Adventure is out there script lettering

The morning coach left for Harrowmere without you, so I have put your satchel behind the counter where the damp cannot reach it. Your brass compass is in the top drawer with the stamps. Your mother says you have been reading the old charts under your blanket again by candlelight. I forgive you that, provided you write back and tell me what lies past the Lantern Reef.

I will confess something I have never told her. When I was your age I had the same charts and the same stubborn chin, and I stood on the quay at Sallow Cross every evening for one whole summer, waiting for a ship that would take me somewhere other than the tide tables. Nobody came for me. The vessel I finally boarded was a tea barge that smelled of tar and onions, and it carried me only as far as the next market town. I spent forty years telling myself that trip had been a failure.

Then last winter a cartographer from the northern academy wrote asking whether I still had the drawing of the drowned bell tower I once sent them. I dug it out of the cabinet and found, pencilled on the back in my own careful hand, a line I had forgotten writing: Adventure is out there. I had copied it from a signboard above the chandler's door and never once acted on it. I took its appearance in my own handwriting as a sign that I had been waiting for permission all along.

So here is your permission, from a woman who was too slow to use her own. The coach returns on Thursday. Bring your boots and leave your fears in the drawer with the compass. Write to me from wherever the road takes you, and do not spare me the cold details.

Your loving Nan, Mabel Thorne, Postmistress of Sallow Cross