Knit in Comfort (27 page)

The rainbow blanket
won
?

Which of the Purls slept with Roy?

Envelope opened, she read the contents of the letter and sank into a chair, blinking in disbelief. A check for five thousand dollars, made out to Megan.

The Purls had entered the shawl she made for her vow-renewal ceremony, the one Sally would wear at her wedding.

She'd won.

What's more, Addy Baker needed permission to give out her contact information because so many people who'd traveled from Hendersonville and Asheville for the fair had asked where they could get lace.

Megan blinked some more, allowed herself a smile, then a grin and a warm swell of love for her Purls. How she'd miss them.

This was all really hard to take in.

Coffee. She needed coffee. Megan stared again at the check. First thing after breakfast she'd buy herself a new maker, the kind she liked, a machine that would keep her faithful company until the end.

One step at a time, so the uncertainty ahead, bad and good, yin and yang, wouldn't become overwhelming. She needed Elizabeth's
Babcia
to guide her through this, to give her confidence that she could fly off into the murky future and find sunshine.

She needed Gillian.

Coffee brewed, she took her cup outside, wanting to get away from the riotous mess of the kitchen. On the stoop she paused to inhale the garden-scented morning air, benefiting from the suspended animation of having made an enormous decision she didn't have to put into action just yet. The last peaceful sunrise of her old life. She could still pretend the kids were innocently asleep upstairs as usual, Vera in her room, Stanley away on a sales trip.

Down the steps, she saw on the patio table a package, folded note stuck to the top with
For Megan
written in Vera's careless scrawl. Megan's shoulders slumped. End of being able to pretend nothing had changed.

She drew out her chair but didn't sit, set her coffee down carefully, opened the note.
Megan, this came from your father the day you left.
Megan ripped off the paper, rolling her eyes at the way Dad always wrapped packages with enough tape to keep Harry Houdini out. Inside a stained cardboard box. A note from Dad that simply said,
From your mother.
Fighting tears, she lifted the lid, pushed the rustling tissue aside.

Lace.

Megan lifted, unfolded, caught her breath. A wedding shawl, delicate beyond anything she'd ever be able to manage, complicated beyond anything she'd ever be able to imagine, nearly magical in its perfection. Holding it, gazing rapturously, trying to take in the extraordinary details—fans, birds, trees, diamonds, flowers, curling ocean waves—she was swept by emotion, not pain, not joy, but with elements of both added to humbling awe. This was the work of true genius, a lace-knitting Mozart.

Breeze blew; the shawl rippled sensually as if delighted to be freed from the confines of cardboard. A slip of paper fell from its folds, cut with uneven edges from a larger sheet. Megan
picked it up and read, read again to make sure she really understood, trying to take in the hope spreading through her for the first time in fifteen years.

On the paper in her mother's unmistakable loopy handwriting:
Wedding shawl, knitted in memory of Calum Jamieson during the long summer nights of 1925 in Eshaness, Shetland, by my grandmother, Fiona Tulloch, and her too-briefly known and long-missed friend, Gillian Halcrow.

FROM

ISABEL
SHARPE

AND

AVON A

Q: Your book has a flashback story that takes place on the Island of Shetland in the mid-1920s. Can you tell us how you did your research?

I'm usually not big on research, to be honest. I'd much rather focus on the characters and their stories and emotions. However, this time I was hooked. I probably couldn't have written this book without the Internet, or at least I couldn't have finished it by my deadline! I not only found terrific sites, like the Shetland Museum website, which has archives with amazing pictures from that period, but I also came across references to very helpful books, including
The Last Lighthouse
, by Sharma Krauskopf, about her successful quest to purchase the Eshaness lighthouse being built on Shetland during my story, and
Heirloom Knitting
, by Sharon Miller, an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to knit lace. I even found a movie,
The Edge of the World
, which was filmed on the Shetland island of Foula in 1937, but which took place during the 1920s, and which used native Shetlanders as extras. There was even one quick shot of women knitting lace! I nearly jumped out of my seat with excitement.

Q: Is your story historically accurate?

I did mess with facts a little. There is an area called Eshaness on Shetland, with a lighthouse, but I couldn't find evidence of a town with that name—that is my invention. And I might have pushed it
more up, and who knows? People do cling to that kind of story. I tried to have mainly the older generation talking about the legends.

Q: Have you ever been to the Shetland Islands?

