Faith script on the wrist

The Chancellor sent for me on Tuesday and put a brass pen in my hand before I had sat down. The gate of Ostmere has cracked along its lintel since the flood, and the masons want a word cut above the arch before the autumn fairs bring the carts through. He wants it in the old hand, the looped capitals the kings used on their seals, and he wants the word itself to be Faith, because the council has decided that a town which has lost its bridge and two of its granaries had better be reminded what it is for.

I have spent three evenings on the first F alone. The loop must swing wide enough to hold a thumb, but the stroke must thin as it climbs, or the whole letter looks as if it is leaning on the wind. The a came easily after that. The i I cannot yet abide, since the dot wants to float and the stem wants to sink, and every draft I make has the two pulling in opposite directions. Master Ilse says that is simply what faith looks like on paper, and laughed when I did not.

Here is the strange part. Yesterday the grey ink ran thin in the pot, so I thinned it with rainwater, and the trial strokes faded toward the final h like breath on a cold window. The council man studied them and asked whether that was deliberate. I said it was not, and then I said it was, because the word ought to seem a little further off each time it is read, as if the people who wrote it had grown tired of waiting to be answered.

I am sending you a copy on vellum. Keep it, if you like, and tell me whether it looks like something a person could believe in.

Your loving brother, Aldous