Anatomical heart on the inner upper arm

Consider the wagon with the green shutters that followed the Michaelmas fair from Ely to Doncaster and never once paid the toll-keeper in coin. Inside lived a man called Absalom Pyle, who had been a surgeon's clerk and had helped himself, the way clerks do, to a bundle of drawings from a dead man's lodging. Pages of hearts. Every chamber and ridge, every vessel branching like the roots of an old ash. He pinned them above his cot and copied them onto anyone who paid a shilling and kept still.

The girl who came to him was Nell Tyack, who had walked in from the Fens carrying a letter she could not read, meant for a man who drowned at Sutton Gault. She wanted her own heart drawn. Not for prettiness, she said, but so she would always know where it sat when the wagon rolled on without her. Pyle worked three evenings with one needle and a bottle of soot and water. Grey where the shadow fell, black only along the great vessels, which he drew up over the crook of her arm like a river reaching for its spring.

On the fourth morning he held up the mirror and she laughed, because the heart was smaller than she had pictured, and lighter, as if it had been folded to fit a pocket. She left at noon with the letter still unopened in her apron. Some say she reached Doncaster and learned her letters from a sailor. Some say the wagon is still out on the road. I can tell you only this: when the fair packs up and the lamps go out, you can hear something ticking in the dark behind those green shutters, and it is not a clock.