Lioness face on a forearm

The lioness came up the Ely road in March on a cart with four wheels, and by Lady Day the whole house had stopped talking about anything else. Brother Osric says she was a gift from a Crusader's widow, though the porter swears she was bought at Lynn for the price of a good ox. Either way she lives in the outer court behind a grille of ash-wood, and I am ordered to draw her so the abbot can judge whether the Psalter's great initial is worthy of the bishop.

I have drawn her forty times now, in charcoal, on the backs of old rentals. The face is the easy part. The ears are two soft cups, the brow a low hill of fur, the whiskers pale as thread against the cheek. What I cannot make hold is the eyes. Every morning she looks at me through the grille as though I owe her a debt, and every morning my lines go slack and I have drawn a sleepy cat.

Yesterday I stopped trying to be clever. I sat on the cold step with the ink pot warming in my sleeve and simply looked back at her until my own eyes watered. She did not blink once. Then I understood that I had been shading the fur, when what the eye wants is the dark ring pressed into the grey, and the small wet light at the edge where something has decided to stay.

I finished the initial last night. The abbot wept a little, which I did not expect, and then asked whether the lion would look at the bishop the same way. I told him it would look at whoever stood closest. Brother Osric laughed, and the lioness, I swear, turned her great head and looked straight at me, as if the joke were hers.

Yours in haste, Thomas