Blackwork (12 page)

“Maybe after my class I can be of more help.”

“Maybe.”

Attempting to cheer her up, Betsy asked, “What are you going to put in the middle?”

“I don’t know. That’s the other problem.”

Betsy felt more confident in helping with this one. “Another border? A square won’t fit, will it? And even a rectangle will have the vines coming across it here, I think, unless it’s really narrow—but then there will be too much space down here, at the bottom.”

“Maybe a triangle?” said Billie, interested now, frowning and looking at the pattern. “No, that won’t do, there’s still too much room at the bottom. Oh, maybe I should just give it up!”

“No, don’t do that, you’ve done too much work to quit now. And it really is pretty. Here, I’ve got an idea.” She took a scrap of paper and a Sharpie pen and drew three elongated diamonds, shaped into a triangle. “You and your Mitsubishi—don’t you see? Look, their emblem fits as if you had it in mind.” She picked up Billie’s fabric and held it up to the front window then slipped the sketch behind it. A trifle too large for the space, otherwise it fit comfortably into the shape Billie had worked with her vine pattern.

Billie turned her head this way and that, looking at it. “Well, aren’t you clever? That’s just
perfect
. I’ll stitch it in silver and hang it on the rearview mirror!” Billie was very fond of her Mitsubishi.

“And because it’s blackwork, it will look nice from both inside and outside the car,” said Betsy.

“Yes, and thank you. I only wish I could do it properly, so it’s a real piece of blackwork. I don’t know why I’m so disappointed in this, it’s the first pattern I’ve ever designed myself. But I wanted it to be perfect.”

“Nothing in this life is perfect, Billie,” sighed Betsy. She nodded subtly at a customer nearby who was saying, “I never did like Leona, never. There’s something
wrong
about her and that so-called ‘religion’ of hers.”

Now that Billie’s needlework conundrum was fixed, she could pay attention. She said, “Betsy, do you think it’s possible that Leona did put a curse on Ryan?”

“No, of course not!”

“Well, good!” She rewrapped the pattern in its towel and left.

Peggy Dokka brought sixteen skeins of DMC floss to the checkout desk. “Betsy, you have to do something!”

Betsy tried to keep her tone light and ignorant. “About what?”

“All this foofaraw about Leona Cunningham. What everyone is saying—you have to
do
something!”

Alice stepped forward. “Tell them this: There was once a man who claimed he could summon demons using a spell he found in a book, but his friend said about him, ‘Yes, he summons them all right. But do they come when he calls?’”

“What does that mean?” asked Kathy.

“It means you can throw all the curses you like, but do they work?”

Another customer snorted indignantly. “Well, I should say this one did!”

A young woman standing behind her ventured, “I had a great-uncle who never had a day’s luck in his whole adult life. Everyone talked about it, but no one knew why—except his wife. She said he was cursed and she knew the reason why, but never told.”

The first woman said, “There ought to be a law. Seriously, there
ought
to be a
law
!”

Hours later, closing for the night, Godwin said to Betsy, “You didn’t mean that, about an innocent explanation for Ryan’s death, did you?”

“There may be one, hidden in all the foolishness about a curse. But I don’t think so. I think this is a case of murder. What I wish is that every false explanation could be proven wrong, because then we’d know whatever was left is the real explanation. The problem is, even if we knew
how
it happened, would that tell us
who
? Why would anyone want to kill Ryan McMurphy? There were people unhappy with him, I know. But who was murderously angry? Nobody I know.”

She wasn’t sure what Godwin said under his breath in reply, but it sounded suspiciously like, “Leona Cunningham.”

Betsy disagreed. But there were people she would put on that list. Joey Mitchell, for example. A person who found his life’s dream spoiled by another man might be angry indeed.

 

 

 

 

T
HE closing routine finished, Betsy followed Sophie, her fat, lazy, sweet, and loving cat, up the stairs to her apartment. The cat went directly to the door, looking anxiously over her shoulder—it was suppertime, and Sophie, who spent her days down in the shop cadging treats from customers, was determined never to miss any kind of a meal, even the sad pittance of Iams Less Active that Betsy allowed her.

Betsy fed her, changed into casual clothes—jeans and a sweatshirt—then fixed herself a quick salad, did a little housework, and went back down to the shop to open the door to members of a class in blackwork that Lisa Hugo was teaching.

A middle-aged, comfortable-looking woman with long salt-and-pepper hair cascading down her back, Lisa doted on the more difficult areas of needlework, particularly Hardanger. She did blackwork for relaxation. She was a patient, competent, experienced teacher.

Blackwork is the thinking stitcher’s needlework, she told Betsy and the five women gathered for the class. “You may spend more time thinking about your pattern than stitching it, because you have to think about where to begin, in which direction to go, and how to complete it.

“Blackwork is a form of embroidery, worked on even-weave fabric. It is done in black thread on white fabric if you like, or red on white, or brown on tan, or yellow on navy. It is always reversible—mostly. It is not counted cross-stitch, but counted embroidery, except when you don’t do it on even-weave or make it reversible. It is usually recognized by its geometric form.

“But purists like it done in black on white and as a mirror image; that is, the pattern is the same on the front as on the back. It’s not magic, but there is some trickery to it.

“It is an extremely old form of needlework, very popular among the Tudor monarchs of England, beginning with Henry the Eighth, whose first wife, Katherine of Aragon, is said to have brought it to England from Spain—though we now know that isn’t true. In ‘The Miller’s Tale’ by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote in the late fourteenth century, we find:

So far as Betsy could tell, Lisa’s Middle English accent was flawless.