No, but I'd love to go! At one point I did some research on travel options, thinking it would be the chance of a lifetime, and what better way to write about a place than from firsthand experience? But at the time I checked, it would have cost three thousand U.S. dollars for one person just to get there and back, which is over my travel budget.

Q: How did you get the ideas for the flashback characters?

Oh you're really testing me here, it was a long time ago. Their story came partly from the characters I was working with in the main story, and partly from who they were. Gillian arose as a contrast to Fiona and from the legends of the finmen and the selkie. There's a movie set in Ireland,
The Secret of Roan Inish
, which I stumbled over while writing the book. I'd picked it out because I thought it might appeal to my sons (it didn't, but I loved it!), and then there was all this great stuff about selkies relevant to my book! Serendipity.

Q: Can you tell us more about the finmen?

Fishing, then, as now, is a very dangerous way to make a living. The sea around the Shetland Islands seems to have been particularly difficult due to sudden and severe storms. In earlier, more superstitious days a lot of the losses—boats, people, nets, lines—were blamed on amphibious creatures called fins. The finmen,
who resented mortals for competing on their fishing grounds, did whatever they could to cause trouble for them. I guess it was more comforting for Islanders to imagine their loved ones had been snatched by sea people than drowned. And easier to blame bad luck (or maybe carelessness) on some faceless other species.

Finmen were obsessed with silver (“white metal”) and loathed the sign of the cross. Fishermen would cut crosses in their floats and sinkers, and toss silver coins into the water if they suspected they were being chased. The finmen would become distracted by the silver and pursue it, allowing the men to escape.

There were also legends of finwives, who began life as mermaids, many times more beautiful than mortal women. If these mermaids were able to marry mortal men (consummation was the key), they could retain their beauty and live happily. Hence, tales of mermaids trying to entice men with their beauty and glorious singing. If they failed, they were forced to marry finmen. Gradually they'd lose their beauty until they became hideous finwives.

The idea of finwives resembles other cultures' ideas of witches. Unlike finmen, who avoided humans, the finwives would move onshore to live among them, though staying relatively solitary. They would knit or spin and practice healing arts—the classic suspicious single woman suspected of witchcraft. In return for healing and for selling needlework, the finwives would earn silver, which they would dutifully forward to their greedy fin-husbands.

Q: Who are the parallel women to Fiona and Gillian?

I didn't want to make direct parallels. At various points in the story, various people have aspects in common with the characters in the Shetland story. Ella can be a Gillian to Megan's Fiona as well as Genevieve, Stanley's other wife. Elizabeth is a newcomer who shakes up Megan's complacency, and who develops a relationship of sorts with David. Elizabeth and Megan start out as antagonists and then bond, so their relationship can be
compared to Gillian and Fiona as well. I didn't want it all to jibe too neatly.

Q: Have you ever tried lace knitting?

Yes! When I started this book. Of course I had to try. I learned to knit as a girl, and have always enjoyed it. I also loved crewel and cross-stitch embroidery, needlepoint, and made my own clothes for many years. I make a point in my regular knitting to find the most complicated patterns possible to keep me challenged and interested. So I felt entirely up to the job of taking on lace. Uh, no. No matter how carefully I counted every stitch, by the next row I was always missing one somewhere. I did stick with it long enough to develop a recognizable and very beautiful pattern, but it went too slowly for impatient me, and I never got far enough for the pattern to become instinctive. My hat is off to anyone who can make it through a project. I found pictures online of lacework that was absolutely stunning.

Q: Where did the Shetland women get the wool for their work?

They'd raise the sheep themselves, then in the summer, when the animals were molting naturally, they'd pluck
by hand
the softest hairs from the sheep's necks and behind their ears. This was to keep the hairs as long as possible (shearing would shorten the individual strands). They'd mix the wool with seal oil, which they'd wash out for regular knitting, but leave in for strength when making the finest threads. Then they'd card the wool and spin it. The best spinners could get nine thousand yards from a single ounce of wool!

To avoid spoiling the most delicate yarns, they did everyday knitting with thicker wool outside while they did other chores (they'd rig one needle so they could knit one-handed!), and they
worked on the fine lace inside by fire and lamplight in the evenings. One source said it took up to nine months to spin the yarn for a shawl and six weeks to knit it. This they did in addition to making thicker mittens and caps and stockings for their families and to sell.

What the women on Shetland accomplished is mind-boggling. Their lives were so hard, they had so much to take care of—house, garden, children, animals—yet, somehow they managed to create all this gorgeous and amazingly complex lace. I have no idea when they slept!

