Thread and Gone by Lea Wait Read Free Book Online Page B

and dowager queen of France. She had a claim to the English throne, too, as a descendant of Henry VII’s sister. That’s why her cousin, Elizabeth—Queen Elizabeth the First, of course—kept her under lock and key for so many years.”
    No, I didn’t know all that. And I got a little lost trying to follow Ruth’s story. My semester on world history at Haven Harbor High hadn’t covered much. And, to be honest, I hadn’t paid much attention. But I did get Ruth’s basic message: this Queen Mary had been pretty important in Elizabethan times.
    â€œShe was in prison?”
    â€œNot a dungeon, of course. After all, she was a queen. But Elizabeth was afraid Mary’s supporters would try to put her on the English throne. She’d already been thrown out of Scotland because she’d made poor decisions choosing her two husbands after Francis—she wasn’t good at relationships, I always thought—and she was Catholic. Scotland was Protestant then. So Mary asked her cousin Elizabeth for asylum. Elizabeth offered her a place to live at the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the lords who supported Elizabeth. But when Mary got there she found there was a catch. She couldn’t leave. And she could have very few visitors.”
    â€œSo she was all alone there?”
    â€œOh, she was allowed to bring a few members of her staff with her, including her ladies-in-waiting and her chef. And the earl’s wife, Bess of Hardwick, became a friend of sorts, as well as a jailer.”
    â€œHow long was she held there?”
    â€œEighteen years. And then she was put on trial for treason, found guilty, and beheaded.”
    â€œWhoa. Not a pretty ending.”
    â€œNo. But what’s important to us is that Mary’d learned needlepoint when she was a child in France. Like other women of her station, she had professional needlepointers working for her, designing and stitching tapestries and bed hangings and elegant clothing. But she and her ladies also did needlepoint themselves. It helped fill those long years of exile from Scotland and imprisonment in England.”
    Locked up eighteen years, without even a television set or a newspaper. Needlework might seem pretty important if it was all you could do. “But even if the needlepoint Mary Clough showed us is Elizabethan, how would we know who stitched it?”
    â€œNoble ladies like Queen Mary stitched their own emblems, or symbols, or even their initials, into their work. The books you and Sarah have about Elizabethan needlepoint should picture those.”
    â€œI’ll let Sarah know,” I assured Ruth. “She’s doing most of that research. I still think it’s a long shot. How would a queen’s embroidery end up in a Maine attic?”
    â€œLet me know what you discover,” said Ruth. “I love mysteries.”
    Could Ruth be right? If a queen’s embroidery had ended up in Maine, it would probably be worth a lot. But, how could we find out? I was pretty sure stitching by Mary, Queen of Scots, didn’t go on the market often.
    Ruth didn’t get excited about very much. But she’d sounded convinced.
    What if I’d held a piece of needlepoint stitched by a queen?
    I shivered. I felt as though a ghost from the past had reached out and touched me.

Chapter 8

    In the end is my beginning . (En ma fin est mon commencement.)
    Â 
    â€”Motto of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), referring to the phoenix, the emblem of her mother, Mary of Guise

    I kept thinking about Mary, Queen of Scots. She’d been sent out of Scotland when she was five to grow up in another country, speaking another language. Living at the French court must have been as good as life got in those days. But being there hadn’t been her choice. And then she’d been married when she was sixteen and widowed at seventeen.
    Most childhoods (then and now) were pretty simple compared to hers.