Script quote on the back of a leg

The tide took the eastern archive last night, so I am writing this on the back of a tax roll, which the clerks say is the only paper left dry in Caddow. Your room above the bakehouse is gone, I am sorry. I went down at first light with Master Hollis and we pulled three ledgers and a cat out of the mud. The cat was the less trouble.

Hollis does not sleep. He sits on the harbour steps with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead and recites the tide tables from memory, though the sea has stopped keeping to them. Yesterday the queen's envoy came from Veyne with his silver seal and offered us a ship if we would sign over the salt pans. Hollis read the offer twice, then asked the envoy whether he had ever watched a sunrise from the water. The envoy did not answer. Hollis said that was a pity, because the sun still comes up over Caddow, drowned or not.

I have been thinking about that since. We have lost the bakehouse, the archive and most of the lower wall, yet every morning the light still climbs the bell tower and lands on the water like a dropped coin. So I copied the line onto the chapel wall in my worst lettering, under the crack where the plaster gave way: The sun will rise and we will try again. Hollis says it is not poetry, only a promise, and that is why it is worth carving.

Tell Mother I am eating. Tell her the cat is called Tithe.

Your brother, Aldo