Red heart with black scrollwork

The cart got over the pass on Tuesday, though only just. Mr Haskett's mare went lame at the second hairpin and we spent three hours under the overhang waiting for the snow to ease off the road. I spent it looking at the ironwork on the gate of the inn at the top, which is the only thing up there anyone bothered to make pretty. Black scrolls curl back on themselves like ferns, the same pattern twice, one side for each hand of the smith. In the middle, bolted at the crossbar, sits a heart of red enamel that someone has polished until it looks wet.

I asked the landlady who made it. She said her husband's father, who was a farrier before he was anything else, never once made a gate in forty years without a heart somewhere in it. "So nobody takes it for a prison," she said, and laughed the way people up here laugh, all at once, as if they've been saving it.

I have been thinking about that all the way down the far side. The scrolls, I mean, not the heart. Everything in them turns back toward the middle. Nothing runs straight off the edge. I suppose that is the only way to make iron look as though it is meant to be lifted.

Bring your good boots when you come up in June. There is a second gate further along, and I want you to tell me whether the heart on it is red or only painted that way.

Yours in the wind, Agnes