Unicorn head with rainbow mane and rose

The unicorn came in on the Tuesday tide, wrapped in a fishmonger's sack and smelling of brine. Mr Okonedo from the chandlery had found it under a pew in the chapel of St Brannoc, where someone had left it behind for the jumble. Its mane had faded from rose to a sickly green where the damp had got in, and one of its ears hung on by habit alone.

I spent three evenings on it under the lamp in the back room. The horn had snapped near the tip, so I carved a new spiral from a scrap of ash handle. The dotted lines across its face and neck were old stitches gone to threads, and I had to pick them out and sew them back one hole at a time. You would have laughed at me. I swore at it more than once. The rose at its chest was the hardest part, a red felt bloom with the petals pinned on, and I kept mixing the leaves the wrong shade of plum.

On the Friday, the harbourmaster's girl came in with her grandmother's shawl and asked whether I could mend something for the wedding. I said I had no time. Then I looked at the unicorn sitting on my bench, grey-faced and grinning with its new stitches, and I said yes.

She turned it over when she came for it and found, stitched under the belly in cotton gone the colour of weak tea, the initials of a woman dead thirty years. I had sewn them back in without knowing whose they were. The shop bell went, and I put the kettle on, because the unicorn was going home tomorrow and I wanted it to see the harbour first.

Yours, Marjorie