Medusa portrait on upper arm

The hedge along Coldharbour Lane has gone to ruin since you left, and Mr Pryce swears it is the grey lady's doing, though nobody has seen her since the spring floods. Yesterday I took the skimmed milk up the path behind the wheelwright's, as you used to, and found the bracken where the old quarry fills alive with snakes. Grass snakes, I told myself. Dozens of them, heads raised, all turned the one way like a congregation at the back of a church.

Mrs Ashdown had her shutters closed, which she never does. She said she had been drawing and would not let me see the page. Her fingers were black with charcoal to the knuckle, and she kept rubbing at the corner of her mouth as if she had tasted something bitter. I asked her plainly what she was making. She said a face, and that the trouble with faces was that people will look at them.

I stayed for tea. I will not pretend I was brave; I kept my eyes on the teapot. When at last I lifted my head, she had turned her chair to the window and was gazing out at the dark line of the trees, and in the cracks between her floorboards three small heads had come up, tongues going, watching the same way she was.

I have left the pail on her step. This morning it was empty and scraped clean, and pinned to the door was a sketch of me with my eyes shut, smiling as I never have in my life. Come home before the frost, Tom. Bring the good lamp, and do not look at anything you cannot put down.

Your loving sister, Nell