scrap fabric, which lay atop it. The worktable looked to be purloined from the kitchen and the ladies of the parish sat around it on a motley assortment of chairs, none new, most ancient. A cheerful fire in the fireplace warmed the air sufficiently that they had dispensed with their coats and cloaks, but all had kept their bonnets on, and a wide variety of hat ornaments bobbed in her direction.
“Good afternoon, ladies!” she said cheerfully. “I’m sure you know that I’m Marina Roeswood. I hope you don’t mind my putting myself forward like this; Mr. Davies thought, because I was fostered with the Tarrants of Blackbird Cottage, who are well-known artists, I might have some original ideas for the goods for this year’s parish booth— and as a matter of fact, I do.”
With no further preamble, she took her supplies from the falconer’s bag and proceeded to show the women how a professional seamstress, embroideress, or modiste transferred an embroidery pattern from paper to fabric. They watched with amazement as she ran the pricking-wheel over the penciled design, then laid the now- perforated paper on a piece of fabric and used the pounce-bag along the lines of the design, tapping it expertly and firmly on the paper.
“There, you see?” she said, removing the paper to show the design picked out in tiny dots of white chalk. “Now, the last step is to baste the lines of the design before the chalk brushes off, and there you are! On dark fabric, you use a chalk-bag; on light, a charcoal-bag. And this system allows you to use the pricked pattern over and over, as many times as you like, doesn’t mark the fabric, and is a great deal less fussy than sewing over the paper pattern.”
The vicar proclaimed himself astonished. The women—the wives and daughters of the shopkeepers and the well-to-do farmers—were delighted. As with most amateur embroideresses, they had either stitched through a paper pattern, forcing them to use it only once, or had drawn their patterns inaccurately on the fabric itself when the fabric was too dark or thick to use as tracing paper. Many a fine piece of cambric or silk had been ruined this way when the marks made by the pencil wouldn’t come out—many lovely designs had been executed off center or lopsided.
“And these are all very new and fashionable designs, similar to the ones that Messrs. Morris & Co. is producing, but quite original,” she told them, spreading out the sheets of patterns before their eyes. “My Aunt Margherita Tarrant is known all over England for her art-embroidery, and has produced lovely things with these designs for some of the best homes in London and Plymouth.”
That won them over, completely, and with these new designs and tools, there was great excitement over what manner of things might be made. Marina helped them to parcel out patterns, tracing them so that more than one copy could be dispensed, and running the wheel over them since there was only the one wheel to share among the lot of them. As they worked, they were happily discussing fire screens, cushions, antimacassars, and any number of other delights. No one else would have anything like this in the three other parish booths from the churches that regularly had booths at the May Day Fair. Every one of these ladies would make something that she would like to have in her own home. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise Marina in the least to discover that each would make two projects at a time—one to sell and one to keep. As that cheerful fire further warmed the room, the ladies warmed to Marina—who had, of course, seen exactly the items that had been originally made with these patterns, and was ready to offer advice as to materials and color schemes. Mr. Davies beamed on them all impartially; from the scent of baking, his old housekeeper was making ginger biscuits to serve the ladies for tea.
But the spicy scent perfumed the air in a way that shook her unexpectedly with memories of home, and suddenly, she couldn’t bear to be there—among strangers—
“Have I left you with enough to occupy you, ladies?” she asked, quickly, around a rising lump in her throat. “For I believe my guardian will be expecting me back—”
By this time, the gossip was flying thick and fast as well as discussion of fabrics and colors and stitches, but it stopped dead at her question. The ladies looked at one another, and the eldest, old Mrs. Havershay, took it upon herself to act as spokeswoman. “Thank you, Miss! We’re ever so much obliged to you,” she said, managing to sound both autocratic (which she was, as acknowledged leader of her circle) and grateful at the same time.
“Oh, thank
But she couldn’t have said what she hoped; they wouldn’t have understood why she wished she could join their sewing circle. She was gentry; they were village. The gap was insurmountable.
As the others discussed projects, love affairs, and business of the village, one of the younger—and prettier— of the daughters helped her gather her hat, cloak, and gloves and escorted her to the door. “Thank you, Miss Roeswood; we were all dreading what sort of crack-brained notion the vicar might have had for us when he told us you were going to show us your ideas for the booth,” she said, and hesitated, then continued, “and we were afraid that he might be letting—ah—kindliness—get ahead of him. He’s a kindly gentleman, we all like him, but he’s never done a charity booth before.”
“He’s a very kind and very pleasant gentleman,” she agreed readily. “And don’t underestimate him, because he’s also quite intelligent. As you’ve seen, sometimes a new idea is better than what’s been traditional.”
“True, miss, and even though some folks would rather we had our old vicar back, well, he was a good man, but he’s dead, and they aren’t going to get him back, so at least Mr. Davies is one of us, and they ought to get to like him as much as us young ones, But please—some of us—”
Marina gave her a penetrating look, and she seemed to lose her courage, and blurted, “—we’ve been wondering about what you think of our vicar, what with making three visits in the week, and—”
She clapped her hand over her mouth and looked appalled at what she had let slip. Marina just chuckled.
“You mean, have I any designs on him myself, hmm?” she whispered, and the girl turned beet red. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, and surely had what schoolgirls called a “pash” for the amiable young man. Marina suddenly felt very old and worldly wise.
“My dear Miss Horn, I promise you that my only interest in our good vicar extends to his ability to play chess,” she said soberly. “And his ability to compose and deliver an interesting, inspiring, and enlightening sermon,” she added as an afterthought.
“Oh.” The girl turned pale, then red again, and ducked her head. Marina patted her hand, and turned to go.
The meeting with the ladies had taken less than an hour; she hadn’t expected it to take much longer, truth to tell. The cold air on her cheeks made enough of a distraction to get her tears swallowed down, and she mounted her horse feeling that she had done her duty, in more ways than one. If Arachne expected her back as soon as she finished, well, she was going to take her time, and never mind the cold.
“And she believed it?”
Arachne smiled; Reggie’s expression could not be more gratifying, compounded as it was of equal parts of astonishment, admiration, and envy. He leaned back into his chair in her personal sitting room, a lush and luxurious retreat furnished with pieces she had taken from all over the house when she first arrived here, and smiled. “Mater,” he continued, “That was brilliant! I never would have considered suggesting to Marina that her mother was a candidate for a sanitarium.”
“It honestly didn’t occur to me until I was in the middle of that conversation with her,” Arachne admitted. “But the child is so utterly unmagical—and seems to have been brought up that way—that when she was describing the letters her mother sent her about the Elemental creatures in the garden I suddenly realized how insane such tales would seem to someone who was not a mage.” Her hand unconsciously caressed the chocolate-colored velvet of her chair. “Ah, that reminds me—you
Reggie snorted. “A lamb sacrificed at each cardinal point drove them out quickly enough. All sweetness and light, was your Hugh’s precious Alanna—the Earth Elementals she had around here couldn’t bear the first touch of blood on the soil.”
Arachne smiled. “When we make this place ours, we shall have to use something more potent than lambs. And speaking of lambs—”
He quirked an eyebrow. “I have two replacements safe enough, both with the magic in them, both just turned ten.”
“Two?” She eyed him askance.
He sighed. “Besides the one that I took off to die, I lost a second that was carried off by a relative. Pity, that.
