Woman's face within a red and black mandala

The joker plate came back from the engraver with its dots all wrong, so Mr Pell had me sit up with it under the lamp until the ink dried. You'll laugh, but I have never sat so long over a single card. Every bead on the border has to be set by hand, and the spades and hearts must sit dead centre in their petals, or the whole sheet looks like it was printed in a rush by a man with a hangover.

Mr Pell says the face in the middle belonged to the first printer's wife, though she has been dead since before we came down to the quay, and nobody will say what she looked like. I drew the hair myself, long and black and wavy as weed at the turn of the tide. He let me have the red for the jewels. Nobody else on Harbour Row is trusted with the red since the Mary Ann ledger went up over a spilt pot.

On Thursday the boats came in heavy and the fish-market men bought every deck we had pressed. Tonight I counted the sheets on the rack and found one missing. The joker was gone. I found it weeks later folded inside Tom Harker's oilskin, where he'd tucked it for luck before the Gull sailed. I wrote to the harbourmaster, though I doubt he read past the first line.

I sent the card back to Tom's mother with a fresh deck and no note. Then I pressed my thumb to the last sheet on the rack, out of habit, and left a red print in the bottom corner, right where a heart would sit.

Your sister, Nell