Love is All or Nothing script on forearm

The ink in the Queen's ledger has gone thick again in this damp, so I am writing with the good pen, the one Father gave me, which you always said was too fine for anything but love letters. Well, I have a love letter of sorts to finish. The Chancellor wants the motto cut above the river gate before the spring fair, and he wants it in the plain court hand, as dull as a ploughman's boots. I refused. I wrote it the way Mother wrote her name on the back of your christening shawl, all looping tails that run off the edge of the page, and I gave the last word a small open heart at its tail because nobody in Aldermere reads anything closely enough to object.

Love is all or nothing, the old queen used to say, and she said it to the masons, to the bailiffs, once to a goose that would not leave her garden. I stood behind her chair with the sand box and thought it sounded like a threat. Now I think it was an instruction.

Hobb, the mason, asked me last night whether the heart should be cut deep or shallow. I told him shallow. A deep heart holds water, and the rain fills it, and then the whole word goes green with moss before anyone has learned to read it.

Come home at midsummer. The gate will be finished, I have kept you a seat at the table, and I have kept a pot of ink wet for you on the sill.

Your sister, Idris