Portrait tattoo with bladed hands on calf

You will not believe the week we have had at the fair. The Hallam sisters' dancing bear went lame on Monday, and the big top has a hole the size of a cart where the rain got in. Then the new hand arrived, the one Mr Penhallow wrote to you about. He came up the cobbles on Tuesday with a canvas bag and a face like wet slate, and when he pulled off his gloves I dropped every pin in my mouth. There are no fingers there, only two pairs of shears set into the wrists, bright as spoons and worn thin at the edges.

He can trim anything. He cut the vicar's yew into a swan in one afternoon and never once scratched the bark. Yesterday he folded a sheet of yellow paper with those blades, quick as a card trick, and gave the bakery boy a little boat. The boy set it sailing in the horse trough. When it sank, the boy cried, and the man sat very still on the tailboard with his hands in his lap, as if he had been the one to lose it.

Last night the wind came off the sea and the canvas sagged over the ring. Penhallow told him to fix it or pack his bag. I watched from the wagon steps as he went up the guy ropes in the dark, shears flashing once in the lamplight, and by morning the tear was stitched shut in a seam so neat the ringmaster asked who had done it. He would not take his wages. He asked me for thread instead, and I gave him the blue, the last spool I had.

This morning there was a pair of my trousers on the line, hemmed so straight I could have wept, and a yellow boat folded on my windowsill with a note tucked under its keel. It says only: for the seamstress who did not flinch. The rain has stopped, Marjorie. Come up to the ground tonight and see the show before they take the tent down.

Yours in haste, Edie