Lion and savanna sunset on a forearm

The last of the wagons went out past Lenham this morning, and I have stopped pretending the Brightwater Travelling Menagerie is anything but finished. Nobody bought a ticket on Saturday. Old Caspar sold the bay mare to a farmer near Ashford for less than her feed bill, and the boy who swept the sawdust has gone to work on the docks.

Samson is the trouble. He's eleven now and his mane has gone thin at the edges, but he still lifts his head when the evening light comes low across the field behind the paddock. You remember how he used to walk the ring at four o'clock, the whole company trailing behind him, the elephant at the back with her trunk resting on Tilly's shoulder. Last night he walked the length of the hedge with the others following, the goats, the old camel, the two ponies, all of them in a line against that orange sky, and nobody had told them to. I stood at the gate and counted them the way a schoolmaster counts children at the end of a trip.

Caspar says we'll sell the cages to a scrapyard in Maidstone on Thursday and keep the van running until the money runs out. I told him I'd go with it to the coast, if he'd let me take Samson the long way round through the marshes, where there's no fence and nobody to pay admission. He said that was a fine story and I ought to write it down.

So I am. Come and find me at Dungeness if you're passing. I'll be the one with the lion and the setting sun.

Love, Ada