Sola gratia script lettering on the wrist

The men from York came on Tuesday with a bucket of lime and a warrant under the bishop's seal, and by noon the saints along the nave had gone the colour of old milk. I stood in the porch with my hat in my hands and watched them work toward the east window, where the painter Ned Harrow had lettered two words beneath the Last Supper in a joined-up hand so fine you had to lean in to read it. Sola gratia. Grace alone.

The lime men wanted the words gone with the rest. Ned climbed the ladder himself, took the brush from the boy, and spent the afternoon with a stick of charcoal and a folded sheet, copying every loop while the lime dried on the stone behind him. He would not say why. When the foreman shouted at him, he only said the letters were the one honest thing left in the building, and that a man could not whitewash what he had already carried out of the door.

Here is the odd part. When they had gone, I found his copy pinned inside the vestry door, and on the back of it, in pencil, he had traced the same two words again, smaller, across the lid of a fishing creel he means to take to Filey on Saturday. His brother's boat went down off Flamborough the winter the screen was carved, and Ned says the words were always meant for the water rather than the wall.

Come home at Michaelmas and see for yourself. I have kept the copy for you, folded in four, and I will not let the damp get at it.

Yours in haste, Walter