Vertical swirl and star design

You will want to know whether Mrs Pardoe has finally thrown out the stuffed heron, and she has not. It stands in the hall with a tea towel draped over its head like a widow at a funeral, and the new lodgers, two sisters from Leeds who sing in the bath, have named it Alfred. I have been here a fortnight now and I am learning the house the way one learns a difficult hymn, by getting the same bit wrong until it stops being wrong.

The attic room is mine. Its window is small and round and looks out over the harbour wall, and on clear nights the stars come up over the lifeboat shed one after another, as if somebody were sorting them. I have started drawing them on the backs of the menus, joining them with curling lines the way the fishermen's wives used to chalk their husbands' boats. Mrs Pardoe says the little filled ones are planets that have forgotten their manners.

Last Thursday the tide came in under the pier while I was counting, and a boy from the chandler's ran up the steps with a bottle he had found on the sand. Inside was a folded chart, salt-stained, with a star inked at the very centre and swirls of current spiralling out from it to every corner of the sea. Beneath it someone had written, in the careful hand of a schoolroom, Follow the bright one home. The bottle had no name and no date.

I have decided to stay until the chart is finished. I am not sure yet what it is charting, but the lines grow clearer each night, and I think I know which star I am meant to find.

Your loving sister, Edie