Two dragonflies forming a heart

The Pemberton Brothers' Travelling Circus folded its tent in Lowestoft on Tuesday, and I have the Dragonflies' rigging in a sack at my feet because nobody else would take it. You asked after Ines and Anselm in your last letter. They are still in the wagon at the back of the field, not speaking, which is how they have been since the matinee in Ipswich when the wire sang out and Anselm came down a foot short of the net.

Here is the thing you never saw. Before the fall they made a heart in the air. Ines hung from the left rope with a ribbon stitched to her hem, Anselm from the right with his tied to his belt, and they swung in opposite arcs until the silk drew a loop across the big top that the whole crowd could see. Mr Pemberton called it the Dragonfly Heart and sold it on the posters at a shilling a head. The lace-winged rigs were Ines's idea. She cut the wings from old gauze curtains and stitched every vein by hand, so that in the lamplight they looked like something a child might hold up to a window.

Since the fall, neither of them will climb. Yesterday I found Anselm sitting under the empty rigging, unpicking one wing with a tiny pair of scissors, slowly, the way you would lift a splinter from a finger. I asked what he was doing. He said he was making sure the pattern was still whole before the wagon goes to the scrapyard.

The scrapyard man has offered a fortune for the lot. I told Anselm to keep the rigs. He did not answer, but he put the scissors in his pocket, which I took for a yes. Come to Lowestoft if you can, Hal. Bring the good thread.

Yours, Dot