London - Edward Rutherfurd [67]
“Well, there’s nothing we can do,” Offa said.
“No,” his wife agreed. “But I wish there was.”
A further bond developed between Ricola and her mistress when Elfgiva permitted her to join in an activity the girl had never seen before.
Even at this early date, the Anglo-Saxon ladies of England were famous for their needlework, but embroidery was practised only by women of the upper class, for the simple reason that the materials used were rare and expensive. With fascination, therefore, when the afternoon drew in Ricola would sit at Elfgiva’s feet as, holding her work close to a lamp, the noblewoman went about her task.
“First you must take a length of fine linen,” she explained. “Some people in the king’s court even use silk. On this you trace the whole design.” To Ricola’s surprise, Elfgiva did not take the marker herself, but instead sent for Wistan. “He draws a better line than I,” she said.
And what designs, indeed, the young man drew. First, down the centre of the cloth, he made a single, long, curving line. “This is the stalk,” he announced. Then, branching off from this stalk, he made smaller stalks, always with the simplest curves, and upon these he made the outline, still with the purest simplicity, of several kinds of leaves and flowers, so that when he had finished, in the centre of the bare linen was a design that was so organic you could almost feel the nature of the plants, and yet so entirely abstract it might have been Oriental.
Next he indicated some stars and crosshatching as modest decoration within these forms. Finally, leaving a bare, echoing space around this plant form, he began to design a border. This, too, was masterly. Tightly controlled, geometric flowers, birds, animals, all manner of pagan and magic symbols appeared, as precise and neat as if they were links in a bracelet. From the inside of the border, like crocuses pushing rudely through the unbroken ground in spring, strange plants with elegantly curling, scroll-like leaves, and blunt little trees, insistent and sexual, broke into the edge of the central space as though to say: Art is order, but nature is always greater. Which was, perhaps still is, the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit.
Only then did Elfgiva put the linen on to a frame to begin the slow work of embroidery. She began with the centre.
Working with bronze needles, she would cross-stitch the details of the leaves. For these she used a variety of coloured silk threads. “When the Frisians come for slaves,” she explained, “they always bring me silk from the south.” Not content with this, however, she also used threads of gold and, to make the embroidery even richer, in one or two places she added seed pearls as well. At last, when this process was completed, she took a heavy cord of green silk and laid it down along the curving line of the stalk. Then she couched it in place, passing a silk thread over it from the back of the linen. To finish, she stitched extra lines of coloured silk along all the main outlines.
“Next we start to tackle the border.” She smiled. “That will take many months.”
Finding the girl’s fingers were nimble, Elfgiva would often let her put in a stitch or two, amused to see the slave girl’s delight in the process. She even let the girl bring Offa in, to show him what they were doing.
And all the while Ricola studied the older woman, admired her stately ways, and, each day, asked some questions about her dress, or the life of the court, or the estate at Bocton, adding a little to her stock of knowledge. At the same time, she studied ways to make herself useful. “You want us to be free,” she reminded her husband, “and if she likes us enough, one day she could give us our freedom, you know.” She smiled. “We just have to be patient. It’s a waiting game.”
As for Elfgiva, she, too, was playing a waiting game of a kind. She had quickly