Realistic portrait of a woman in lace veil

The Leavers frame jammed again on Tuesday, so Mr Oakes has moved me to the finishing room at the back of the mill, where the black net comes off the machines and gets picked clean by hand. It is dull work and it hurts the eyes, but nobody watches a girl with a bodkin in a room that smells of paraffin and wet wool. The job on my bench is a veil for a customer in Lille, a wide oblong of black silk net with a border of sprigs. Mrs Pell drew the design herself, and she wants the flowers so dense that the light will come through only as a scatter of pinpricks.

I have spent four days on one corner. Each sprig has seven petals and each petal must be worked in the same thread, or Mrs Pell holds the whole piece to the window and sighs at me. Father would laugh to see it. He said the mill would make us all blind by thirty, and I told him I would rather be blind making something than sharp-eyed making nothing. He did not argue, which is how I knew he was afraid.

Yesterday, with the lamp behind it, I held the veil up and the sprigs ran together into a face, two dark holes for eyes and a mouth stitched shut with a thread of fern. It frightened me until I saw it was only the lace doing what lace does. I went back to my corner and added one thistle, the small one we used to draw on the backs of our letters, so you would know it was mine.

Enclosed is a square of spare net with the same thistle picked out in a knot I tied with my left hand. If this reaches you in Calais, hold it to the light and count seven petals. I have not told anyone else. Your loving sister, Win.