Pink flowers with a script letter A on the leg

The abbot has finally let me near the psalter for the Lady Chapel, though he watches my brush the way a hawk watches a vole. Brother Osric wanted the great A of Ave left plain in black ink, as the rule demands, but I was told to make it pleasing. So I have made it pleasing. I painted the mallows we pressed in the cloister garden the summer we were novices, five blooms in rose and deep wine, their throats dark as lamp soot, and I set the letter among them like a bee that has forgotten its hive.

Brother Osric says the teal washes behind the flowers look like pond water after rain. I told him that was the point. The blue-green I ground from the malachite Prior Anselm brought back from the north, and it bled into the damp vellum before I could lift it, so the splashes spread wider than I intended. I could have scraped them away with the knife. Instead I let the colour go where it wanted, as the abbess says we must let the Spirit do with our work and our sins alike.

On the last evening, a dried bud fell from the mallow stalk I had pinned above my desk for reference and landed under the lower curve of the A, still soft, still the exact pink I had spent a week matching. I thought about lifting it off with a feather. Then I thought that whoever opens this book in two hundred years will find one thing in it that nobody planned, and I left it lying there, damp and bright, and went down to ring for vespers.

Tell Mother I am eating properly. Tell her the letter is for Agnes, though Osric thinks it is for the Virgin.

Your sister in the scriptorium, Joan