Authors: Joyce Lavene,Jim

Wicked Weaves (2 page)

BOOK: Wicked Weaves

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I’ve learned a new skill at Renaissance Faire Village each year since I’ve finished college. I apprenticed with Master Archer Simmons last summer and even made my own bow and arrows. I won two of the three archery tournaments after spending all of my time immersed in the subject.

Simmons commended me for my effort and asked me to work with him this year. But I’d made my decision about the topic of my doctorate dissertation and needed to explore other crafts.

I’d titled it, “Proliferation Of Medieval Crafts In Modern Times.” And what better place to do my research than Renaissance Faire Village?

About twenty of my students were also at the Village. I saw two of them working at the elephant and camel ride, helping kids on and off the nervous animals. It didn’t look like much fun, and I was sure they wouldn’t last long. Most were only there for a few weeks. Some might decide to stay for the summer. The pay wasn’t great, but they got a free room from the Village and several credits for my history class when it was over.

As I came around the corner of the jousting bleachers, I saw Tony kissing one of the fairies. I knew my two dollars would go into buying her something. She was pretty and fragile looking. The type of woman Tony
always
chose. Last summer, he spent all his money on a volunteer student from Georgia State University who played a Rapunzel-type character whose bodice never stayed closed. This summer wasn’t starting out any better.

I walked through the Village from the jousting field past shops, eateries, taverns and games. There were plenty of opportunities for apprenticeships with more than one hundred craftsmen in the Village. I probably wouldn’t need to research all of them for my dissertation, but it gave me a wide range of crafts to choose from.

Beth Daniels at Stylish Frocks was an excellent seamstress who’d created all the costumes, including the dragon, for the Village. The costume shop was close to the castle, where a weekly feast was held by the king and queen. Livy liked to change clothes frequently, and it was easier for Beth to be close to her.

Master Archer Simmons waved to me from his shop, the Feathered Shaft. I smiled and waved back. I planned to include my time with him last summer in my dissertation. The clock maker’s shop, the Hands of Time, was full of people. I walked around the customers who had spilled out into the street. Clock making was on my list, too.

Most of the Village was actually facade created to look old. It was built on what was left of the old air force base and studded with cobblestone streets. The heart of the Village was along both sides of the main runway with the jousting arena on one end. Shops and places to eat surrounded the castle, which was built around the old traffic control tower. It took up both sides of the King’s Highway.

The jousting field blocked the street and effectively ended the Village. Parking surrounded the wall that separated it from the rest of the world. The true purpose of the wall (never mind that most Renaissance towns had one) was to keep out people who didn’t have tickets.

Sometimes it didn’t work very well. There were too many people. Every day, the cobblestone King’s Highway became a crowded thoroughfare with carriages, horses, the occasional cow, and thousands of pedestrians. It had to be difficult to keep track of all that, but I guessed they managed. The paychecks came at the end of each month.

No one wore watches, and I missed my cell phone almost as much as I missed my computer during the day while I was in character. Unfortunately, I didn’t need any of those devices to tell me I was running late by the time I reached the basket shop, Wicked Weaves. I
always
ran late when I was with Tony.

“Where have you been?” Mary asked as she made change for another basket sale.

I was her apprentice this summer, which meant she could have me do almost anything. Most of the time, she had me taking care of the shop so she could weave.

“Sorry.” I took the basket from her and smiled at the customer.

“You been houndin’ that boy again?” Mary laughed and shook her head, which was wrapped in a bright orange scarf. “You can’t make him something he ain’t.”

“Wow.” The petite woman in the purple fairy wings gazed at us in awe. “Did you learn that while you were weaving this basket?”

“That’s right,” Mary agreed. “That’s why them baskets are so pricey. You get all of that with each one.”

I finished the sale while Mary picked up her pipe and walked outside.

Mary Shift was a Gullah basket weaver from Mount Pleasant, near Charleston. Not strictly speaking a
Renaissance
basket weaver, although African baskets have been woven for much longer. She was a tiny, birdlike woman who made me feel like I should carry her around with me. I was sure she’d fit on one of my shoulders.

She could have been any age. She had an air of the ancient about her, but her skin was as smooth and dark as a mocha latte. There was a mystery about her past. I felt sure other people in the Village knew what it was, but they were busy protecting their own secrets.

A few more customers wandered into the shop, picked up baskets of all shapes and sizes, then put most of them down again. Mary was right about them being pricey. But everything at the Village came with sticker shock. I supposed visitors were paying for the ambiance of walking through another time.

It was a little frustrating to me that I had to wait on customers. I’d spent months collecting information on basket weaving. I’d woven a dozen baskets since I’d gotten here, but that was on my own. I was supposed to sit beside Mary and learn the things books couldn’t teach me. But there I was, a month into summer break, and I still hadn’t learned any of Mary’s techniques. The only thing I’d learned was how to make change from a hundred dollar bill and punch Visa card numbers really fast. I swallowed hard, waited until the shop was empty, and went to join Mary on the back steps, where she wove most of her work. I stopped before I went outside when I heard the sound of muffled voices.

Peeking around the corner of the door, I saw a black man with a grizzled gray head and a black suit that looked like it was made in the 1920s. He was bent close to Mary, talking fast in what I’d come to recognize as the Gullah language. Some of it I understood, since it sounded like pidgin English. Some of the words might as well have been Martian.

Mary shook her head and moved her hands furiously in and out of the basket she was working. I was surprised it didn’t catch fire. The man was obviously making her uncomfortable.

I stepped out of the door and coughed loudly. Sometimes I have a tendency to butt in where I’m not necessarily welcome. It had gotten me in trouble before. It didn’t seem to be something I could control, like biting my nails.

