Watercolour heart on the wrist

Nell Stannard kept the bakery at the bottom of the lane and had nothing to pay him with but bread. He took three loaves and a jug of rainwater, and asked for the back shutter facing the road. For an hour he worked with a bristle brush no thicker than a straw. Where he needed teal he stirred crushed dye from the mill. For violet he used bruised elderberry, and for the magenta a spoon of cochineal Nell had been saving for Christmas. When the organ started up at the top of the hill, his hand jerked and a spray of dark ink flew across the wash like starlings lifting off a field. He laughed without sound and left it.

Nobody in Harrow could agree on what the heart was for. Some said the sea, some said a girl gone to Leeds. The black outline held everything together while the colour bled past it the way weather spreads over the fells. The fair packed up at dawn and rolled south, but the shutter stayed. Anyone leaving the village for the first time would stop and lay a thumb on the paint, and it would feel cool and faintly tacky, though it had been dry for years.

When Nell's brother Davy shipped out on the coal boats, she touched the heart every morning before the ovens were lit. In March the rain came in sideways and the teal ran down the wood in threads, but the black line never moved. Davy came home that summer with salt in his beard and a story about a night the lamp went out. The colours had crept back into the outline by then, as if the weather had only been keeping them safe for him.