Lace feather on a forearm

Her trade was letters. Men who could not write came to the van with a sweetheart's name, a debt, or an apology they had rehearsed all the way across the field, and Ada wrote for them in the round hand a nun in Nottingham had beaten into her. She looped the capitals into scrolls and filled the margins with ferns and curls until each page looked like a lace collar. Nobody paid for the margins. She did them anyway, because a plain page felt like lying.

Teddy Osgood came in one wet evening with a letter to his mother that he had never managed to send. He wanted it to say sorry without using the word, and he wanted it to look like something a mother would keep in a drawer. Ada wrote the words plainly, then drew the feather down the side of the sheet: a single hair-fine line for the quill, and on either side a vane of dots and lace that thickened where the ink pooled and thinned towards the tip. It took her until the lamp guttered. Teddy watched the whole time and didn't speak.

He came back in March with a postcard from Skegness. His mother had kept the letter. She had written on the back of the card that she knew the handwriting was his, but it was the feather she had recognised first, because it looked like something he would have drawn at nine years old. Ada turned the card over in her hands and then put the quill down on the step, where a single bead of ink dried slowly into a dot.