Feather with 'free yourself' script design

The gull came down on the slipway this morning with its left wing folded wrong, and Mr Pryce from the chandlery said it would never fly again. I sat with it on the wet stones for an hour while the tide crept up the steps. When I finally lifted it, a long grey primary had come loose and stuck to my sleeve, barred with black at the tip, and I have pinned it inside the lid of your old hatbox where you will find it when you come home for the regatta.

I know what you wrote on the card last spring. Free yourself, live your dreams, in your big looping hand, as if the words were a dare thrown across the kitchen table. I laughed at you then. I am not laughing now. Father has nets to mend until October, Mother's hands are worse than she admits, the rent on the loft is due, and I have been counting these things the way Mr Pryce counts rope.

Yesterday I walked to the end of the breakwater alone and read the timetable pinned in the post office window: the Glasgow boat, the Cork boat, the night ferry that leaves at six with nobody aboard but mailbags. The fare is four pounds ten. I have four pounds eleven in the teapot.

So I am going. I will write from wherever the first ticket takes me, and if you are reading this with the feather in your palm, do not tell Father the truth. Tell him the gull flew off, which is nearly true.

Your loving sister, Nell