The letter arrived on a Tuesday, slipped beneath her studio door at the hour when the canal ran loudest and her own footsteps were inaudible to herself. There was no signature, no return address, no seal — only a single line, written in an old surveyor's shorthand she had not seen since university.
The bell at the eastern gate still rings on the hour. Come and hear it.
For a long time she did not move. The lamp on her drafting table guttered once, twice, and steadied; the smell of linseed oil and damp paper rose around her, familiar as an old coat.
She thought of all the things a sensible woman would do with such a letter. Burn it. Pin it to the wall as a curiosity. Take it to the Office of Civic Records, where letters like this had a way of disappearing into the deep filing cabinets and never being heard from again.
· · ·
Instead, she packed.
Not much — a sextant her father had given her, three quires of grid paper, a box of charcoal, and the small brass compass whose needle had always tilted three degrees east of true and whom she therefore trusted more than any of its more accurate kin.
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