Winged angel across a back

You'll think me soft in the head, but I've spent three weeks on my knees in the chapel at Harrowgate Keep and stopped minding the damp. Mr Ashby finally let me clear the north transept. Under forty years of nettles and pigeon muck we found him: an angel no taller than a child, sitting on the lintel with arms folded over his knees and head bowed so low his brow nearly touches his wrists. Whoever cut him knew how a weary thing sits. Behind him the wings rise in stone feathers, each one cut separately, and the men have gone quiet every time the dust comes off them.

Ashby reckons the wall came down in the great storm of '32 and the angel went with it, though someone took a chisel to the left wing afterwards, to be rid of him. There's a clean gouge through its middle. When the afternoon sun comes slantwise through the arrow slit, the shadow of the break looks like a feather pulled free and falling. Three loose feathers lie in the rubble at the foot of the wall, and I count them every morning as if one might have flown off in the night.

I kept one. It's a sliver of grey sandstone no longer than my thumb, and I've been turning it over in my coat pocket all week. Nobody has claimed it in four hundred years, and the angel looks like a man who has given up on being collected.

Come up at Easter if you can. I'll show you him before the scaffolding goes up, and you can tell me whether a man ought to sit that low when he has wings to spare.

Your sister, Hester