The letter arrived on Monday of last week, addressed to Mr Roland Jessup, Foreman, at the Ashwater Paper Works, Millgate. It was handwritten in violet ink on cream card stock bearing the crest of the Cassel Foundation for Industrial Heritage. It was three pages long, which is approximately two and three-quarter pages longer than any previous correspondence the Ashwater Paper Works has received from a baroness.

Baroness Irina Cassel is sixty-four years old. She lives on a coastal estate south of Verlaine, where a converted sail loft houses what is widely considered the finest private collection of working industrial machinery on the continent. A 1902 Linotype press occupies the east bay. A 1918 Jacquard power loom occupies the west. Both are operational. Both run on Tuesdays, when the Foundation opens its doors to the public and charges nothing for admission.

The letter enclosed a photograph of the workshop — vaulted ceilings, whitewashed stone, afternoon light falling through ten tall windows onto polished iron and oiled wood. It looked, Jessup said, like a place where machines would be happy.

The offer is 28,000 florins for both Fourdrinier machines — the 1937 unit, which has produced paper continuously for eighty-nine years, and the 1953 unit, which has produced paper for seventy-three. Transport, disassembly, and reinstallation would be undertaken at the Foundation’s expense. The baroness proposes to run both machines in her workshop, producing small batches of handmade paper for use by printmakers, bookbinders, and restoration conservators.

“I do not collect machines to display them,” the baroness writes. “A machine that does not run is furniture. I am not in the furniture business.”

The offer exceeds the competing bid from the Ashford Republic’s Ministry of Industrial Heritage, which has offered 18,000 florins for the 1937 machine alone, for static display at the National Museum of Industry in Ashford. The Ministry has expressed no interest in the 1953 unit.

Jessup, who has spent thirty-three years at the mill and who is currently compiling maintenance histories for both machines — a document that runs, at present, to forty-seven pages of typewritten notes — received the letter with an expression that might be described as cautious hope.

“They’ve run for seventy years,” he said. “Whoever takes them should run them.”

Agnes Hartwell, the mill’s owner, who announced the closure in March and who has spent the intervening weeks managing the affairs of a business she inherited from her grandfather, was more direct.

“I would rather they went somewhere they’d be used,” she said, “than somewhere they’d be admired.”

The decision is not Hartwell’s alone. The machines are assets of the business, and the sale will be subject to the usual commercial and legal considerations. But the baroness’s offer is, by any reasonable measure, the more generous — and the more sympathetic to what the machines are, which is not museum pieces but working tools that happen to be old.

Separately, twelve of the mill’s forty-three workers have now applied to the Docklands Workers’ Association transition fund — up from eight in early April. Four have enrolled in electrical fitting training. Two are pursuing boatyard apprenticeships at Harbourfront. Two have applied to the Edgeminster textile works. The remaining four include a bookkeeper, a maintenance engineer, and two pulp-floor workers who have not yet decided.

The mill closes at the end of December. The river will continue to flow through the building after the machines are gone. It will be the first time in one hundred and twelve years that it has done so without purpose.

Unless, of course, the baroness’s sail loft is ready by then.