Skull, roses and woman design drawing

Ada came out to the Skerry light in the spring of 1887, sent by a printer in Plymouth who wanted designs for mourning cards. She carried a tin of brushes and a bottle of black ink, and she sat at the keeper's kitchen table with the wick turned low, drawing roses for the keeper's wife, Martha, who had buried three sons in three winters. Every night Ada drew a skull, and beside it a woman's face with her eyes shut and one hand lifted to her cheek, as though she were listening for a boat that was already late.

Silas Trewin did not care for it. He said the skull had been in the water too long to be pretty. Ada said the skull was only the face's second thought, and the roses were there to keep the two of them from quarrelling. She washed the petals in lilac and the leaves in a green she made by boiling seaweed, and the hair she left trailing off the edge of the paper, because hair belonged to the sea and would not be told where to stop.

The fog came in on the last night of March, and the lamp went dark at two in the morning. Silas climbed the stair with a candle and found the glass clean, the lamp unlit, and Ada's chair empty with the pen still wet on the page. She had gone down to the landing with the boathouse lantern, the way people do when they hear oars that aren't there. They found the drawing in the morning, pinned under a stone on the table, the ink dry now and the teal hair running right off the paper towards the water. Martha kept it. Some nights, if you lean out past the rail where it's coldest, you can still see that wave in the hair moving towards the mainland, and the hand on the cheek still listening.