Shades of Surrender (2 page)

“I don’t mind . . . I mean, it’s no trouble.” He quickly drew his eyes from hers and ran his stained hands over the warp strings. “I always loved how your father could turn my lustrous threads into beautiful works of art.” He moved in for a closer examination of the work. “You have your father’s skill at the loom. I can’t tell where his knots leave off and yours begin.”

Her father had been her world, but he was a poor businessman. If he had taught her more than how to tie a good knot she might not have had to sell their home. “Hoping buyers won’t notice is asking a lot. The first thing they’ll do is flip it over. The difference in my clove hitch will be easy to spot.”

“Maybe to you. But to someone like me, the garden on the front is so captivating I wouldn’t even think to check.” Caecilianus gazed around the shop, and she knew he was assessing the row of empty spindles on the stone ledge. “What do you have left to do?”

She wiped her sweaty palms on her tunic, then ran them along the strings of yarn vertically affixed in equal intervals to the horizontal beams across the top and bottom of the loom. “Just the sunrise.”

“Seems you’ll need a bit more saffron.”

“I can’t take any more—”

“What good is beautiful yarn if it’s just lying about collecting dust?”

“You’ve done more than enough for us already.”

Rap. Rap. Rap.

The man beating her door casing with his cane had hair the color of limestone dust, one useless leg that had been crushed in a quarry accident, and a crooked mouth set in a grim line. “You got my rent money?”

Ruth felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment. “I have a customer right now, Metras.” Which was true, for Caecilianus never came on a Tuesday without buying another sleeping mat he did not need. “Can we talk after he leaves?”

Metras nodded toward Caecilianus. “He buyin’ somethin’?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business, sir,” Caecilianus said.

Metras’s suspicious stare landed back on her. “If he buys so much as a mat, you can pay me at least some of what you’ve been promisin’ for the past two weeks.”

Caecilianus stepped from behind the loom. “Ruth was on her way to my shop to pick up a yarn order. Perhaps you could come back later in the day?”

The landlord’s black eyes narrowed beneath his scowl. “I’ll give you to sundown.” He pointed his cane at Ruth. “You don’t have that money, I’ll have no choice but to put you and your mother out on the street.” With a decisive nod, he hobbled off, his cane clicking on the cobblestones.

Caecilianus touched her arm, and Ruth felt herself tense. “Why didn’t you tell me about the rent?”

Ruth didn’t dare lift her eyes. Caecilianus would read her fear faster than the scriptures he loved. “Metras has a bark far worse than his bite.”

“He seems like a good enough man, but he’s got bills to pay, too. He’s well within his rights.” Caecilianus tugged on her elbow. “Let me help you. Please.”

As a well-known dyer of purple, Caecilianus was financially comfortable, but family honor would never allow her to accept a gift she could not repay. “Metras is a bored and lonely old man who suffers from chronic pain. I’ll take him some supper, and he’ll give me the time I need to finish my father’s tapestry.”

“How can you finish it? You don’t have enough yarn.”

“I’ll sell something else.”

“Like what?” He nodded toward the small stack of sleeping mats. “If I bought every one of these, would it be enough to pay what you owe?”

She looked him dead in the eye, her stomach churning. “Mats are not all I have left.”

His bushy brows raised. “No. Not that. Never that.” He took her firmly by the elbow. “You’re coming with me.”

“Where?”

“To get enough saffron yarn to finish your sunrise.”

She yanked her arm from his grip. “I can’t accept your help.”

Good-natured affection no longer twinkled in his eyes. “Pride goes before destruction.”

“Don’t quote scripture at me.”

He let out a frustrated sigh. “Very well. I will make a loan of the yarn. Once you sell your tapestry and pay the rent, you can pay me back.”

She considered his offer and her lack of options. “Only a loan?”

“A loan.”

“What about my mother? I can’t leave her.”

“My shop is only a few minutes away. Everyone needs a breath of fresh air now and then. How long has it been since you’ve been out of this house? I know you’ve become acquainted with the baker. We’ll stop and ask him to check on her.”

Mother wouldn’t last a week living on the streets. And that’s exactly what would happen if Ruth did not finish the tapestry before Cyprian returned. How had things come to this?

