Three orchids on a vine tattoo design

The third bloom opened this morning, the one lowest on the stem, and Mr Pryce went quiet in the way he does when he is pleased and will not admit it. We have carried the Wardian case since Falmouth, lashed to the chart table where the swell cannot reach it. The glass is beaded with our breath, and the three flowers hang inside it like lanterns someone has forgotten to light.

The vine is the stubborn part. It climbs as though the case were a hedge in Cornwall, and each morning Pryce turns the stem by a finger's width so the tendril finds the light from the stern window. He says a plant that cannot see the sun will forget how to bloom. I think he means himself. We lost a bud off Finisterre to a sailor's careless elbow, and Pryce wept over it in the galley as though it were a child.

Then the calms came below the Line and the water casks sweated down to nothing. The captain ordered the sprinkling can stowed and the mist-spray stopped. Pryce said nothing. That night I found him kneeling by the case with a tin cup, a few inches of our own rationed water, dribbling it onto the moss at the roots while the watch sang below. He saw me and only said, The stem is brittle, Ada. It cannot be asked to wait.

Yesterday the wind came back out of the south-west, and the palest orchid at the top has begun to lean its face towards the window. The tendril has wound twice round a brass hook, and I have decided it is not ours to untangle. When we dock in Rio I will send you a cutting. Keep the pot in your window facing east, and do not let anyone tell you the thing is dead until it has stopped trying.