Ornate anchor and cross design

Thirty years back there was a silversmith on Saltgate Quay called Ada Penhallow, who could hammer a filigree curl so fine you'd swear it breathed. A widow came to her one wet March carrying a bosun's anchor, pitted green with weed, and a request. Cut my husband's cross into the shank, she said, and make the ovals hold something. Ada asked what. The widow put down a folded paper no bigger than a fingernail and walked out before the kettle boiled.

Ada worked by the gas lamp for nine nights. She beaded each oval with tiny silver knots and stippled the flukes until they looked like spray under moonlight, and every night she heard the tide come up under the quay and go back down without him. On the tenth night she found a hollow cut into the crown of the anchor, and inside it was no letter. Just a pencilled bet on a torn chart: one more crossing, then the cross comes home. The pencil had smudged, but the date was clear enough.

The widow never came back for it. Ada kept the anchor on her sill, polished, facing the water, and when the lamps on the quay go out at two she still sets it that way. The cross was never meant for a grave, you see. It was meant for the way home. Now there's your lamp, and that's your tale, and the first round's on the house, which means it's on me.