Monstera leaf tattoo on the foot

The cutting arrived on the Tuesday boat, wrapped in a wet copper sheet and a page torn from the Gazette, and it has been in the lantern room ever since because the kitchen is too cold for it. Harold says it is a waste of a window. I say the window is the only place it gets enough light to bother with us. Its leaves are the size of my palm already, split right through as if someone had cut them with dressmaker's shears, and I have stopped apologising to it for the wind.

You will want to know about the boy. He came up the rock path on Thursday with a sack over one shoulder and asked if the keeper was in. He had been a deckhand on the Maritana out of Falmouth, and the ship went down off the Stones in March. He did not drown, which is more than can be said for the captain, and he carried this plant the whole way from the Azores in a tin bucket because it was the only thing he had left of the captain's. Harold gave him a bunk in the store and a shilling for the walk back.

I have been turning the leaf over in my fingers while I write. It is a tough green thing, but the holes in it are so clean that you can see the light through them, and I keep thinking they are the only honest part of anything that came off that ship. Send me a letter when you can, and tell me whether Mother has finally given up on the parlour fern.

Yours in haste, Edie