Ornate cross on the back of a hand

The wind has finally dropped, so I can hold the pen still enough to write. Mr Rhys has me on the chapel inside the castle walls at Caerdeg, the one the Corvin family let fall down after the fire. You would hate the state of it. Nettles grow through the nave, and the east window is a frame with no glass, just sky. But the old smith's gate is still hanging on its hinges, and that is where I have been since Monday, scraping lichen off a cross-shaped finial with a brass brush.

The finial is the size of a teacup, scrolled all over as if someone had piped icing onto iron and let it set. Every curl ends in a little hook, and the centre is a bloom with three petals pinched together. Mr Rhys says the smith cut it with a file and a patience nobody has now. I thought about that for a whole afternoon, with my knuckles bleeding from the wire brush, and decided I did not want to be the one who let the rust finish what he started.

Yesterday the lichen came away in one piece, and under it was a sharp, clean line, bluish where the iron had been oiled a century ago. Mr Rhys saw it first and went quiet, then sent me to fetch the tin of linseed. I cannot explain why that small thing made me cry in the middle of a ruin, but I did.

Tonight I am going back up with the lantern. The committee wants the gate painted black by the spring fair, and I have told them they will have to wait until I finish the scrollwork, every curl, even the little ones at the bottom that nobody will ever look at. Do not tell Mother I said so.

Your loving niece, Edie