Rebel Alliance emblem on a thigh

The snow came over the pass on Tuesday and has not stopped since, so the Crown and Lantern is full of people who were only meant to stay the night. There are eleven of us now, counting the two sisters from the dairy and the surveyor who keeps apologising for his boots. Your father's hall clock stopped the same afternoon the road closed, and I have not had the heart to wind it. Mostly I count the logs. Forty-two left in the back store, and I have started measuring the fire in fingers instead of hours.

Last night a stranger came in with the blizzard on his shoulders. He would not take a room. He sat by the hearth with a canvas roll across his knees and asked, very politely, whether I knew anyone who could mend a circle of pressed tin. He had a dented disc the size of a saucer, with two curved wings folded around an upright bar like a mast. Someone had hammered the wings back into shape more than once. I told him the smith in Carrow had died in the spring. He nodded as though that was the answer he expected.

Then he turned the disc so the firelight caught the scoring along its rim, and I saw what he had been protecting. The marks were a map, scratched by a child's hand, of every farm between here and the coast, each with a small notch beside it. He said the notches were names. I did not ask whose.

He left before first light, down the eastern track with the disc inside his coat. I have left a lamp in the window. If you come home by Friday, bring the good tin snips from the cellar. I think the clock might run again if we tried, and I would like to hear it tick in a house that is still ours.

Yours, Ilse