Winged heart, moon and lotus design

Mrs Hesketh came up the stairs over the saddler's one wet March with a photograph of her son, Daniel, who had signed on with the Ellen Rae and not sent a card in five months. She wanted a heart that could fly. Arthur told her hearts don't fly, and she told him that was exactly why she had come to a silversmith and not a vicar. So he took his pencils and drew wings on a heart, and a crescent moon beneath it, because the Ellen Rae always sailed on the dark of the moon, and a lotus at the bottom, the sort of bloom his sister kept on her kitchen sill and called a succulent when Arthur called it a flower.

Three weeks he worked. The moon he cut from a gold sovereign his father had left him, bending it thin over the stake until it curved like a paring of fingernail. The wings he filed feather by feather. When it was done he hung a tiny hollow drop at the base, the kind you could keep a seed in, and asked her what she wanted put inside. She said nothing. She folded a slip of paper, pressed it through the gap, and went back down the stairs without another word.

The Ellen Rae came in on the next dark moon. Daniel walked up Marlow Street with his cap in his hands, and the first thing he did, before he had even kissed his mother, was open the heart and read what was inside. Arthur never learned what it said. He only knew the slip had been written in pencil, the same grey as his drawing, and that Mrs Hesketh wore the pendant every Sunday until the day they buried her.