Script and silhouette on upper back

The lamp at Skerrow Point went out again on Tuesday, and I sat in the dark with your old brass telescope across my knees, waiting for a light that wasn't coming. Mother says you're as stubborn as the tide, and I've told her she's right, because the tide does turn in the end. Eleven months now since the Marigold left the Humber with you aboard, and I have crossed off every one of them on the calendar above the stove.

I took the Marigold's old sailing plans down from the shed loft yesterday and laid them on the kitchen table. Your sketch of a schooner is still pinned in the corner, the one you drew on the back of the tide tables when you were nine, with a captain's profile and a ship sitting inside his skull like a thought he couldn't put down. Days went by like paper in the wind, you wrote in your last letter, and I laughed, because you never wrote poetry unless you were homesick or half drunk on rum.

Mrs Fenwick says the Marigold put in at Valparaiso in March. A man at the chandlery swears he saw her name stencilled on a crate of lamp oil bound north. So on Saturday I am going down to the quay to ask the harbourmaster what he knows, and if he knows nothing, I will ask the gulls.

Come home for the autumn gales, or send word. The kettle is always on.

Your loving sister, Nell