Umbrella and rain cloud on a calf

Maud kept the chandlery on Tallow Quay, and every autumn the rain came up the estuary like a dog that had found a grudge. She sold oilskins and tarred rope and cheap brass compasses, and she would not sell an umbrella to anyone, because she said a proper one was a thing you had to earn the right to carry. Her own was green as a bottle end, with cream panels scalloped like the crust of a good pie, and its black crook handle was worn pale where her thumb went.

The cloud was another matter. It was purple underneath, fat and sulky, and it sat over the harbour wall every afternoon dropping its little black rain on anyone who hadn't gone indoors. The fishermen cursed it. The gulls did not care. Then one Tuesday it drifted down onto the quay itself, settled on the mast of the Hester Jane, and wept on Maud's doorstep until the water ran under her door and out past the ledger.

She went out with the umbrella. She didn't open it. She held it up at that cloud like a schoolmistress with a ruler and said, 'You've had your fun. Now go and be useful over the moors.' And the cloud, which had never once in its life been spoken to like that, went quietly pale at the edges, lifted off the mast, and drifted inland, where the farms had been crying out for it since Lent. The Hester Jane's mast was dry by teatime, and Maud has never been seen without that umbrella since.