Speranza script with heart on upper back

The big top came down in Carlisle on Tuesday night, and by Thursday Mr Vitale had sold the last of the ponies to a farmer outside Penrith. I am writing from the back of the lorry, where the lamp still works if you hold the cord just so. You will laugh, but the banner is still hanging from the ring. Nobody has had the heart to take it down, though the damp has eaten the edges so the S looks like a question mark.

When the company left Naples the banner was new, the paint still tacky, and Vitale stood at the gate in his good waistcoat watching people read it aloud. Speranza. Hope. He told them it was a promise, that every town would fill its seats for it. Last month in Kendal we played to eleven children and a man with a dog who left at the interval. The little heart he painted at the end, green and red, has faded to the colour of weak tea.

Lucia, who walks the wire, climbed up this morning with a bread knife and her sewing kit. She did not tell anyone what she meant to do. By dinner she had cut the word free in one long strip, stitched it inside the lining of her old blue coat, and folded the coat into her trunk. She said the wire does not care whose name is on the tent, only whether your feet remember the way.

So the ring is bare now and the lorry is heading south. I have the lamp, Lucia has the coat, and I am keeping this letter as well as I can. Tell Padre Anselmo I still say my prayers in the right order.

Your loving Tomasso