Moon Mirror by Andre Norton
Author:Andre Norton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
“Did you make all these, Miss Ruthevan?” I blurted out at last.
She took two careful stitches before she answered. “No. There have always been Ruthevan women so talented, for three hundred years. It began"—her blue lips curved in a very small shadow of a smile, though she did not turn her attention from her work—"with Grizel Ruthevan, of a family a king chose to outlaw—which was, perhaps, hardly wise of him.” She raised her hand and pointed with the needle she held to the first of the old frames. It seemed to me that a sparkle of sunlight gathered on the needle and lanced through the shadows about the picture she so indicated. “Grizel Ruthevan, aged seventeen—she was the first of us. But there were enough to follow. I am the last.”
“You mean your—your ancestors—did all this.”
Again she smiled that curious smile. “Not all of them, my dear. Our art requires a certain cast of mind, a talent you may certainly call it. My own aunt, for example, did not have it; and, of course, my mother, not being born a Ruthevan, did not. But my great-aunt Vannessa was very able.”
I do not know how it came about, but when I left, I was committed to the study of needlework under Miss Ruthevan's teaching; though she gave me to understand from the first that the perfection I saw about me was not the result of amateur work, and that here, as in all other arts, patience and practice as well as aptitude were needed.
I went home full of the wonders of what I had seen; and when I cut single-mindedly across Ruth's account of her day, she roused to counterattack.
“She's a witch, you know!” She teetered back and forth on the boards of the small front porch. “She makes people disappear, maybe she'll do that to you if you hang around over there.”
“Ruthie!” Cousin Althea, her face flushed from baking, stood behind the patched screen. Her daughter was apprehensively quiet as she came out. But I was more interested in what Ruthie had said than any impending scolding.
“Makes people disappear—how?”
“That's an untruth, Ruthie,” my cousin said firmly. True to her upbringing, Cousin Althea thought the word “lie” coarse. “Never let me hear you say a thing like that about Miss Ruthevan again. She has had a very sad life—”
“Because she's lame?” I challenged.
Cousin Althea hesitated; truth won over tact. “Partly. You'd never think it to look at her now, but when she was just a little older than you girls she was a real beauty. Why, I remember mother telling about how people would go to their windows just to watch her drive by with her father, the Colonel. He had a team of matched grays and a carriage he'd bought in New York.
“She went away to school, too, Anne Ruthevan did. And that's where she met her sweetheart. He was the older brother of one of her schoolmates.”
“But Miss Ruthevan's an old maid!” Ruth protested. “She didn't ever marry.”
“No.”
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