A Letter From My Father
The room she had taken above a tallowchandler's in the Cordwain was six paces by four, with a narrow cot and a table whose legs had been shortened unevenly for reasons she did not inquire into, and a window that looked across a yard at another window in which, at most hours, an old woman sat carding wool. The yard was quiet in the afternoons. It was the best thing about the room.
She locked the door and put the chair against it, which would stop no one who wished to come in but would wake her if they tried, and she sat on the edge of the cot and unpicked the stitches in the hem of her shift with a needle she had carried in her boot. The letter came out folded small and soft from three months of being worn. The paper was her father's, from the mill at Harrow, with the watermark of the three arches, and the seal had long ago crumbled away, and the hand, when she unfolded it, struck her as though he had walked into the room.
She had read it six times on the voyage. She read it now a seventh.
*Reyna, my daughter, my only daughter.*
*If this reaches you, it will be in a hand you do not remember and from a country you do not know, and you will be old enough to understand what I could not say to you at the door of the orange-cooper's shop on the night I sent you away. I ask your pardon for that night before I ask you anything else. I gave you to a stranger and I did not kiss you