Hummingbird and roses flash design

The hummingbird would not sit still for me, so I have had to draw it from memory and from the three dead ones Mr Pargeter keeps in a drawer of his cabinet. You will laugh, but I pinned the poor things to a board and fanned their wings with a feather to learn where the feathers lay. The Captain's wife wants roses beside it, the old pink Bourbon sort from her garden at Wrexley, and she wants them red, though roses never come out of a plate the colour you remember.

I have worked the scrollwork first, as Mr Pargeter taught me, because the curls must be bold enough to hold the eye before the bird does. Acanthus leaves, he calls them, though none grew in any garden I have seen. I spent an evening cutting the filigree line by line with my lamp smoking, and the ink kept bleeding into the hatching until I wept over a sheet and nearly threw it on the fire.

Last Thursday the bird came back to me in a dream, or perhaps it was only the smell of the roses Mrs Bellamy sent up from the kitchen. Whichever it was, I found the wing angle I had been missing. The beak runs out long and thin, reaching for the bloom at the top like a man reaching for a letter he has not quite decided to post.

I am sending the finished plate by Monday's coach, sepia and red, with the wedding card tucked in its folds. Tell Father it is his fault I have become such a fussy draughtsman. And keep the ink off your gloves this time.

Yours ever, Constance