Courage, dear heart script and bird on wrist

I had been sent to repoint the arrow slit so the rain would stop running down into the chapel. Old Dafydd, who had cut stone for the estate for forty years, had scratched a line of words above that slit before his chest gave out, and nobody had read them properly since the lichen took most of the letters. On the third morning I scraped the green away with a flat knife and found them: Courage, dear heart.

Beneath the words a swift had built a nest of mud and feathers. When I pressed the knife too close, it flew straight at my face, then swung away over the valley as though it had only wanted me to look up. Dafydd's daughter had left for Cardiff the year he died and never came back for his tools. I wondered whether she had ever known what the words had cost him to cut, or whether he had carved them for nobody at all.

I finished the joint at dusk with the nest still warm above me. I wrote the same two lines on the back of my timesheet and slid it under Mrs Pryce's door, though I could not have said who it was meant for. When I left the castle that evening, the swift was already back on its ledge, one wing lifted, as if to see whether I would climb again.