The Wishing Thread (8 page)

Nessa felt her heart sinking. She hadn’t realized she would be so disappointed. “I thought it was a ghost.”

“Nah.” Her mother lifted a rope of Nessa’s red hair and moved it behind her shoulder for no apparent reason. “No ghosts in this place.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” her mother said. And her conviction was so strong, so unwavering, that Nessa immediately felt safer. But also a little sad.

“You should go get your brother,” Bitty said. “He’d think this was neat.”

“Okay,” Nessa said. And she went to the bottom of the stairs, opened her mouth, and bellowed, yelling at the top of her lungs, yelling and yelling with her mother telling her to stop, but she couldn’t, not even when Carson appeared, rumpled and perplexed, at the top of the stairs. In a few more minutes, the mist would be gone.

On a chair in her bedroom, Aubrey collapsed, utterly wrung out and spent, sometime in the muddled and forgotten hours that come after midnight but before dawn. Her muscles had cramped. Her head ached. Her eyeballs hurt as if someone had cradled each orb in a fist and squeezed. It was always like this. On her lap were two fingerless gloves. Done.

Ruth Ten Eckye’s mitts had formed in her mind long before she’d started knitting them: ribbed two-by-two edging, the stockinette sheath rising up like a tall castle tower, stitch by stitch, brick by brick, the gusset of the thumb—born from an opening like a window—branching seamlessly outward, the tubular crenellations flowering where fingers would poke through to do their work—she’d seen all of it, so that by the time she readied a cable cast-on and had forty-four neat little stitches distributed on four needles squared, the pattern was already firmly entrenched in her subconscious mind, and all she’d needed to do in order to follow it was get out of her own way and let her fingers fly.

Aubrey loved knitting. When she knit for the sake of knitting—and not to make a spell—she enjoyed the work. It was pleasant, satisfying, and soothing. She loved watching her projects grow inch by slow inch, until she could look back on what she’d done and measure how much she’d accomplished. Even if she wasn’t knitting a spell, she liked knowing that she’d done her best to keep a positive outlook while she was
working and at least a few stitches bore within them her warmest wishes and blessings.

But when she knit a spell—a deliberate, concentrated, focused spell—she was not knitting for the sake of knitting. She was cinching up every last bit of focus and concentration in her mind; she was pouring herself out, wringing herself dry. And it wasn’t that she didn’t
enjoy
the process on some level. She liked the intensity, the sense that she was being driven forward by some crazed coachman whipping his horses—
faster, faster!
—into a demonic momentum. But when the mêlée ended, when the knitting was done and she felt so vacant that she could sometimes hear the sounds of air particles bumping into one another, she had nothing left. Nothing but the dog-tired optimism that the spell would “stick” as she’d intended.

Now the fingerless gloves were done. And with any luck, with the power of Ruth’s sacrifice and Aubrey’s concentration, it would work. Slowly, her knees creaking like brittle leather, she stood. She went to the dresser by the window, to the massive, clothbound tome that her family had used for record keeping since 1867. The Great Book in the Hall no longer occupied its original location, but the moniker had stuck—in part because it didn’t sound as impressive to call the thing
the Great Book in the Spare Bedroom
or
the Great Book on Aubrey’s Dresser
. Like the old Dutch Bibles of farmsteads past, the Stitchery’s sacred book moved from room to room over the centuries, but it was never far from a window. If ever a fire were to break out within the Stitchery’s dry timber frame, the Great Book could be tossed out to relative safety.

After recording Ruth’s name, a description of her sacrifice, and her address—which Aubrey hadn’t needed to ask for simply because
everyone
in Tarrytown knew where Ruth Ten
Eckye lived—she plucked up Ruth’s pin from the table beside her and carried it reverently, cupped in two hands like a firefly, up the kinked tower stairs. The moment Mariah died, Aubrey had become the Stitchery’s official guardian. It was hers now: her burden, her responsibility, her joy. All she could do was hope.

She placed Ruth’s pumpkin pin among all the other relics. Then she went downstairs to her bed and fell on it belly-first, too exhausted to take off her clothes.

“Do you think she’s happy?” Meggie asked. She and Bitty were stretched out side by side on Meggie’s old quilt, their feet hanging off the end of the bed. It was sometime in the middle of the night, but Meggie wasn’t tired. She was worried about Aubrey. There were troubling elements of Aubrey’s lifestyle that she hadn’t quite fully noticed when she’d left the Stitchery four years ago.

“I don’t see how she could be happy,” Bitty said. “She lives like a hermit.”

“She’s got a friend. Jeanette seemed cool.”

“She’s
knows
people,” Bitty said. “But she doesn’t have a social life. Nothing but her job at the library, and the Stitchery, and the hedgehog. She’s cooped up in here all the time. And now that Mariah’s gone, it’s only going to get worse.”

“So what do you think she wants?”

“I don’t know.” Bitty pulled the long end of her ponytail in front of her face and squinted at the ends. “Maybe she thinks it doesn’t matter what she wants.”

“I guess I can understand what that’s like,” Meggie said. And she paused, but her sister was lost in thought and didn’t ask what she meant. “If she stays here …”

“I know,” Bitty said. “It’s dangerous.”

They fell quiet, and Meggie knew they were both thinking of their mother.

