The Stumpwork Robe (The Chronicles of Eirie 1) (25 page)

He led his horse to Liam’s body and heaved the stiff, young man over the saddle, again tying him on. A tear ran down his cheeks and he scrabbled his hand angrily through his close-cropped white hair.

‘Liam, I was wrong, so terribly wrong.  I have never been wrong and now you are dead because of an old man’s frailties.’ He ran fingers down Liam’s dry cheek. ‘I am sorry, so sorry.’

A single bird trilled into the peace as the cavalcade headed across the forest to the Barrow Hills and the gateway to Faeran. Jasper led the way, his horse walking quietly behind. Mogu trudged patiently in their wake, conscious of her precious cargo, awash with loss as she searched the horizon for the broad bay back of Ajax and the swaying, creaking van carrying Adelina.

There was nothing. She trudged on.

C
hapter Thirty Seven

Waves sucking shingle filled the sea air with a rhythmic, hypnotising sound. Breaking softly, stroking the shore, pulling playfully at the crushed shells and then running back to the sea, like a child teasing another. Creeping up behind, tugging at hair and then running away again, giggling. It was a playful sea that stroked the shore of Mevagavinney. In, out, out in. Occasionally a whole shell would be caught in the watery pull and dragged out to sea. But then the next wave would grab it and toss it back again. Adelina reclined on a window seat high above the small beach, watching the waves. Her head rested against the window frame and she closed her eyes and listened. In, out. Out, in. Luther had stopped the poppy more than a week ago and her body had taken time to stop its desperate desire for more. She found the waves helped - soothing, relaxing. But she used her own intrinsic strength to conquer the cravings as well. In any case, the need to outwit Severine was far stronger than the need for such drugs. To a point she felt the poppy had helped her, taken the edge off the frantic fear, anger... madness. Opium was an insidious thing, a dark friend that it was best to cast aside.

Her window sat high up a sheer wall. The stone facade fell away to a tiny cove only a small distance from the breakwater that protected Mevagavinney from the cold waves of the southern Ocean. Icy blasts from Oighear Dubh, the Land of Black Ice, had been known to knock waves up as far as Adelina’s window.
Severine owned the tiny fishing hamlet; the fishing smacks, the trading
vessels, the smugglers’ dinghies, the men. Her harbour sheltered them behind the protective bulwark of the stone sea wall. Isolated from the rest of Eirie by a forbidding landscape at its back and an inhibiting sea from the front, it was Severine’s own world. Her laws, her subjects. Veniche was her public face and Mevagavinney was her private one. Her secret.

The closest village was Polcarrow... a half day by sea with a following breeze. A little further away lay Frynche on the southern tip of Maria Island, two days in good conditions. But few ventured to Mevagavinney, it had a reputation of all that festered and rotted.

Adelina sighed. Always someone whose hands had been busy, she was bored. Luther brooded when he entered with her daily needs, eyes flat and empty as a corpse. She asked him where Severine was but he chose not to answer. In truth, his presence stirred a fear in her and for once she thanked Aine for Severine’s power over he and so many others.

In the beginning, she was content to lie on her bed and watch the shifting patterns of light on the walls. Or to observe the excellent tapestries. She thought it was a series of Travellers’ tales. Of Oenghus and the Swan Maid, Tristan and Isolda, Lancelot and Guinevere. She read them like books and then took to examining each and every stitch and thread, changes in colour and tone. And thought how unsatisfying it must be to create things in anything less than a third dimension.

Time passed merely as light travelling in an arc across her walls.

She found some paper in a writing desk and a piece of charcoal and began to
draw designs, one after another. Looking for more paper she made a discovery that changed her life. Far in the back of the little desk, behind a box of broken pieces of charcoal, lay a goosequill pen and ink powder and a pile of tissue thin paper.
She began to write; firstly a page that she hid under the mattress,
and then another page. Always at night when she was left alone without interruption. She had begun the third page when she heard voices outside the studded door of her room and quickly thrust her scribblings under the bed, grabbing charcoal and one of her designs and flinging herself onto the window seat, under the light of a flaring wall sconce.

