Broderie Écossaise

FIONNIE GIVES A LITTLE GASP and puts her finger in her mouth. There’s no blood, no real injury. The gasp and finger-sucking are only theatre: a way to break the monotony. A clock ticks in the room. Thread whispers through linen.

Outside, a single hoof-strike sounds against the pave. Fionnie drops hoop, silk, and needle and bursts to her feet.

“I am very well to meet you, and to learn many fine stitches together.”

Marguerite’s voice, her charming, approximate English, echoes off the marble of the hall. She is trim and dark, with a face like a fox that bespeaks mischief. Something in her accent, a note in her voice just off-true, tugs at Fionnie’s guts. Fionnie dives into a curtsey, and when she comes up, Marguerite gives her a wink, and the heat in her belly intensifies.

Marguerite is here to watch her.

Yes, they will learn new stitches together, which is what Fionnie, the maids, and Marguerite herself have been told. But Dad also knows her father: the family are staunch Huguenots, despite the risk, and so there can be no doubt that Marguerite, unlike Fionnula, is a good Christian girl. So all of them—Fionnie, the maids, Marguerite and certainly Dad—know Marguerite is also here to make sure Fionnie keeps out of trouble, doesn’t get up to any of her nonsense again. At least until Dad can pass her safely into another man’s keeping.

Fionnie doesn’t mind. She likes embroidery, likes learning new stitches, and the way she can see the results of her efforts. And if nothing else, she knows the danger of idle hands.

There is a letter from Ewan.

He’s still in Rotterdam, but writes joyfully to tell her he’s coming back sooner than planned. Fionnie fights off the urge to crumple his letter into a ball and eat it. Instead, she slips it under her mattress with the others: he will expect her to show him the whole fat stack of them, tied up with ribbon, when he gets back.

She’s dragging her pen through a reply, trying to dredge up more platitudes from the silt at the bottom of her brain, when Marguerite knocks on the doorframe.

“Oh, thank God.” Fionnie throws down the pen. “Let’s go outside.”

She’s tying on her bonnet in front of the tall mirror when Marguerite says,

“What an odd thing to stitch!”

Fionnie freezes. “Don’t—!”

Marguerite is crouched beside her basket of samplers. She’s holding up one of Fionnie’s bigger ones. A pastoral scene, of a sort. For a moment Fionnie is terrified Marguerite will recognise the subject, lying prone, one leg folded under him, on a gravel driveway made of french knots beside a tall dappled horse of fine satin-stitch. But of course Marguerite hasn’t met him yet.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Marguerite drops the piece, her face going a fetching pink.

“No, no. It’s nothing. It’s just— not finished yet. I’m embarrassed of it.” Not quite true. The stitches are finished, it’s the other part that isn’t. Though Fionnie lives in hope.

“Anyway,” she adds, trying to laugh, though her palms are sweating. “It’s only a silly fancy. I hope you don’t think me morbid.”

Rain sheets down, pattering on the windows and pooling in the muntins. Fionnie practises her French, her cheerful, blundering efforts sending Marguerite into hysterics. It will be sunny and warm right now in Manosque, and Marguerite describes birds, rabbits and sheep, fields of flowers you can run through, the smell of lavender. Fionnie lets her needle travel where it may, hardly attending the shapes and colours that bloom in its wake. In her mind Manosque is bright and full of colour, as distant from Gillieshall’s forbidding woods and moors as from the moon.

There’s a stew Marguerite wants to make for their Sunday dinner, with Fionnie’s help, meant for cold wet days like these. The project has Dad’s approval: he thinks learning to cook will civilise her. For her own part, Fionnie is looking forward to feeding Marguerite morsels of mushroom and carrot, sneaking sips of cooking sherry and laughing with her in the warm confines of the kitchen. Everyone wins.

Marguerite drops her hoop with a delicate sigh, shaking out the stiffness from her fingers, and Fionnie at last looks down at her own work. And swallows, realising what she’s stitched.

The identity of the subject is plain enough: no one else’s hair could be rendered in such a shade. And in such a pose— and Fionnie herself in such a one. Well.

Heat, and then cold, washes through her. She’s got to undo it. Now. She needs to unpick it all before Dad or a curious maid or, God preserve us, Marguerite herself can see. Before what Fionnie has drawn in thread can seep out into the world.

Hands trembling, eyes unaccountably prickling, she snips the thread and reverses her work. She spends the rest of the afternoon teasing threads backwards out of the linen, heart pounding in the base of her throat. Unmaking Marguerite’s face and grey gown, her hands and damning ankles. Failing to make conversation with the real Marguerite, sitting across from her, busy at her own work and not seeming to mind the silence.

When she is done the light is thin and her head is tense with squinting. The linen is only holed a little, wisps of thread still clinging in fawn and black and grey. Fionnie feels empty and relieved, like the fabric.