White ornamental design across upper back

The pattern came back from the mill in Valenciennes folded inside a bread wrapper, which is how the customs men at Hondschoote missed it on Tuesday. Forty bobbins of linen thread, a sheet of pricked card, and a note in your mother's hand saying only: rosettes first, then the stars, never the other way round. I have pinned it above the table where the lamp falls best. The scrollwork runs from a central stem like a vine that has decided to become a fern, and every curl turns back on itself twice before it lets go.

I have been working the shoulder pieces since Sunday. The trick, your mother always said, is to leave the ground empty. Lace is what is not there, she used to tell us, and the stars must sit in the spaces the scrolls refuse to fill. Yesterday I got one wrong, a flourish that closed too tight, and I had to unpick a whole morning of pearl stitch by candlelight. It was almost a relief. You can only lose a thing that was meant to be seen.

The lady from the big house wants the finished piece for her niece's wedding in June, sewn onto a length of silk that will be worn once and then folded in tissue for fifty years. I told her the rosettes would outlast the silk. She laughed and said that was rather the point.

Write back soon, and tell me whether the crossing at Dunkirk is still hopeful for the thread. I will keep the card safe under the loom until then.

Yours, Liesbeth