Ruth covered the kitten curled in her mother’s lap with a small blanket. “Mother, I need to run an errand.” She knelt before the vacant-eyed woman. “Promise me you’ll sit right here and take good care of our new friend while I’m gone.” She kissed her mother’s forehead, then turned to Caecilianus. “This is only a loan.”

2

“A
NY DYER WORTH HIS
salt only uses snails harvested after the rising of the Dog Star.” Caecilianus motioned Ruth into his shop. “Leave the door open. My latest shipment is fermenting.” He bid her peer into the tin dye vat, which she did without so much as holding her nose.

He knew he’d nearly talked her ear off all the way home, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop his foolish prattle. He kept telling himself it was because he was overly anxious about Ruth’s situation, which was serious. When Natta’s family had become unable to pay their taxes after his sudden passing and lost their home and shop in his neighborhood, he’d offered help. But Ruth had done exactly as he expected and turned him down. His concern over her burden of caring for her mother and keeping a roof over their heads was one of the very reasons he made up excuses to visit every Tuesday.

The other reason was a recent development.

Lately, it seemed that every time he got near this girl whose skin looked as soft as lamb’s wool, his legs either went out from under him or his tongue came unhinged. That’s why he limited his visits to her shop to once a week. He was afraid seeing her more often would turn him into a quivering mass of snail jelly.

“Once the sea snails discharge their waxy secretions,” Caecilianus continued, busying his hands with the removal of Brutus’s leash, “their juices lack the needed consistency. That is why I buy my snails before the summer sun warms the seas.” He waved his arms over the vat, and Brutus began to howl for his breakfast. “This is a secret known in only the finest of dyers’ shops,” he shouted over the dog. “Oh, I didn’t mean that to sound like I was bragging.”

“Hush, Brutus.” Ruth snapped her fingers and pointed to the mat in the corner. Brutus immediately slunk to his place, circled, then showed his disdain by plopping down with his rear pointed in their direction. “You don’t have a proud bone in your body, Caecilianus.” She straightened one of the drying racks. “My father used to say, ‘Our neighbor is a true artisan. He doesn’t sell the fool’s purple, like the light blues and deep violets hawked by the lesser talents.’ ”

Caecilianus tried to concentrate on the vat, but his eyes kept straying to hers. They were a stunning shade of
caeruleus
. He’d tried numerous times to reproduce that luscious blue-green of deep-sea water but could never quite match the intensity.

“No one in the empire can coax Tyrian purple from murex indigo and red madder root like you, Caecilianus. No wonder weavers come from as far away as Persia to purchase your beautiful skeins.”

Heat crept up his neck and flushed his face. “Kind of you to say.”

She shrugged. “Truth is truth.” She lifted her eyes to the rafters, where skeins of yarn hung from every peg. “How will we ever find the saffron twists in this mess?”

He tapped his forehead. “I keep order here.”

“You may have skill at the color vat, but you could use my help with presentation.” She found the stool she used to stand on to watch him hammer snails as a child, climbed aboard, and began taking down long, loopy skeins. “If we arrange the yarn by color, it will be so much easier to keep up with your inventory, and buyers will be able to see the subtle variations in shades.”

“But I know where—”

“Hold these.” She handed him an armful of yarn. “This whole place needs serious work. Once I’ve established order up here, I’ll take a broom to that horrid floor and organize those mounds of raw wool by the crimp count.” She looked at him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

How could he tell her she could organize his shop as much as she liked, but there was nothing she could do about the disorder her presence brought to his heart?

He sighed in surrender and held out his arms for more yarn.

3

F
OR ALMOST AN HOUR
Ruth sorted through stacks and stacks of yarn. Then she convinced Caecilianus to stand on the stool while she paced the floor, directing the new placement of every color. When they were finished, the ceiling was a rainbow of perfectly ordered inventory.

Tapping her finger to her lip, she tallied the colors. “No saffron.”

“It’s here.” He climbed down from the stool. “Somewhere.”

“Then it must be hidden under this layer of dust and snail shells.”