The door flew back and Severine swept in. ‘Now that is what I like to see, Adelina at wo
rk. How diligent. Good, good.’ She reached and grabbed the pile from the window seat. ‘Actually quite exceptional. Now I see why they want your work in the Museo.’

She moved around the room slowly, as though searching for anything
she felt should not be there. ‘What do you need?’

‘My freedom.’ Adelina made no effort to show any respect.

‘Always straight to the point.’ Severine frowned. ‘So let me be equally frank. No. Not for a long while. I shall ask you again. What do you need?’

‘For what?’

‘Has Luther not told you? Luther!’ she called out through the half open door. ‘Send in the housemaid.’

A young waif of a girl with black hair wound into a bun from which wisps escaped, sidled into the room. Eyes downcast, over her arms she carried the robe.

Severine gestured toward Adelina’s drawings. ‘I want you to embroider the robe. I want it to look just as you planned... with some variations.

‘No.’

‘No? What do you mean?’

‘No to everything. I will not embroider my robe for you. Ever!’

Severine’s face darkened, a small tic in her cheek flick-flacking away.
‘Luther, bring the rest in,’ she called to her man and he entered with a bundle wrapped in a cloak. ‘Tip it out.’ Her harsh voice slipped over Adelina’s skin like a snow-shower.

The cloak was unrolled and Kholi’s travel caplet and scimitar fell to the floor. Adelina leaned forward, a gasp escaping, her eyes fixed on the familiar objects.

‘I think you will stitch, Adelina.’ Severine gestured. ‘I am sure you recognize these. And just in case you think we found them and lie, perhaps you should see this.’

She walked across the thick Raji rugs, her feet silent, unrolling a small twist of paper. Inside was a lock of blue-black hair, curling back over
Severine’s finger. Adelina looked at the hat, at the weapon and her eyes
dwelt longest on the hair, her heart thumping from where it had sunk, low, so low in her chest. She bent and picked up the rolled caplet and crushed it in her fingers, smelling the love of her life drifting on the air. ‘Where is he?’

‘Somewhere very safe. And he will continue to be safe as long as you do my bidding.’ Severine turned to the maid. ‘Well don’t stand like a statue, girl, hang the robe up and be careful with it. It is priceless to me.’

The girl hurried to reach for the hook on the side of an empty armoire and hung the gown where it swung to and fro, mocking Adelina with its beauty. If she could, she would have slashed it to ribbons, to flimsy torn streamers as frayed as her emotions. ‘Where is Liam?’ She was so filled with ire her voice shook and it annoyed her; the last thing she wanted was for the bitch to think she was scared. ‘Is he with Kholi? Is he alright? I swear Severine, on my life, if you have hurt them...’

Severine smirked.
‘What? What can you truly do to me as you are now?’ She sighed like a mother annoyed with the whining of a fractious child and tossed her hair back over her shoulder, her icy eyes as chilled as mid winter. ‘Liam is with Kholi and he really can come to no harm as I said, if you do as I want. So, I ask you again, what do you need?’

Adelina sat silent for a moment, holding the cap to her lips. Then, ‘Everything in my van. Baskets of thread, baskets of stumpwork. In fact the whole wall of drawers.’

‘Luther, you hear? Take the wench and see to it. I want everything set up in here in the morning. Go now.’

Luther and the girl walked out of the room, the door shutting quietly
behind them. Severine stood in front of Adelina, smiling as the embroiderer bent her head over the caplet. ‘By Behir woman, don’t get maudlin. It’s a dirty caplet,’ she uttered dismissively. ‘And I swear to you, its wearer can come to absolutely no harm where he is. You keep to your promise and all will be well.’

Adelina could hardly bear to look at Severine. If she did she thought she might jump up, grab the scimitar and swing wildly.

‘My horse, Severine. Where is my Ajax?’

‘At pasture with some of my mares.’

‘And Mogu, the camel?’

‘Ah. We had no use for her so we turned her loose in the forest.’

Adelina’s fingers gripped the caplet tighter and her knuckles turned white as bone.