The man looked up and stared at me in a way as dismissive as if he’d actually said,
Get out of here.
He made a gesture to Mary, then stalked away. He was quickly lost in the sea of pedestrians.

“Who was that?” I tried to push my black linen skirt down to keep it from poufing up when I sat beside her.

“Who?” She exhaled smoke from her corncob pipe.

“The man who was just here.” If she didn’t want me to know who he was, she’d have to say so. I wasn’t good at hints.

“He went away. Don’t fool with him. Help me with this basket. My old eyes don’t see so good.”

I’d spent the last month with this woman. She could see a grain of salt on a sandy beach. Although I wanted to know what was going on, I did as she asked and focused on helping her.

Mary had the bottom of the coiled basket started with a big knot right in the middle. There were even lengths of the sweetgrass she went to harvest each week woven with pine needles, a nice rust-colored contrast to the yellow sweetgrass. I inhaled its unique smell, like vanilla and fresh air tinged with pine.

“You might have to wet the palm to sew it.” She watched me as I started weaving the coil she’d begun around the knot at the bottom of the basket. “I think this one is for eggs. We’ll make it not so tall and wider at the base.”

“Have you collected eggs with a basket like this before?” I hoped to sidetrack her attention and then go back to the strange man’s identity.

“Many times. They’re good for collecting turtle eggs.”

I stopped and stared at her. “You didn’t
eat
turtle eggs, did you?”

She laughed, a thousand small lines fanning out from her eyes, telling of a thousand things she’d seen and done in her life. “Yes. We ate what we found to eat. Sometimes there wasn’t so much fish, or the crab basket was empty. You do what you have to do to survive.”

I didn’t want to go inside and get the basket I was working on. I was afraid it might spoil the moment, so I started a new one. I coiled one end of the sweetgrass into the smallest possible ring around the knot, holding the grass and pine together with one hand while I pushed the palm under and over with the bone.

I had been a little reluctant to use the bone when Mary first showed it to me.

She had laughed when she saw the look on my face, saying, “See? It’s only an old spoon my great-grandmother found on the beach. See the little rose on the handle? She took off the bowl and used the end. You children today are too worried about everything.”

Despite her explanation, even now I was a little reluctant to use the smooth tool polished by a century of weaving baskets. The whole “bone” thing really bothered me. Why call it a bone if it wasn’t one?

This wasn’t like weaving the other baskets I’d practiced before meeting Mary. The grass was more supple than reed and harder to hold in place, even though it was braided. The palm leaf was stiff and held the grass well but also managed to cut my fingers a few times.

“There.” Mary nodded and puffed smoke. “You’re doin’ fine. If you could only learn to keep better track of time and leave that boy alone, you’d be ready to sell your own baskets.”

I put another stitch in, catching the beginning of a new bunch of grass and pulling it tight. “Who was that man, Mary? Why was he threatening you?”

“Let it go,” she urged. “Look, you left out a piece of grass, and your hand is bleeding. Let me take that. You go and clean up. Fetch me more tobacco from the shelf and put a bandage on that hand.”

Mary was the original whip-cracking boss. She might’ve been small and vulnerable in some ways, but she was as tough as that palm leaf. Those shiny black eyes that reminded me of dark diamonds saw everything. She didn’t mind telling me, either.

There were two more customers in the shop. I cleaned my hand and bandaged it while they browsed. One of them, a heavyset woman in a long, green velvet gown whose breasts were almost pushed out of her bodice, asked me about the weaving. “Is it true no two baskets are ever the same?”

“That’s right. In fact, master basket weavers have distinct styles that are never duplicated by anyone outside the family or group of weavers. Some of them, like this one,” I showed her a large, oval basket, “made by our master weaver, have a pattern handed down for hundreds of years.”

The woman nodded, suitably impressed. “I’ve heard you can keep them outside, too.”

“Because of the grasses and palm they’re sewn with, they can get wet without any problem.”

She was convinced and bought two $400 baskets. The skinny woman with her looked around but didn’t buy anything.

“Jessie!” I didn’t have time to turn around before I was lifted completely off my feet. Not a common occurrence for someone my size.

I’d been waiting a month to hear that voice. I stared into the familiar face, looking for any changes since last summer. “Chase! I was wondering where you were!”

“I was visiting my family in Arizona for a few weeks. Are you working at Wicked Weaves this year?”

Chase Manhattan looked as healthy and alive as always. He was six foot eight, 260 pounds of energy. He reminded me of a pirate with his long brown braid and one gold earring.

Chase had lived at the Village for the last five years. He told me once he’d played every sport imaginable in college but had a soft spot for history. I found out later, by snooping around, that he took unimaginable crap for not latching on to a pro team of some kind and buying a new Ferrari.

He was intelligent, well-spoken, handsome, and charismatic. He was also the bailiff for the Village, which meant he was kind of chief of security and circuit court judge rolled into one. He was appointed by the king and queen. Adventure Land, the owners of the Village, appointed Livy and Harry the same way. They’d been the company’s top sales people.

Unfortunately, it meant Chase was as bad as my brother. He was content to live here and had no real ambition for his life. It was the only thing that kept me from throwing myself on him every time I saw him. Me, and half the other women in the Village. I wouldn’t let myself be involved with someone like that.

Thinking about it was almost as good as taking a cold shower. “I’m working, Chase. Put me down.”

“Sorry.” He set me back on my feet and managed to look apologetic. “I just got back, and you were the first person I saw.”

As though that explained everything
.

BOOK: Wicked Weaves

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