Matching script quotes along the collarbone

The landlady has finally given up on the damp in Room Four, so I am writing this at the window while the rain comes sideways off the harbour wall. You will laugh, but I have been practising the loops you taught me on the back of the slate, because Mr Pryce's post comes up the hill at nine and I want the lifeboat coxswain's wife to see something steady in my hand.

The crew went out at four when the Gwen Meredith signalled from the Bitter Rocks, and Mother has not stopped pacing since. Father is aboard. You know he always says the sea is a ledger, every debt paid back in its own time, and I have never once believed him until this morning.

The shipping clerk's boy brought word that they had the three men off the rocks, all of them alive, and that the boat came back on one engine with a rope still knotted round the bow. I copied the line he read me from the telegraph form onto the back of this page so I would not forget it: For them all risk it all. Underneath, in my own bad hand, I wrote the thing I could not say to Mother: because of her, I will not fall. I think you will know which her I mean.

Come home on Thursday. Bring the good scissors.

Love, Bea