Sam Redlark

image generated by Craiyon “Earlier, I saw from the window of my room, your men loading a quantity of barrels onto one of my wagons,” said Sir Echarde. “I counted eight in total.” His fingertips absently probed a dewy rosette of deep-pink petals, forcing the flower head down under his touch. He continued to dawdle along the brick fringe of the earth bed until his trailing hand strayed from the rose. The stem sprang back to its approximate original position, oscillating stiffly, hither and yon, between converging poles, shaking off old raindrops. A blackbird, that had been hopping around on the damp topsoil, silently took to the air. “Shale from the Norwegian fjord beds, preserved in its own water,” said Southwell. The blackbird alighted as a silhouette on the wiry branch of a nearby quince tree, where it scattered a rising alarm call across the ornamental gardens. Southwell was a fellow of the Unified Wells. Two years before, he had been made a Knight of the Loft in recognition of his

image generated by Craiyon The massive hull of The Nore Croft was fashioned from half-metre-thick glass that had been clouded with aqueous salt, rendering it opaque. It was named after a ramshackle navigational marker, formerly a small cottage, that once occupied a brackish peninsula at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. The heaped rubble of the smallholding, around which sheep had once grazed, with strands of green seaweed straggling their fleeces, was commonly lit as a beacon during inclement weather. By the end of 1918, it had been swamped by rising tide levels: “Displaced by the bodies of those fighting men whose lives were claimed by the sea,” according to Rose Kirtley – the writer of a hugely-popular, but now largely forgotten, volume of self-penned meditational verse, titled Tea Breaths: Poems for Secretaries . I have, on my desk in front of me, copies of the notes for an unwritten autobiography that were made by the architect of The Nore Croft – one Leonard Shapland. He recalls t