The Burning Queen by Kathryn Lasky

Author:Kathryn Lasky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

The Gift

He can do just about anything. The words still lingered in her mind the next morning, Christmas Eve. Rose yearned more than ever to see her father. She wanted to give him a gift, a special gift. She had the bow tie, but that just didn’t seem special enough. She had thought of making a very small album with pictures of herself and her mom. But that would be too dangerous. Not with Queen Mary wearing that locket on a chain around her neck. Nevertheless, Rose wanted to bring her dad some sort of Christmas gift when she went back. But who knew if it would be Christmas? The century was always the same—but the day, the month, the hour was anybody’s guess.

Rose then suddenly remembered her mom’s favorite sweater. It was cashmere, with a timeless design of flowers entangled on a rich brown background. Obviously too small for her dad. But could she turn it into something else? She went to her closet and took the sweater off the hanger. Pressing it against her cheek, she was overwhelmed with a smell, a scent that was uniquely her mom’s. There were layers of scent. First, there were the lilies of the valley that grew in the backyard of their house outside Philadelphia. And then she smelled the fragrance of a pasture dotted with wildflowers where they used to fly their kites. This was mingled with the salty breeze of the beach and the tang of sunblock. Then another scent—the velvet petals of roses, damask roses. All these scents flowed through her. She buried her face in the sweater. Like souls of something lost, they came back to her. But then she had a terrible thought. What if cashmere violated the sumptuary laws that governed what people could wear? What if cashmere was outlawed? Her dad could be arrested. Had cashmere been invented by the sixteenth century? She raced to her computer and googled it. Her heart sank when she read on Wikipedia that cashmere had been produced thousands of years ago in Mongolia, India, and Kashmir (naturally). Had anybody over four centuries ago known about those places? Marco Polo, the explorer, might have. Princess Elizabeth was very smart. She read history all the time. However, she had never mentioned Marco Polo. Two seconds later Rose nearly yelped with joy. In 1811, William-Louis Ternaux, the leading woolens manufacturer in France under Napoleon, began to manufacture cashmere from a herd of goats he had acquired. Too late for the sumptuary laws of the sixteenth century. “Hallelujah!” She immediately reached for her sewing scissors and had just begun cutting the sweater when Marisol came in.

“What are you doing cutting that beautiful sweater?”

“It was my mom’s. Doesn’t fit me. So I’m repurposing it.”

“Repurposing?”

“Making it into something else. I do it all the time. I once repurposed a sweater of my mom’s into a skirt for me.” She looked up at Marisol. She hoped she believed her. It would get complicated if she had to explain it was for her dad, in another time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.