Winged angel over a demon on upper arm

The scaffolding came down on Tuesday, and the chapel at Harrowgate Keep is finally standing up straight. You'll want to hear about the north wall. Mr Pell from the trust had the lime wash stripped, expecting plain plaster, and instead we found Saint Michael underneath, bigger than a man and furious about it. He has his spear raised and his wings spread against a sky the colour of a bruised plum. Beneath his feet a crouched thing sits in climbing flames. Damp has flaked away half of it, but the angel's face is perfect.

Pell wanted a pigment sample for the lab in Durham. I let him take it, but asked him to leave the halo alone. Behind the head there is a ring of gold leaf that still catches the light through the slit window at four o'clock, and for ten minutes each afternoon the whole wall looks lit from inside. I stood there with my tea going cold and thought about Father Ambrose, whom I had always assumed the village invented to keep children out of the moat.

The clouds are the strangest part. The painter shaded every billow so it seems to press forward off the plaster, and in one corner someone had scratched a name into the wet lime. Tobias, and a date in 1743. Pell calls it a donor's mark. I don't think so. I think Tobias finished those wings and signed the wall where only the angel would see it.

Love to the boys, and tell Dad the damp is no longer his problem.

Yours, Harold