Blue floral bouquet on a forearm

The kiln took the whole of Tuesday and half of Wednesday, and still the cobalt would not sit right. Father says the oxide from the Saxon stock is too grey, that it sinks into the glaze like ink into wet paper and comes out smudged at the edges. So I have been painting the peony again, the big one at the top of the tile, and this time I let the brush hold its own breath before each petal, the way you taught me on the quay with the rope.

The order from the Amsterdam merchant is for twelve panels of six tiles each, a garden to set above a hearth in a house on the Herengracht. The merchant's clerk came to look and asked whether the flowers were real. I said they were not, that no real flower has such patient leaves, and he laughed and paid the deposit in silver. I did not tell him the truth, which is that I copied the bouquet from the sketch you left on the windowsill, the one with the forked stem and the little three-petalled bloom at its foot.

I have kept a pale highlight in every petal, a thumb's width of bare white where the glaze runs thin. Father thinks it a flaw. I think it is where the light got in. When the panels are fired and wrapped in straw, I will send one to the harbour office with your name on the crate, though I expect the clerk will open it first and lose a tile on the stairs.

Come home before the thaw, or at least write. The peony is nearly finished, and it is blue all the way through.

Yours in ink and clay, Marijke