‘Hate me all you like, Adelina. It is no matter. I am your gaoler and you must do what I want, I truly have the upper hand. You are my servant and servants work for their masters. It is as it should always have been. Wasn’t it you who told me I was a changeling, that I am not mortal? Does that not mean I am therefore just a little,’ she measured with her fingers, ‘better than you?’
She walked around the room restlessly.
‘You will find I am not unkind. I shall send your clothes up from the van and just because I like you,’ she mocked, ‘I will leave you the hat as a comfort toy. This you don’t need,’ she held up the lock of hair and threw it into the fire, Adelina gasping as she watched it burn. ‘And this,’ Severine scooped up the scimitar, ‘you must not have. Adieu Adelina.’

The following morning, under a grey and forbidding sky, Adelina watched from the window seat as Luther and some men of equally rough ilk carried in her tall set of drawers and placed it on the floor against a bare stonewall. A trunk followed filled with her clothes and the serving girl carried in a bundle of the baskets from the floor of the van. Everything had been found just as it was before Adelina had been drugged.

‘Meriope will help you unpack. She is mute so you won’t be able to gossip and conspire.’ He tapped the servant on the shoulder, using his hands to indicate time and shouting as if the poor woman was deaf as well as dumb. ‘Girl, I’ll come back in an hour. See you have everything settled before I return.’ He took his overlarge, egg-shaped pate and his thick, muscle-bound body and left the room with his cohorts, the key once again turning in the lock.

Adelina cast a tired glance at Meriope and black eyes smiled back. ‘He is wrong of course. I do speak.’ The wench’s voice was as clear as a bell. Adelina clapped her hands together in delight. ‘But it pays for them not to know.’ Meriope grinned.

Adelina nodded, enjoying the subterfuge and secrecy. A vision of Liam rose unbidden but she forced it away into the darkest reaches of her mind.

‘We had best unpack then, had we not?’ Meriope began to open the trunk and shake out the clothes that were crushed and pressed flat with the weight of packing. She hung them on hangers and placed them in the armoire, chatting to Adelina as she worked. ‘I was captured in one of their smuggling raids. Now I work as a wench in this house, so we are alike, you and I. Both prisoners.’

‘Only you get to move about. I have only this room and my garde-robe.’ Adelina placed her baskets on the massive table stretching along one wall underneath two of the tapestries. As she lifted one of the woven lids, she saw the tiny wand spiked through a ball of wool like an old crochet hook. A satisfied sigh soughed away.

‘Severine may let you walk outside one day, she is a mercurial person.’ Meriope brushed at a fall of silk fabric the colour of butter.

‘Mercurial? Mad I say. She thinks to make herself immortal like the Others. More than mad.’ Adelina busied herself unlocking the drawers and checking the contents were unharmed.

‘Mad, deluded - it makes little difference. We must do her bidding.’ The younger woman shook out a fine lawn chemise and folded it carefully into a chest.

Adelina snorted as she reached for the whispering silk robe. ‘Do her bidding I must but I will get my own back’.
She sat and threaded a needle and began to sew the first element on the
left front of the robe’s hem. Tonight she thought, I shall write more and shrink what I write and sew it into the stumpwork of the gown. The story of this robe shall be for someone to read in the future. Severine’s insanity will be learned by someone somewhere and spread across the land. She heaved a sigh. For now, that was all the revenge she was capable of.

***

So my friend, you can see how it all started. I began to sew all day and write all night and my hands became knotted and tired. My eyes reddened and ached and I felt exhausted to the point of collapse, worrying it would be hard to give the robe the attention and skill it deserved. Come hell or high water, I wanted this robe to end up in the Museo. If not, then at least I wanted it found by someone who would appreciate my skill and who would want to hear the story it would tell. It was these paltry conceits, to finish the robe and write the story, that fuelled my fires and kept me going, as you see.

Shrink away those last two books and replace them in their hideaways. Then follow the bees to the fishpond which I have rendered in Venichese stitch on canvas. I applied it separately as you do in stumpwork and surrounded it in a stitch to resemble rocks. Under one of the boulders, which you must unpick, you will find another book. Then count two rocks to the one with the tiny shells nestling in the crevice for there is the next journal. Release it in the same way.