Tapestry , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Margaret Allen

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129 pages

English

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Enter the enchanted land of the Tapestry, an exquisite wall-hanging fashioned long ago by a master weaver. His creative talent was such that he gifted his work with real life and it is animated every night from sun-down to sun-up. What adventures does it see?Orphaned tragically, a young girl named Selina leaves her home and travels to serve a noblewoman who has her own sad history. The rumours say that her husband abandoned her because he could no longer bear to look at her face which had been disfigured in an accident and which she now hides behind a veil. Selina only sees a kindred spirit in the brief flashes of eyes behind the veil and is willing to obey Lady Isabella.But nothing is ever as it seems and in a twist of fate, Selina discovers the truth: Lady Isabella's husband never ran into the night - he was lost to her on her wedding night as a result of a spell cast by an evil and jealous sorceress. Only one girl has the power to confront the sorceress and do battle with her for the release and reclamation of Lady Isabella's husband, body and soul.Selina, it's time to accept your destiny.

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	06 septembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781803133553
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Copyright © 2022 Margaret Allen

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1803133 553

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To Maura, Kwame, Taali, Namali and John

Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter One
Washing her grandmother’s lifeless body, Selina had experienced the truth of so-called dead weight. Frail as she had become in these last months, it had still proved surprisingly difficult after the ablutions to manoeuvre her unbending and uncooperative arms through the long sleeves of shift and overdress. The very fact that those unwieldy limbs were also withered and desiccated made the determined effort she was obliged to employ all the more difficult and distressing. Awkwardly pulling and tugging at clothing as stiff and unyielding as she herself would soon become she reflected on the pity of it all. These garments had been put away long ago, reserved for the special occasion that might come, but of course never had. Instead they would now adorn her body for the occasion of death, rather than in preparation for the life-changing invitation or encounter for which they were initially made. Sewn then in the never-failing hope and anticipation that the best might yet come, they had languished a lifetime as unseen and quietly unfulfilled as the woman who had made them.
There had been no need to close her eyes. She had done that for herself as she had surrendered unresisting to those other forces that would now take charge of steering her dismasted vessel. Maybe too she was weary with the world and its ways, and glad enough to be done with having to look at it. Whatever her fading motivation had been, in the end she had slipped away so quietly and in a manner so devoid of fuss or drama that Selina had not been aware of exactly when she had finally crossed the dividing line between here and gone. Stepping outside the door for the briefest of moments to stretch arms and back, and to take in a good deep breath of air free from the smell of death, she found that in that short space while her back was turned, her grandmother had departed this life without ceremony, leave taking or bestowed blessing.
She had died much as she had lived. Not so much living really as simply existing, and she would leave as little impression on the world she had just departed as her wasted body would leave on the straw mattress on which she was stretched. Selina sighed and shook her head as she finished dressing her, and then laid her out with hands folded across her breast before the stiffening set in. Her final act of respect was to comb and braid her hair and tie up her jaw with a binder. Then she gathered some sweet herbs from their small but well-stocked garden and laid them round about her. When all was done, she cleared away the water and washcloths, knowing she must sit with her a while before she went to fetch the priest.
She had not been close to her grandmother; their relationship defined by the fact that she had never called her anything other than ‘Grandmother’, and she in her turn had remained ‘Selina’. No sweet, affectionate pet names had evolved naturally in the course of their one-to-one shared life. It was a life in which nothing had ever been done or said that was unkind, but also one where if there was no evidence of disaffection neither was there any of affection, of displeasure or pleasure. Such spark of emotional life as might yet have survived unquenched in her grandmother’s shrunken heart was channelled entirely into her needlework for the church and it absorbed her totally. It was her livelihood but also her reason to be. As she sewed, she became lost in executing her exquisitely perfect stitches, consumed by her own ability and the results of it. Maybe through gloriously enrobing God’s ordained intermediaries she found a reciprocal sense of also being of use to the Divine, her work in its own way no less a vocational gift and calling.
But as they had never talked about such things, Selina could only guess at the reasoning of her head and heart. The bare facts of her life were known to her only from her own mother’s telling; a tale in which it seemed that everything that was going to happen happened early on and then was over. Barely started before it was finished.
In her long-forgotten girlhood, her grandmother had been seduced by an itinerant mummer. He had come into and gone out of her life with careless but potent brevity, like an incubus whose dreamlike visitation had an adversely tangible outcome – her own mother’s birth.
Selina’s grandmother had raised her child on her own with scant sympathy and even less assistance, but her salvation was in her exceptional ability as a fine needlewoman. For in recognition of this, the church had given her free tenure of a humble dwelling and a meagre stipend in return for fashioning vestments, altar cloths and whatever else the house of God had need of. With her eligibility for procuring a legitimate husband and helpmate irredeemably compromised this then had been both work and penance ever since. And she had accepted it without complaint or rancour as her just deserts, the wages of sin inarguably allocating her place in the scheme of things. The mummer never came back nor did she seek him out. Instead she supplemented the church’s barely adequate provision by taking on commissions from the better heeled, and thus kept body, soul and child safely steered away from total privation.
Over the years, despite living a more or less hand-to-mouth existence, her grandmother, like many others, had still managed to put aside a few coins every week to ensure a coffin of some ilk, a simple service and a marker for her grave – stone if funds ran to it, wood if not – when the time came. A pauper’s burial was the dread of the impoverished and to be avoided at all costs, the resulting shame and stigma untenable. No matter that they would be dead and gone, they still would not escape such considerations, for it was common knowledge that you would languish in Purgatory or worse for all eternity should your mortal remains be left to rot in unhallowed ground. Selina hoped her grandmother’s work over the years for the church would have earned her a decent resting place whether or not the adding up of her contributions fell short of the mark.
Fortunately, when her own misbegotten mother grew to maturity, she met with better fortune than a vagrant opportunist. Her head was turned by a handsome, able and entirely suitable young man encountered at the annual May Day fair – the accepted trysting place for seeking and finding a partner. She left with him, glad to go, shed her bastard status and start a life of her own in another settlement. The distance between them meant Selina saw her grandmother rarely at first and finally not at all and news came but sparsely.
There was traffic enough from place to place with pedlars, story-tellers, tooth-pullers, actors and acrobats coming and going, all of whom you would be a fool to trust if you seriously wanted to send word.
Few could read or write, so for the written word you needed to employ two scriveners, one to pen the news and another to read it at the other end. Added to this burden of expenditure was the cost of the purveyor of the missive. In a climate where dubious dealings were normal commerce, it was all too likely that while on the road the bearer would spend his fee at a wayfarer’s inn and thereafter lose the incentive to fulfil his side of the bargain. Were he to be caught and challenged, he could always plead that he had been ill-used on the road by brigands, which being indeed so prevalent would be hard to disprove. Another possible choice was the wandering friars who were undoubtedly honest and who would also refuse payment other than a morsel to sustain them along the way. But they could lose themselves and all sense of worldly matters at any time if they were caught up and whirled away in a divine rapture. In transcendent holy madness, all else was as nothing to them, a fact that, when all was said and done, meant they were no more reliable than the rest.
Her parents had thrived in their committed endeavours with a sound beginning and the promise of a prosperous future ahead of them. Her industrious father apprenticed as a youth to the guild of weavers, had achieved the position of journeyman and aspired in a matter of a few years to become a master in charge of his own business. Being thus secure, they had been able to send word to her grandmother through guild and