Pink hearts and swirls on an ankle

The sea has been flat for three days, which the mate says is the worst thing a ship can do, because a flat sea leaves a man nothing to do but think. I have thought about the tin of ribbons you put in my kit. We are four hundred miles past the Azores, the cook has run out of anything fit to eat, and so I have been sitting on the hatch cover with a pencil and the back of a spoiled chart.

Last night the lamp swung and the ink bottle slid across the page, and when I wiped it up it left a curl like the ones Mother used to make on ribbon ends with the scissors. I kept going from there. Five hearts, I drew, one for each of us, though I cannot say which of us is which. Mr Pruett looked over my shoulder and said a heart drawn on a chart is the sure sign of a man who is either drunk or in love, and I told him I was neither, only bored.

Tomorrow the boy Eli is going to cut hearts from red card out of the purser's store and stick them to the galley door for Sunday. The purser says it is foolish. I told him it is only paper. He did not argue, which is how I knew he agreed.

I am sending this with the drawing folded inside so you can see the swirls I put round them. They are the wake, Nell, the way the water closes over the place where the ship has been and tries to remember it. It will be a long time before we are home, but the wake always catches up in the end.