Stack of books with a flower on the upper arm

The last of the hardbacks went onto the cart this morning, six of them, tied with the grey cord you always said was too thin. Ferrin swore the spines would split before Saltcombe, but I bound them tight and told him the damp would be the thing to finish them. He laughed and said nobody in the tower reads anymore, so it hardly matters how they travel.

The top one is Aunt Ilse's almanac. You'll recognise the star pressed into its board, the one she made with the back of a spoon because the brass stamp had gone missing. Under it sits the atlas with the gilt bands worn to brown where our fingers used to hold it open. I kept the camellia in the almanac, pressed flat between the June and July pages, the one from the wall by the well. I thought about sending it loose, but paper folded badly in a cart, so I left it where it was.

The buyer's clerk came back twice to check the spines were genuine leather, then asked whether the books would open. I said they would, if anyone wanted them to. He looked at me as though I had offered him something rude, and paid in good coin anyway. So the almanac is going up a tower to sit on a shelf nobody will climb to, and I am keeping the one loose petal I found on the cord. It is folded inside this letter. Mind it when you open it, it is older than both of us.