Compass star mandala on an inner arm

The chart for the Mary Ellen came back from the engraver with the rose all wrong. Mr Pardoe wants the compass star at the centre of the sheet, eight points thick with ink, and the rings round it done in the old way, every petal twice. I told him the lines would blur at that size. He said the ring was the whole point, that a captain looks for the rose before he looks at the coast. So I have spent three nights at the table in the back room with the lamp turned low, pricking dots with a needle for the stippling so the ornament catches the light like frost.

Your mother says you have not written since Lisbon. I am not cross, only tired of hearing it from her. Send word by the carrier at Penzance, even a line.

Here is the thing I wanted to tell you. Last Thursday the castle-keeper's boy came down to the quay with a rolled tin of rubbings from the ruin on the headland, the ones the antiquarians pay him for. Among them was a stone from the gatehouse where someone carved a star like ours, rings and all, its points as long as a man's forearm. Nobody knows who cut it. The boy says the sea has been eating the wall for three hundred years and the star is the last part still standing above the tideline.

I drew it out for Pardoe that same night, and the rose came right at last. I think it is because I stopped trying to be neat and let the dots go where the stone had worn away. Come home before the autumn gales. The chart is pinned above my bed now, and I look at it before I sleep, the way you look for the pole.

Your sister, Nell