Anemone and quote on the ribs

She carried it up to the lee rail, where Mr Oakes the bosun was splicing rope with his sleeves rolled to the elbow. 'Who wrote this?' she asked. 'Dr Lowry. Went quiet somewhere below the Forties and never really talked to anyone after.' He turned the page for her. Beside the words was a drawing of an anemone, its petals opened like a struck match, the stem bent as if it had been pulled toward the light. 'He drew one every day. Said it was the only thing aboard still growing.'

That night Nell took a seed packet from the bottom of her trunk, a gift from a Liverpool nursery, and pushed three seeds into a cracked biscuit tin of ship's soil. She set it on the galley step where the stove's warmth reached and watered it from her own tin cup. Each time the sea heaved, the tin slid across the planks, and each time she caught it, one hand flat over the earth, until her wrist ached and the swell eased.

At Port Adelaide the air smelled of wheat dust and hot tar. The anemone had put up one green leaf, then a second. Nell wrapped the tin in the surgeon's notebook and left it on the quay with a note for whoever came next: keep it in the sun. Whatever slept in him, she thought, could go on sleeping while something bright was kept awake beside it.