Rose and numbered banner on the hand

The shield was my father's idea. He had a tin sign from the Co-operative nailed to the shed door, a shield with a dotted rim, and he said a rose inside a shield was worth more than a rose in a pot. He painted the numbers round the edge himself, a hundred, fifty, ten, five hundred, whatever the bookmaker's ledger had last written in red. Nobody could say what they meant. Ada said they meant nothing at all, which was the only honest thing anyone said that summer.

On the last Friday a stranger in a grey overcoat put down half a crown on a rose he had never seen and asked for the odds. Ada looked at the bloom, then at the old leaves curling at the foot of the wall, and counted under her breath. Forty-one petals. She told him forty. Then she tore one off, folded it into his palm, and closed his fingers over it. He lost. She took his coin, bought our father a new pair of gloves, and pressed the stolen petal flat inside the shield, behind the ten, where no bookmaker would think to look.