She whisked a broom across the floor efficiently until there wasn’t a speck of dust or a single mollusk shell left for Brutus to sniff. Then, after giving the windows a thorough scrubbing, she invited Caecilianus to step outside and see how they sparkled. The shop now had a clean, cheery feel, and so did she. For the first time in months, everything did not seem so dark, and she had Caecilianus to thank.

“I can’t believe what you’ve accomplished in such a short time.” Caecilianus handed Ruth a cup of watered wine.

“We,”
she corrected proudly. “We accomplished, Caecilianus.”

He wiped the smudge from her cheek. “You take on lost causes the way I take in lost pups.”

She cleared her throat nervously. He could never know how lost
she
was right now, how close she was to losing everything. No one could. She emptied her glass and handed it back. “Now to sort the raw wool.”

“It can wait.”

“I intend to leave here owing nothing.”

“After all your hard work today, I believe I owe
you
.”

“I have six months of your charity to repay.”

“That is a debt already forgiven. Besides, kindnesses between friends are never charity. They are a privilege.”

“In that case”—she turned him toward the bucket of snails sitting by one of his big vats—“you go about the business of making your dyes, and I’ll go about the privilege of making your shop presentable.” She brushed aside the perplexed expression on his face, squatted beside a pile of uncombed fleece, and plunged her hands into the greasy fibers. “Twenty twists per finger length, right?” She held up a strand, then glanced over her shoulder to find Caecilianus watching her while he whacked spiny-shelled mollusks with a mallet.

He gave a nod. “Better suited for the fine togas that must hold their shape from the fuller’s vats of urine to the steamer’s pressing bricks.”

“We shall keep the fine wools in this bin.” She scooped up the pile, then retrieved a strand from another. “Ten twists for blankets, right?” She moved to the next pile. “Three twists, the requisite number required for carpet wool. Coarse, resilient, and better able to withstand the scuff of passing feet.”

“Very good.” He poured the bowl of snail glands into the vat of salt water. “Come spring, you will be shrewd enough to purchase your own wool. No Bedouin will want to face you on the shearing floor.”

A strange sensation, like a sinking stone, rippled in Ruth’s stomach. Freeing Caecilianus of his obligation by learning to stand on her own two feet was the right thing to do. So why did the idea of losing him hurt so badly? Ruth’s father had taught her the secrets of a tight weave, but what she needed to know about friendship, faith, or how to run a successful business she had learned in this shop, from this humble man.

“Look what I found.” She held up a golden-toned skein of yarn.

He came to her side. “Told you it was here somewhere.”

She fingered the yellow strands, sensing the labor of love involved in the long process. “So many flowers must have had to surrender their petals to achieve the brilliance of this shade.”

“It is in the surrender that everything is made more beautiful.”

She slowly turned to him. Could he see into her soul? To that part of her so afraid to let go? Before she could express her gratitude and convey the terms by which she could accept his help, Caecilianus continued.

“Some dyers use cheaper plants like weld.” His lips were so close his breath mingled with hers. “But rich colors like this come from mixing the bright red stigmas of the saffron crocus with—”

She put a finger to his lips. “It’s perfect.”

“It is the color of the golden flecks in your hair,” he whispered, almost to himself. Then he immediately straightened and increased the space between them. “I mean, sometimes colors stick in my head, and I can’t rest until I re-create them and . . .”

When had Caecilianus acquired the strands of gray threaded through his beard? They didn’t make him appear older the way the rapid onset of gray streaks had aged her mother before her time. Instead, the silvery strands shimmered soft as moonlight and made Caecilianus’s smile seem even more sympathetic . . . more charming . . . more irresistible . . . more . . .

He reached for her hair. “Ruth, I—”

A loud clattering startled them both and cut off whatever Caecilianus was about to say. They wheeled to find Brutus standing in the middle of a puddle of purple dye and the tin vat rolling around his feet. His long tongue frantically lapped up the black liquor of rotted snails, sea salt, fermented urine, and toxic madder root.

“My clean floor!”

“My dog!”

“Brutus!” Ruth splashed through the slimy mess. She reached for the dog’s collar, but he ducked and took another daring swipe. “Brutus, no!” Purple stained the big tongue hanging from his panting mouth.