Realistic roses and revolver on a thigh

The Marigold cleared Gravesend on Tuesday with the tide, a hold full of wool and a passenger list that has kept me busy. Among the cabin trunks came a flat box wrapped in oilcloth, addressed to a Mr Thomas Hale care of the Valparaiso agents. The purser told me it held a revolver, a gift for a wedding that will not now take place, and I have kept it in the strongroom since. He says a great many things, and I have stopped believing most of them.

Every evening a young widow sits on the bench by the second-class companionway with a sketchbook on her knee, drawing gulls off the wake. Last night she turned the page for me to see. She had drawn the revolver as it lies in the box, its grip scrolled in silver, and she had wound a rose climbing briar round the barrel so the blooms hid the hammer. Every petal was shaded with a stub of pencil she kept sharpening on her penknife. I asked her why roses. She said that a thing meant to hurt someone ought at least to be worth looking at, and that a briar grows whether you tend it or not.

This morning she came to the strongroom with her hat already tied on and asked whether the box might be re-sent to the agents at Valparaiso unopened. I said it could. She did not ask for the key, and she did not ask what I thought of the drawing. She only asked whether the sea was always this grey off the Horn, and I said it was, and she nodded as though I had given her the answer she wanted.

I have enclosed the drawing. Keep it somewhere dry. I shall write again from Montevideo.

Your loving brother, William