Woman blowing bubbles among planets on back

The telescope is back in the bell tower, and Brother Anselm has stopped pretending he is not pleased about it. You asked whether the Saturn plates were ever finished. They were, the week the dyer's girl from Harrow Lane came up the hill with a jar of soap and a clay pipe, asking if she could blow bubbles where the sky was clearest.

She sat on the parapet with her hair tied back in twine and blew one bubble after another, very slowly, so each one lifted off the stone and hung in the air. Anselm swears the first one caught the crescent moon whole and kept it for a full minute before it burst. I did not see that. I saw the ones that caught the lamplight and turned it purple, pink and a bruised sort of blue, the colours of the cloth she dyes down in the valley.

On the last evening she asked me to name the planets, and I did, badly, while she pointed at them through the bubbles. The ringed one she called the hat. The cratered ones she said looked like bread left too long in the oven. When the bubbles drifted over the edge of the roof and vanished above the orchard, she laughed and said that was where they went, to fill the gaps between the stars.

She left before Vespers with the pipe in her pocket. The jar is still on the sill. Come up in spring and see whether the sky looks emptier without her.

Yours in Christ, Brother Eustace