“We have to respect her choices,” Bitty said. “We can’t save her if she doesn’t want us to.”

“Still,” Meggie said. “We have to try.”

It was no stretch of imagination for the people of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow to believe in magic. From the beginning, they always had. Native people gathered around the big Hokohongus tree for decades, even centuries, during council meetings. The enslaved Kongolese men and women of Philipse Manor held that the mucky waters of the Pocantico were a boundary line between this world and the next. Even the old burgher Frederick Philipse, staunchly Dutch Reformed, had seen his share of the unbelievable.

As legend goes, he’d just started construction on the Old Dutch Church—his slaves quarrying rock and mixing mortar—when a freshet flooded his millpond. The dam crumbled and water sluiced through the vale. Philipse pulled the plug on the church’s construction to stop up the pond, and when the water was behaving subserviently once again, the slaves returned to the church on the grassy mound—heaving its fieldstone walls higher and higher toward God and the big valley sky.

But once again, the millpond blew its dam. And once again, the church construction was halted. Repeatedly this happened. Rupture, pause. Rupture, pause. Until finally, one of Philipse’s slaves pulled his master aside to tell him that God had sent him a dream. Until the Old Dutch Church—
which was of course the
new
Dutch church at the time—was overflowing with people and prayer, the dam would never hold. And sure enough, once the little chapel was up and running, the millpond did not burst again.

At least, that’s how the old folks told it—a story unchanged since 1697, when wolves still howled by night in the wooded hillsides of Manhattan, when the Weckquaesgeck hunted beaver in exchange for teakettles and guns, and when mast-thick forests were still dotted with healthy American chestnuts.

But the story of the Stitchery was not so firmly fixed in people’s minds as the story of the Old Dutch Church. Nor was it so cheery. Some people had heard that the Van Ripper house was haunted by a girl with yellow braids, a pointy white-winged hat, and little wooden
klompen
on her feet. But more than likely, the true story of the Stitchery—if such a thing existed—was the story that the Van Rippers told one another, a tale passed down from generation to generation, guarded like the treasure in the tower room. And like so many stories that are meant to explain things, that come sifting down through the ages like falling snow, the story of the Stitchery was a love story, a magical one.

On fall evenings when the river was a placid brown-gray and the Palisades were at stone-faced attention, Mariah bundled the girls into her bed
—my three little birds
, she called them—and told the story of the Stitchery’s beginnings. It was important, she said, that they always remember where they came from. For the Van Rippers, the Stitchery was at the heart of every decision they would ever make, whether they liked it or not. A person’s future could branch into infinite directions and redirections, but her past always had the same, reliable beginning point.

And so, the story started the way so many do:
Once upon a
time
. Back when the Stitchery was born, Mariah said, the Hudson Valley was a battleground. It echoed with the sounds of camp songs, drillmasters’ orders, and gunfire. The summer of 1779 was hot, smelling of pond scum, boiled potatoes, and lightning. The Headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow was scratching behind his ear and complaining about lice, with no notion of how he would go down in history. George Washington was stooping nightly over his maps and his Madeira and halfheartedly daydreaming about Sally Fairfax, who was perfect except for being a loyalist’s wife. The women of the Revolution camped not far from their husbands, boiling the laundry, knitting stockings for men who could wear out a pair a day, and twirling their drop spindles to make strong flax thread.

Helen Van Ripper, whose maiden name had been buried by time, was among them. She lived in a tent near the army encampment so that she could be with the husband she had married only a few months before. Helen was young and strong; she had predictable blond hair beneath the flaps of her Dutch cap, but her fondness for a sweet
koekie
or two each evening lent her a bit of stylish plumpness beneath her chin. Every day she woke to the hot summer sun, the chirp of crickets and clatter of locusts, the cardinals whooping and blackbirds chirring in the trees, and she wondered if today she would be widowed.

One day a sentry rushed to General Washington’s side with news that a line of lobsterbacks were marching on the camp. He saw them across the distant clearing, their bright red coats flapping in time to an inaudible fife and drum. Alarms were raised. Muskets and rifles were made ready. But when Washington himself laid his gray-blue eyes upon the line of advancing redcoats, he was said to have given the watchman a look of such steely disapproval that it momentarily
turned the child to clay. The fearsome invading soldiers were nothing more than the women’s knit red petticoats, hung across a line to dry. It had been a moment of mirth for Helen and her fellow wives.

So you see
, Mariah told the girls,
this is what life felt like when the men were not fighting. But there was always the specter of tragedy looming over them all
.

The valley was dark with the shadow of death, and the soldiers ate and drank and slept with the weight of it pressing their chests. British forces had taken up residence not far away, at a rocky outcropping on the Hudson called Stony Point. Their intention was to push north up the river: If they took the Hudson, they took the Northeast.

Helen’s husband came to her while the cicadas were giving their evening concert and the sky had softened to a pretty pink. He had red-brown locks that had been passed down to him from some northern bloodline, gray irises, and a mangled left ear from a childhood skirmish with a feral dog. That evening, there was a wild, dagger-sharp gleam in his eye. Helen listened, not looking up from her knitting, while he told her what he was not supposed to have told her—the plan. The daring, terrible, and completely mad plan to take Stony Point.