Hester(5)

Mam began to cough and I saw that I had taxed her as my little brother taxed her and the storm was taxing her, and so I made myself quiet and put my head against her bosom and listened to the blue beating of her heart as we fell asleep.



* * *



SNOW KEPT COMING that night and through the next. It drifted against the cottage high enough to cover the windows and shutters. We had dry wood for fire and enough hard bread and pickled cabbage to sustain us. It was warm inside with my father and mother. Jamie stood at the window and watched the snow falling until the window was covered, and then he stamped a dance beside the fire that went on all day. By evening my mother had taught my brother to pound flour and snow into dough and mold it into small loaves of bread, and so his love of baking was born.

In the weeks that followed we were busy digging out from the storm, feeding the sheep, emptying the barrels of rainwater, and gathering up the scattered chickens. Mam told us to pay her cough no mind, but by spring there were splatters of scarlet on her bedsheets and sleeping gown.

Pap piled us into a wagon and his brother drove us up to Glasgow. For three weeks we waited in a small room while the doctor treated Mam with camphor and bloodletting. She was pale as the bedsheet—pale as a bean-nighe—when she called me to her.

“Pap told you stories of the faerie world.” Her voice was a whisper. I nodded fiercely and blinked back tears. “Some people can see it better than others, but remember, it’s best to keep those things to yourself. Keep your secret close, Isobel.”

Then she was gone, and my colors were gone with her. Letters were simply black, just as she’d taught me. Words were sounds and nothing more. My colors had been my inspiration, and then my curse, and after they left me there was no cure for my sadness.



* * *



PAP SENT JAMIE to live with Uncle James and his wife in Abington, but he and I stayed on in Glasgow. He found work in a distant cousin’s print shop and let a small room just inside the city walls. There were two pallet beds, a coal stove and a table, and a small window that looked onto the narrow alley.

“White on white,” Pap told me as he led me down the street early one morning. I was wearing a plain black work dress covered with a red-and-white ticking smock. It was my first store-bought smock, tied with a bow that rubbed into my back as we walked. “’Tis what your mam said you should do, and so you will do it.”

“Why?” My words had become fewer since my mother died.

“’Tis good work, a valuable skill,” Pap said. “Scotland makes the finest muslin in the world and our embroidered work is wanted everywhere.”

I remembered the day my mother had stitched the small red A and folded it away, and the day she told me about Isobel, Queen of the Witches.

But Mam had conscripted me to the tambour shop, a place without color, and I knew it was her way of trying to keep me safe now that she was gone.

Never tell anyone, Mam had said. I had never spoken of the colors, even to Pap. I wondered if he knew but could not fathom how to ask.

He and I entered a stone church through a side door and descended a half staircase into a basement sewing shop. The walls were white, the floors were freshly mopped, and the warming fire on the far side of the room was covered by a tall black grate. There were four tables stretched with white linen; fifteen girls kept their heads down when we entered. Not a single hook or needle faltered.

A tall man led us to a washbasin and told me to scrub my hands.

“The nails, too,” the shop master said. His hands were long fingered and pale, as if he soaked them in whiting. His left arm was twisted and folded inside a sleeve.

“Small fingers and no dirt beneath the nails. We’ll see if your daughter can stitch as you’ve said, Mr. Gamble,” the shop master said.

I was given a sharp tambour hook and asked to make a running stitch. Mam had taught me how to use the long needle with a hook that pulled thread through and across the fabric. I was quick with the work and my line was true and straight.

“Now a satin stitch,” the shop master said. I worked without lifting my hook from the cloth, as my mother had taught me. “And then a string of ivy.”

I completed each task without looking up.

“She’ll do quite well,” the shopkeeper said. “Bring her tomorrow morning and have her bring a white potato or bread for her lunch.”

So began my years in Master Dwyer’s Tambour Shop, where we decorated, cut, and sewed muslin aprons, caps, collars, petticoats, bridal trousseaux, and infants’ robes and gowns. At night Pap told me about his work in the print shop, where he learned how to read and to spell. He bent over the newspaper and sounded out the words and taught me to do the same.

“Your mam wanted you to read,” he said, and he made it so.

Without the colors, it was easy. The letters did not worry me anymore, for they were black as they were meant to be. This was the one good thing that came of losing the colors—I could read, and the words dropped away as they were meant to, leaving pictures, people, places, and tales in their stead.

Every girl in the tambour shop was small and clean, each quick with the needle. The shop was a quiet place, for the shop master insisted on it. But the girls whispered to one another while we worked, and I hoped we would be friends.

One day I read a notice before Master Dwyer got to it, and eagerly shared the news.