Q: What is the history of Shetland lace?

Shetland sheep produce especially warm and soft wool, better suited to knitting than weaving. Knitted wear was already important to the local economy by the sixteenth century, when natives traded stockings, caps and gloves to northern European merchants and fishermen. Lace knitting grew out of this tradition. In the nineteenth century, the height of the lace industry's prosperity, gifts to England's royal family paid off when Queen Victoria (herself a knitter) wore collars and stockings of Shetland lace, and lace patterns were printed in English magazines. In 1851 Shetland lace was displayed at the Great Exhibition at London's Crystal Palace. By the early twentieth century, Fair Isle sweaters had taken over as the main commercial knitted product from the islands, and the demand for lace died off.

Q: Knitting has been very important to Megan's life. What part has knitting played in your life? Have you ever belonged to a knitting group?

I've never belonged to a group. For me, knitting is a blissfully peaceful and solitary activity, but then I'm an introvert, so that fits me. My paternal grandmother was a knitter. She was incred
ible. Her stitches were so even (mine aren't) they looked like they came out of a machine. She also never used a pattern. My mother also knitted, and she taught me. Three kids to raise, a full-time teaching job, and Mom managed to knit me beautiful sweaters! Once she even made a cable sweater for my Barbie (Mom, where did you find the time?). I need my hands busy when I'm listening to music or an audio book, or just letting my mind wander, and needlework is perfect for that.

Q: On to the characters in your book. Did Gillian exist or not?

You can decide! The shawl that shows up at the end could have been knitted by Megan's mother, or it could have been the real one passed down. Maybe there was real magic and the box and shawl appeared in Megan's father's attic when Megan needed to see it. Maybe Fiona was altered by the shock and grief of losing Calum and imagined Gillian while she knit the shawl herself. There are many possibilities. Me, I'd love to believe the Shetland story as written.

Q: Why is Megan so sure Gillian isn't real?

First, in a literal sense, because Gillian suddenly appeared in her mother's stories when Megan had a difficult girl at school to deal with, and because her mother often told the Shetland stories as morality tales to fit Megan's life. And of course the “magic” side of Gillian would not have held water for Megan.

Second, symbolically, the book is about Megan's world expanding. She lived all over the country as a girl, but stayed very closed and small in her life, directed very inward. Her memories are more of knitting with her mother than the cities and towns around her. In fact, she often confuses where she lived at any given point. Her eventual opening up to believe in Gillian is part
of her opening up to external experiences and aspects of herself that she denied for too long.

Q: Do David and Megan end up together?

I'll leave that to you! But yes, I believe they do. I think David keeps Megan's world from closing in on her and I think she keeps him humble. They're a good match in temperament, too.

Q: What do you see as Elizabeth's future?

In my mind Elizabeth is still going to need a few years to settle down and make peace with her mother and herself. In my original draft, Dominique was an overbearing jerk and she left him at the end of the book, but that was too many women leaving relationships, so I changed it. I think her process of maturation works better this way. I'm still not sure Dominique is perfect for her, but she loves him, and he definitely adores her. I do think she'll go to college, and become a more mature and grounded person. Having career goals of her own will help their relationship too.

Q: Can you relate to Elizabeth's aimlessness career-wise?

Yup. Until I started writing, when my first son was a baby, I had pretty much resigned myself to wandering from one job I didn't much care about to the next. I had no career aspirations simply because nothing made me catch fire. Writing changed my life. Maybe Elizabeth will find something to catch her on fire. Truffles? That farmhouse in North Carolina? Being a bigger part of Dominique's life and world? Something will. She's too stubbornly enthusiastic and creative to remain down for long.

Q: Why truffles?

I must have come across an article about them—I didn't realize they were being grown in the United States! I'm a foodie, so all things about food interest me, and I was fascinated. Truffles are why I set the story in North Carolina. The western mountains became the perfect place because of their beauty, but also because they seem in many people's minds to be the opposite of ocean, which is where Megan and her ancestors come from. And truffles represent Elizabeth's fancy life in New York, which she leaves, but which are still part of her in the form of Dominique, so she embraces them again at the story's end.

Q: What about Ella's future?

Ella will always land on her feet. I'm not worried about Ella. Watch out world, here she comes.

Q: Anything else you'd like to tell us?

Check out the information online about the Shetland islands! A truly fascinating place with a dramatic history. And if you're already a lace knitter or brave enough to try, I'd love to hear from you. E-mail me through my website, www.IsabelSharpe.com.