Compass rose with circular quote on upper back

They had lost him in the fog off the Skerries three nights before. Everyone in Saltcombe said the same thing: the sea takes the careless and gives back the lucky. Morwen did not believe in luck. She climbed to the chart-room above the net loft, unrolled the great sheet her father had made, and found the compass rose he had inked at its centre, eight points drawn in solid black and a fine grid of rings around them like a spider's web. Beneath it he had written, in square capitals, the words he painted on every chart: not all who wander are lost. He used to say a rose was not for finding north. It was for remembering that north would always be there.

She carried the sheet down to the harbour wall at low water and pinned its corners with stones. Below the wall the sea had left a line of wrack across the Skerries, a crooked arrow pointing west into the grey, and she copied it onto the paper with the dividers, one wet mark at a time. Then she took the Gannet's spare lantern and walked the rocks in the direction the arrow gave her.

At first light she found him on a ledge with his back against a stone, his lamp dead, his hands still knotted around a length of rope. He had been waiting, he said later, for the rose to come up out of the murk. He had taken it for a dream. Morwen told him only that he had taken long enough, and helped him to his feet.