Dear Mum,
I'm settled in Mont-Havre, at least for a little while, so you can safely send me letters. Send them to Armand Tuppenny, in care of the Courier's Guild, or as they mostly call it here, the Guilde du Courriers. A lot of the names are like that here, which is funny, because most of the people I've met speak Cumbrian. I guess the first settlers were Provençese, but there haven't been many colonists from there in the last ten years or so. A few; I spent a deal of time on shipboard with a Provençese couple, Marc and Elise Fronterac.
Mont-Havre is the big city here in Armorica. It's where the first colonists landed, and it still has the only harbor that can take big ships like the Lombard. The government is here, too.
Only a few of the folks I came with are staying in Mont-Havre, and they all have family members who are already settled here. The rest are moving out into the provinces to farm or to practice one trade or another. Most of them had some place to go all lined up before they left Yorke. Lucky them.
I hadn't time to arrange such things—you know why—and after paying for my passage I haven't the funds to set myself up with a farm or in trade somewhere. I don't even know what trade that would be, since— Well.
I could work on a farm, I guess, but if I'm going to do menial labor I've decided I'd rather do it here in Mont-Havre where I'm more likely to hear of better opportunities. So I'm living in a cheap boarding house, though Madame Truc assures me every day, and sometimes every meal, that "it is a place of the most elegant." But at three francs a week she can call it what she likes. I am managing to make ends meet, and even save a little. I'm starting here, but I don't mean to end here!
Write me, please, and tell me how things are at home. The Courier's Guild runs a pair of packets between Yorke and Mont-Havre, the Herbert and the Robert; anything you send me by the Guild should reach me in a couple of months.
Your loving son,
Armand
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photo credit: Giuseppe Milo (www.pixael.com) Vulcanii Noroiosi – Romania – Landscape photography via photopin (license)
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