Spinal script and flowers across a back

The lilies you sent in the tin came through the crossing better than the biscuits did. I have pressed the last two between the pages of Mother's psalter, and the petals have gone the colour of weak tea, but the stems still hold their shape, which is more than I can say for the cook's pudding. We are four weeks out of Gravesend and the wind has backed south-west twice this week, so the captain has stopped expecting anything of the hold and started expecting everything of us.

Mr Pell, the mate, asked me yesterday why I keep copying lines of verse into the log margins. I told him it was for my own sake, which is true, though the line I had chosen was one Father used to say over the bread: Keep what is given, and give back what is kept. Pell said it sounded like a bad bargain. I told him he had never kept anything worth giving back, and he laughed, which is the nearest thing to friendship I have had aboard.

Mostly I think of the lane behind the chapel where the vines came over the wall every June. You always said I climbed them like a sailor. Here the rigging is all the vine I get, and I have learned the knots the bosun showed me, the ones that look like a band of black ribbon wound round a wrist. I worked one in thread on the corner of my handkerchief to see if I could keep the pattern straight. I could.

Write when you can. The packet goes from Montevideo if the weather lets it, and I will be looking for your hand on the cover. Tell the chapel I have not forgotten the order of the hymns, though I cannot sing them in this wind.

Your loving sister, Eliza