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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Nightingale
There are post offices with brick walls and brass doorknobs, and there are post offices that go about on the water. The Nightingale was the second kind.
She was a paddle-boat, green as a wet leaf, with a red wheel at her stern and a chimney that puffed like an old man climbing stairs. Along her side, in letters painted by somebody's great-grandmother, it said: RIVER WINNOW POST — LETTERS, PARCELS, AND THE LENDING OF BOOKS.
There were forty-one books in the lending shelf. Dora Quince knew every one of them by the crack in its spine. There were nine villages on the Winnow, and she knew those too — Harberry Ferry, Milk Cross, Poddle, Sinder, Fell Bottom, Nine Stiles, Cobb Marsh, Thrushton, and last of all Upper Wend, where the river went narrow and cold and nobody lived past the mill.
Dora was eleven, and she had lived aboard the Nightingale her whole life.
Every morning she sorted the mail into the pigeonholes, which were little wooden boxes in the wall, one for each village. Every Friday she oiled their runners so the drawers slid sweetly. She stamped parcels. She hunted down overdue books with the politeness of a small, determined bailiff. And she kept a private notebook, tied with string, which she never showed to anybody.
On the front of it she had written: THE UNFINISHABLES.
An unfinishable was a letter that could not be delivered, no matter how you tried. A letter with half a name. A letter whose ink had been rained on until the words swam apart. A letter addressed to a house that had burned down eleven years ago, or to a person who had moved away without leaving so much as a forwarding cough.
Dora copied them into her notebook and worked at them like riddles. Sometimes she solved one. Once, from three soggy letters and a smudge, she had worked out that a man called T. Ripple lived above the bakery at Cobb Marsh and had been waiting nine months for a birthday card. When she handed it over he cried, right there in the flour, and Dora went back to the boat feeling as though she had lit a small lamp somewhere in the world.
The unfinishables that stayed unfinished went into the Dead Letter Locker: an iron cupboard bolted into the wall of the sorting room, black as a stove, with a keyhole shaped like a keyhole in a story.
Dora's grandmother, Bess Quince, was postmistress and captain both. She was small and square and had a voice that could reach the far bank without hurrying. Ned Bexley kept the engine going, mostly by talking to it. And Sixpence the cat slept on whatever was warmest, which was usually the mail.
It was a good life. It was the only life Dora wanted.
And on the eleventh of December, three weeks before anybody expected it, winter arrived and stopped it dead.
