Anchor and sword with pink flowers on thigh

Hettie was a Whitby cook's daughter who married a boy from the herring boats, and the sea took him the winter after the wedding. The bosun sent up his anchor in a handcart, because it was all that came home, and Hettie decided an anchor belonged in the high lake where a woman could sink her grief. She was not a big woman. She dragged that iron up the pass road for nine days, with her brother's cavalry sword strapped across her back for company and for the wolves.

The snow came early that October. Her rope frayed through on the ninth morning, so she bound the coil around the shank and lashed the sword crosswise to the stock to make a crutch of the pair of them. At the top the lake was iron-grey and frozen solid. She could not sink anything through that ice, so she drove the sword point first into the rock, hung the anchor from its hilt, and sat down beside it to wait for the thaw.

When spring came the flowers came up through the scree in pink and magenta, thickest on the side where the sun reached the blade first. Hettie went down the pass one morning and never came back up. Some say she married a drover in Kendal. Some say she went to sea after all. The anchor is still hanging there, rust brown now, and the walkers tie ribbons to the hilt.