But Lisa saw the puzzled faces looking back at her, and relented. “Let me translate that: ‘Her smock was white; embroidery in coal black silk repeated its pattern on the collar front and back, inside and out.’ That sounds like a description of blackwork.

“One theory of why blackwork was so popular in the sixteenth century—and it was very popular—is that it looks like lace. Lace was incredibly expensive because just a few knew how to do the long and tedious work of making it. Only people above a certain rank were supposed to wear it—sumptuary laws, you know. Our chief source for fifteenth-century patterns are the portraits of Hans Holbein—most of the fabrics themselves are gone. But Master Holbein was painting portraits of nobility and even royalty, who wore lace as well as blackwork. So it was loved for its own sake.

“Okay, history lesson over. Let’s get closer to picking up our needles. Blackwork uses what is called a ‘double running stitch.’”

Lisa handed out large squares of natural-color fiddler’s cloth, whose weave resembled Aida cloth. It was fourteen count, nice and low to make it easier to follow the pattern they would be stitching on it. She had them practice a double running stitch along one edge, stitching over two in one direction, then coming back to stitch over the understitches and under the overstitches, to make a solid line.

“If you turn it over, you will see that same line on the underside—and that, my children, is how blackwork is done.”

Lisa had selected as a class project a pincushion in a pattern called Harvest Time. It had a center medallion in a zigzag outline, with vines and a leaf coming off each of the four sides. She held up a pretty little pincushion about three inches across—“We will make two copies of the pattern and stitch it corner to side so it will have eight sides. When you begin using finer weaves, you may want to do this again as a small traveling pincushion—and when you are really advanced, you can do it on fabric with such a high count that you end up with a button.” She brought out a tiny padded model barely an inch across. “I’ve seen stitchers bring these to conventions to trade or give to friends they meet there.

“So, let’s get started. You want to pull off three strands of your six-stranded floss . . .”

Surprisingly, the work began not in the center, but with one of the leaves, and stitching that first leaf took a leap of faith, as it didn’t look at all like a leaf, but a random series of small stitches around a vague open space.

Betsy lost her way the first time, frogged it, got it wrong again. The third time she got it so wrong that even Lisa couldn’t see where the problem was. All she could do was take it out completely and start it from the other direction. The weave of the fabric was so loose, and the three strands of floss so sturdy, she could undo the work as often as necessary without damage to anything but her patience.

The fourth time, coming back along the “random stitches,” the leaf became manifest, to Betsy’s great satisfaction. Then she worked the two curling vines off the stem of the leaf, making two mistakes in the first one from overconfidence.

The class was to have a second session. Homework after the first was to finish two copies of the pattern. In the next lesson, the students would learn how to stitch it together. Lisa also promised a glimpse of a more advanced kind of blackwork, in which an outline first was stitched on the cloth and then was filled in with “shadowing,” or stitching with a repeated geometric pattern.

Covered in the cost of the class was a copy of
Why Call It Blackwork?
by Marion Scoular. “There are dozens and dozens of geometric patterns in that book. You will want to look through it and find one you think would fill a shape you select. The book has a nice outline on the last page—a teacup, teapot, and tea cozy—but you may want one of the simpler ones found in the handouts I gave you, or just something you choose yourself. Look around, you’ll be surprised at how many pattern outlines are suggested by everyday things.”

Betsy, not a fast stitcher when learning something new, had only the first of her two patterns half finished when the class was dismissed.

Blackwork is not magic
, Betsy recalled Lisa saying, putting things away.
But it
is
trickery.
She wished it were magic; she could use a magic wand to convince her brain to easily follow that simple pattern. Blackwork was like Hardanger—which she couldn’t get at all—in that the forward stitching must be done correctly, or the backstitching wouldn’t come out right.

She wondered if she would find blackwork to be as discouraging a craft as Hardanger. Like the tricky case of murder she was also foundering on.

A
FTER the class ended around nine, Betsy felt too restless to go back upstairs for the night. Of course, she had a knitting project to work on, there was bookkeeping to be done, she hadn’t checked in with her newsgroups in two or three days, and she needed to put up the new shower curtain she’d bought last week. Plus it was blowing a gale out there in the dark. The wind was driving thin droplets of water hard enough to sting the face of anyone foolish enough to be outdoors.

On the other hand, it would make her feel brave to go out for just a little walk.

She did go back upstairs, but only long enough to put on her oldest walking shoes and her raincoat, a new tan Burberry with a hood. She tied a pink scarf around her neck to keep the hood in place, and drew on leather gloves. She put her wallet in a pocket along with her keys, and set out for Water Street.

Her building was on Lake Street, which ran into Water Street—Excelsior’s main thoroughfare—very close to the lake. There were several slips for large cruisers, the kind that could handle a wedding reception on their three decks. Two were tied up, looking forlorn in the dark and shiny wet. Next to the slips was a big wooden wharf.

Betsy caught herself using the word
big
in connection with the wharf, and smiled. Compared to the huge wharves that accommodated seagoing ships in the port of her old home town of San Diego, this wharf was barely big enough to deserve the name. But it was enormous compared to the narrow plank walkways people built out into the lake behind their cottages. Two of the lake cruisers could tie up at the same time to load passengers, with room left over for a couple of motor-boats or a sailboat or even one of those twenty-foot yachts that populated the lake in the summer.