Floral high-heel shoe line drawing

The last of the lasts came off the bench this morning, and I have spent the whole afternoon deciding whether Mrs Ashdown will be pleased or frightened. Her heel is a stiletto, thin as a knitting needle and nearly as tall as my forearm, and she wants it covered in flowers. Not painted, mind. Stitched. Every petal is cut from the same soft kid and pricked with a bradawl, so the veins come out like the markings on a seed packet.

I worked on it by the stove while the lane outside filled with the kind of snow that makes the Tollgate look like a pudding. Father would have said a shoe like that belongs on a stage, not on a woman who walks to the post office. I thought of him each time I cut a swirl, those curling shapes that run from the toe up the back like a vine that cannot decide where to climb.

When I finally fitted the last leaf, I stood the pair beside the window and the snow had stopped. Mrs Ashdown came in stamping, saw them on the counter, and sat down without a word. She turned one over and traced a dotted petal with her finger, slowly, the way you would check a letter for your own name.

"My mother wore a pair like these to the Assembly in 1911," she said. "I never told you because I never had the nerve to ask anyone to make me a pair."

I did not tell her I had copied the pattern from the photograph I found tucked inside her ledger. Some things are better left in the stitching.

Yours in haste, Ruth