Nautical stars and wings flash sheet

The rain has stopped on Dock Road and the gulls have gone quiet, so I am writing by the lamp while Mam snores through the wall. You will laugh, but I went back to Silas's room above the chandler's again. He keeps a sheet of flash pinned by the window, stars in blue and red with black outlines, and he says they are for men who have been a long way and mean to come home.

I asked him why there were so many. He licked his thumb, tapped the page and said a star is only a star until somebody steers by it. Then he showed me the wings at the bottom, drawn in black ink with a flash of blue, and told me they were not for anyone who had come home, only for those still out there. I did not like that. He laughed and said I was too soft for a port town.

Silas drew all of it at night, he says, because the lamps on the water keep him company. The little scattered stars, he told me, are the ones that fell off the Marigold's rigging the night she went down, and he gathered them up in pencil so nobody else would have to. I believed him for about a minute, then he winked and I knew he was pulling my leg.

I have folded one of the small sheets into this envelope. Peel it off if you are too stubborn to sit still for the real thing. Count the stars when you do. There are eleven on the page and I am keeping the twelfth for when you get back. Yours, Lottie.