Small fine line heart design

We reached the east tower this week, the one Mr Harrow swore had been pointing at the sea since the Armada. Half the north wall came down in the winter, so the stone is raw and pale and smells of wet lime. Yesterday I was on my knees in the window embrasure, scraping out crumbled mortar with a pick no bigger than a knitting needle, when I found it. A heart, cut no deeper than a fingernail and about the width of my thumb. Just one thin line, the way you'd draw one on a steamed-up window.

Harrow says it's nothing, that masons marked their work with all sorts, and perhaps he's right. But the point sits at the bottom exactly where you'd want it, and the top dips the way a child's does when she isn't trying to be neat. I sat there with the lime drying on my hands and thought about whoever stood in that gap a few hundred years ago, bored or frightened or in love, cutting something so small nobody would ever see it unless they were looking.

I didn't tell Harrow straight away. I covered it with my palm, the way you'd cover a secret, and then I brushed the dust out with a dry rag so the line showed clean. Tomorrow the lime goes in and it will be hidden again behind a skin of new stone.

I wanted you to know that somebody here was small and careful once, and that I was the one who got to see it first. Write back soon and tell me about the flat. Love, Tom