Lace garter and bow on a thigh

Mr Haddon has finally let me take the Leavers machine on the night shift, so you can stop fussing about my eyes. The frame runs hot after midnight and the bobbins chatter like starlings, but I prefer it to days. Nobody watches you at night except the moon through the skylight, and she never asks what you are making.

What I am making, between you and me, is a garter. The order sheet calls it a christening trim, but Mrs Tebbutt sent a sketch of a scalloped band with a small bow at its centre, drawn on the back of a coal bill. The loops of the bow are fine as eyelashes, and she wants them shaded grey, like pencil rubbed with a thumb. I told her lace does not take shading, it takes thread. She said then I would have to think harder.

So I have been thinking. The scallops fall in little bowls, one after another, and I count them under my breath the way Mother counted stitches on Sunday shawls. Eleven to the yard at the narrow edge, thirteen where it loosens. At the end of the shift I tied a bow from a spare length of black silk, and it sat in my palm so neatly I nearly laughed out loud.

Tomorrow Mr Haddon will send it off on the early cart. I wanted you to know there is a bit of my own handiwork in it, and that the grey was my doing after all.

Your loving sister, Ada