I’m not good at explaining things like this, but… perhaps the clothes are there because Jennifer knows that something bad happened to Joshua. Jennifer knew he was dead in her time there, but probably didn’t know the details. So when she’s trying to remember her past, perhaps in her “dream” world she simply places his body – or rather, the clothing that represents his body – in the bed which belonged to him. Even if he died there a long time before, Jennifer is in a confused state and not quite remembering things correctly. With her memories twisted, the thought “Joshua is dead” or “Joshua died here” could quite easily be represented by that. It wouldn’t be the first time a straightforward memory would be represented by a seemingly abstract occurence.

The bit that tips me towards that theory the most is the part about her feeling pain in her chest, which – assuming she doesn’t have a heart condition – could mean that she knows deep down that this is a sad thing but doesn’t quite remember why.

Oh, here’s a thought: what if the letters never actually existed? If they were just transposed into Jennifer’s memories as a way of processing their conversations? There are letters exchanged between the two when Jen is at the orphan, regarding Brown, that can be found in the OUAT chapter. If they were there together, would it make sense for the two of them to take the time to write out letters when they could just pull the other off to the side to chat?

Then again, it may be that they still did this for nostalgic purposes, regarding it as a sort of playful remembrance of when they first got to know eachother. Dunno, just throwing it out there.

If this is true, there are a million places Jen could hide letters to Wendy. Joshua’s Room, The mailbox outside, the window ledge to the basement. The places Wendy could have been in in the house are numerous.

The bed in the basement is the only bed in the house, and the only bed he could rest in. It was probably the room he spent the last weeks of life in, and the room he died in. Many people keep memorials of their family members’ rooms.
But I can’t think of a reason why it would be in the basement. Perhaps Joshua became sensitive to light.

The clothing is nice dress clothing, not something a sick boy would wear to lay in bed all day, so it is probably not the clothing he died in.

Also, I find it telling that Jennifer’s greatest complaint is “He won’t let me leave.” If I were trapped for months with a corpse, the corpse would be my first complaint. It’s been said before, but I think it’s important to remember.

But wait, a letter from Jennifer to Joshua says “This man calls me Joshua, but my true name is Jennifer” or something like that. She doesn’t know who Joshua is.

~

It is a letter from Jennifer to Wendy. It can be found in my blog-post “Document-based Time-line: Before Jennifer Arrived at the Orphanage” (see “Important Resources” in my website header):

16 November

Dear Wendy, my visitor in the window,

Thank you so much for writing to me. The man calls me Joshua, but my name is Jennifer. I’ve been in this room ever since he saved me. He’s a nice person… but he won’t let me leave.

(letter found during “Once Upon a Time” chapter, in the Sickroom, by the lamp)

I don’t know that we can say from this letter, or the others, that Jennifer doesn’t know that the name of Gregory’s son was Joshua. She doesn’t explain it in a letter, true, but she also doesn’t explain that she is not a boy—despite Wendy referring to her first as Joshua and then, in following letters, as Prince—and I doubt that we should take from that the idea that Jennifer doesn’t know that she (Jennifer) is a girl. The letters are all very brief. Perhaps too brief to be realistic, under the circumstances. Perhaps we can reasonably hypothesize that, in her dream, Jennifer remembers only certain parts of letters and other documents.

Considering the fact that this child who looked a lot like Joshua just fell out of the sky, and practically dropped right onto his lap, from an airship no less… …he may have surmised that Joshua had possibly returned to him from heaven

~

The idea that Gregory had rescued Jennifer from the crash-site, and had regarded Jennifer as Joshua returned from heaven, had been raised on Rule of Rose forums in the past, and I used to favor it myself. The problem with it, for me, came when I wrote my blog-post: “When Did the Airship Crash?”

I find it difficult to mesh the probable date of the airship crash (and the newspaper account of the storm) with the dates and entries in Gregory’s journal, and have them together support the idea that Gregory was at the airship crash-site and rescued Jennifer shortly after the crash.

It seems to me that Jennifer, after the airship crash, must have wandered around in the woods for several days before she came to Gregory’s house—perhaps like Hansel and Gretel wandered lost in the woods before finding the Gingerbread House (I never made that connection before, but I think I really like it).

Of course, this doesn’t rule out the possibility that Jennifer TOLD Gregory that she fell from the sky… in that way giving Gregory the idea she was Joshua returned from heaven.