edition of the Donna Tartt — yours, formally, from the morning of the 4th. Mum will pretend she does not know about it. Dad will pretend he was the one who suggested it. They are both lying. I want you to read it slowly this time, and write in the margins this time, and not give a single quarter to the people who say the prose is too much. The prose is exactly enough. It is, after all, the year you stop being twelve about everything.
ad multos annos, sister-of-mine. The candle is, as I write this, low; the room is, as ever, yours. — T.
P.S. I have, as instructed, not told you what is in the second parcel. I will say only that it is bound in something you will recognise.
— written in the long room, by candle.