Gold metallic scallop motif on a thigh

The shells were plain then, grey scallops off the coast, bored through at the hinge so a boy could thread a cord. Anselm had the job of scoring their ribs with a bone point, fan after fan, until each shell looked like a folded hand fan drying in the sun. The abbot said pilgrims needed no finery, only a shell to show they had walked. But Anselm had a scrap of gold leaf left from the Virgin's halo, and on the night of the first hard frost he laid it along the ribs of seven shells, each one overlapping the next, and set them out on the cloth by the door to cure.

In the morning the abbot found them and picked one up to scold him, then did not. He turned it to the window and the light ran down the ribs like water off a roof. He said nothing for three days. On the fourth he sent the shells out with the pilgrims going west, and the gold went with them, stitched onto cloaks and hats and the hems of a great many coats, until the whole road seemed to be catching fire in the rain.

Anselm never learned how far they went. Years later a carter brought word that one had been found on a riverbank in the south, its gold worn to a faint blush, the scallops underneath still sharp where the shells above had kept the wet away. Nobody here believes it. I have held that shell myself, and under the top ribs the gold still shines.