Script word Girl on a forearm

You will not believe what came down to the counting house this week. Four hundred notes of the old Tallow mint, bound with a band cut from a bicycle tyre, pulled out of the drowned fishmarket wrapped in oilcloth. The head cashier has bad eyes, so the Vizier's clerk handed the bundle to me. I sat on an upturned crate by the lamp and went through every note with my thumb, the way you taught me.

Somewhere in the second hundred I found a slip of ledger paper folded small and tucked against the band. On it, in ink gone brown at the edges, one word, looped large the way the Wardens signed their pardons: Girl. I thought it a joke at first. Then I saw the fold. It was the same square fold the river women use to pass messages under the Ninth Bridge, the one you and I used when we were children and swore we would never grow into anything dull.

I did not tell the clerk. I put the slip inside my own coat and counted the rest of the notes twice, and the total came out four notes short. Nobody in the cellar has noticed yet. I have not decided whether that makes me honest or makes me the same as whoever wrote that word.

Come Sunday. Bring your mother's shears and the good thread. I want to see what the river women look like when they are not hiding.

Yours in ink, Odile