Black ink butterfly with dark eye spots

Her grandfather had drawn for a living, though never for anyone who paid him properly. Lepidoptera mostly, copied from cabinet specimens in a museum that no longer had a building. He worked with a crow quill and a bottle of Indian ink he bought by the case, and he liked the wing veins best, because, he said, a wing was the only honest map a creature carried. The auctioneer wanted to know whether the sheet with the four dark eyes was the one he had signed in the corner.

It was not signed. Nell knew this because she had turned every sheet over a hundred times, looking for the initials that would make the thing worth money. What she found instead, on the back of the spotted wing, was a pencilled line in her grandmother's hand: Keep this one out of the rain.

She laughed, once, at the empty stall. Then she slid the drawing into a folder, pulled her coat over her head and walked it through the wet streets to the post office, where a clerk with reading glasses on a chain took her parcel and weighed it with the care of someone handling a bird.