Hester(13)

I pulled away the brown paper to reveal a rainbow of threads more brilliant than any I’d seen even in the finest shop windows back home—vermilion and India red, indigo and cobalt, the green black of the deepest seas.

“You told me your dreams.” Darling’s voice shimmered like river water. “This is my thanks to you—silk from China, colors from every corner of Shanghai. I believe you might be an artist if you wish it, Mrs. Gamble.”

I choked out my thanks and he touched my arm.

“I owe you my life,” he said. I stared up at the words that floated above him like strong blue clouds pillowed against a pearl-white sky.

I OWE YOU MY LIFE



The shoemaker’s banner had appeared in my mind’s eye as a sewn piece that I might create. But the captain’s words were nearly tangible, as if I could hold out an open palm and take them into my hands.

I managed one more word of thanks before the captain was called away and I was alone.

Clutching the threads against me, I slid down onto the floor of the ship. I was dizzy and dazed and feared I was falling ill.

I listened to the crashing waves, the ropes clanging against masts, men calling to one another, and the breeze ripping the sails—everything suddenly full of color. The sea seemed to tilt and I felt as if I were sliding into the faerie world, where mischievous kelpies and lovelorn selkies could steal away your clothes and your memory, your mind or your heart.

Over the years I’d sometimes wondered if I had ever lived in a world where sound was color and voices hung in the air like painted curtains, or if I had merely imagined such things. Now the colors of my youth were even richer than before, sprung from within me as they had not since I was a girl—beautiful, but also terrifying.

I tried to reason with the colors, to keep them at bay so they would not overwhelm me, but they kept coming. The crew’s voices were pebbled brown, the ocean’s windy roar was the cobalt blue of tumbling sea glass. Every sound around me had its own vivid hue and texture, as bright as it had been in my childhood, the smoky veil of my girlhood grief finally lifted.

After Mam’s death I’d learned to accept a more ordinary imagination. In Glasgow, the colorful shop banners had been a joy, but when ruin came so quickly after, it had seemed a warning to stay as far from my colors as I could.

Yet I’d brought about good fortune at sea: I’d helped save the captain’s life and nursed him back to strength. I’d made a friend and been given a gift. Waves crashed blue and purple and I laughed aloud, and the sound of my own laughter was a brilliant pink light, something I’d never seen before.

As if I were waking from a long gray dream, old sights from long ago made themselves known and I clutched at my notebook and made my sketches. Stories my mother and father had told me, their tales and colors, returned to me. When I was steady enough to stand, I made my way back to my cabin and drew more. I found the sand-colored linen remnant I’d salvaged from ruin and measured and cut a new lining for my red cape.

By afternoon I was stitching the River Clyde, the cottage where I was born, St. Andrew’s grand cathedral in brown and gold, and a red-and-white May tree in bloom. I used a blue running stitch for the river, a brown backstitch for tree trunks, tufted cream for the sheep in our old family pasture, and blue green and brown for the hills in Abington. These were the places and colors of my childhood, the magical world my parents had taught me to both love and fear.

I sewed the caramel of my father’s voice into his hair and boots; the sapphire and turquoise of Mam’s voice I put into a dress made with jeweled buttons as my mother had never worn in life.

For days I was lost in the work, wishing only for a larger embroidery hoop to make the stitching easier. I’d nearly forgotten about Edward until he staggered onto the deck one afternoon.

“Isobel,” he cried in a strangled voice. “Girl, I need your help.”

Something in the way he pitched across the ship frightened me, and I pressed myself into a shadow. A passing crewman motioned me belowdecks and opened a trapdoor that I slipped into as Edward collapsed.

“You stay here,” the sailor said. “Let Ingo take care of him.”

I found myself in a narrow pocket of space just big enough for two empty barrels. A cat and her kittens were nesting in one, and the other was filled with water and bits of trash. For a few moments I was torn between hiding and helping. But when I realized the copper ring on the barrel could be fashioned into a very large embroidery ring, I set my pliers and knife upon it, first prying it off and then filing the edges smooth.

By the time I was back on deck, Edward was nowhere to be seen.



* * *



WITH A BARREL-SIZED hoop to hold my cloth tight and secure, I fell fully under the spell of my colors. Suspended between Scotland and the New World, I worked in my cabin or on a bench on deck. At night I sewed by moonlight, and when the sky was dark I lit the lamp in my cabin and picked up my work again.

I finished the scenes of my childhood home and set to work on the selkies and kelpies at the river’s edge, the faeries under the May tree, and two Jacobites for the Highlanders’ uprising. I stitched my name in emerald green, Isobel MacAllister Gamble, and my mother’s in magenta, Margaret Anderson MacAllister. I stitched my pap’s in bold black letters with black thread—Seamus MacAllister—and recorded his parting words to me: