Watercolour splash diamond on a forearm

The rain came down through the alder wood on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the beck ran blue, then violet, then a green I have no name for. Father blames the madder vats upstream at Coldharbour. I blame nobody. I have been wading in it up to my shins, looking for whatever the water brought down, and I have found it.

It is a stone, clear and hard, cut like a crown with a flat table on top and a point underneath, though no one cut it. Mrs Pennock says it is glass from the old chapel window. Mr Dunmore, who once sold clocks in Leeds, says it is a diamond and that I should be ashamed of hiding it in the tea caddy. I have not told him how often I hold it to the window. The lines inside are so even that I think someone patient must have drawn them, and when the light comes through, the colours gather round it: teal where the woad settles, purple from the logwood, a green like the smoke off the dye-house roof.

Mr Dunmore has offered eleven pounds, which would clear what Father owes the miller and leave enough for the coach to Leeds. I have written three replies to him and burned two. The third one is only numbers.

So this morning I took the caddy down to the ford and knelt on the flat stones. The water was clearing already, the colours thinning to pale rings that broke against my wrist. I opened my hand over the current and watched the stone turn over once, catching every bit of grey sky, and then it was gone under the alders. Tell Mother I am coming home at Michaelmas. I will bring the caddy, and nothing in it.