The Wishing Thread (44 page)

Aubrey could not quite process what Ruth had said—not for a long moment.

“Did you hear me, or do you have yarn stuffed in your ears?”

“I heard you,” Aubrey said cautiously. “I just don’t know what to say.”

“
Thank you
is normally the accepted response for a gift of this magnitude.” Ruth shook her head. “You Van Rippers have the manners of wildebeests.”

“And you’re one to talk,” Nessa said.

Aubrey shushed her. She turned to Ruth. “What’s the catch?”

“Catch?”

“What do I have to promise to do in exchange for your building?”

Ruth turned to face her, her whole face frowning. “Do what you always do for Tarrytown. Knit spells.”

Aubrey sat motionless, but her heart in her chest was wild. Over the last few months, she’d grown very comfortable with, even
grateful
for, the idea that her future was no longer manacled to the Stitchery, that she was free to choose, to have the life she wanted, to perhaps be a normal—or at least semi-normal—member of her community. But here was
Ruth, making her an incredible and unexpected offer, and Aubrey felt as if the Stitchery were drawing her to it again, sucking her back into the circle of its power.

Ruth seemed to sense her discomfort. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Aubrey said nothing; she had no idea where to begin.

“You might as well tell me,” Ruth said.

Aubrey took in a breath. “The magic … on Devil’s Night, it failed. How can the Stitchery save anyone if it can’t save itself?”

“Is that what you think?” Ruth laughed. “That’s only because you didn’t know I would be offering you a
new
Stitchery. But here I am, dying, practically on my last breath, and giving you the chance to start over—so it seems to me the Stitchery came through for itself in the end.”

Aubrey rubbed her eyes and wondered. She looked to the large French doors that led to a stone patio behind Ruth’s house. “I’m sorry. I—I’m just going to get some air.”

Outside, the afternoon smelled of springtime—fresh and fragrant with sweet earth and flowers. Aubrey leaned her hip on the black iron railing and looked out at the river. It appeared calm and steady. She—on the other hand—didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The Stitchery, back again
.

Life was so unfair. Now that she’d finally gotten her feet under her—she knew who she was (more than just a guardian), and what she wanted from life (to spend it making memories with her sisters, her future family, and Vic)—all of a sudden she was supposed to return to her old way of life. She wondered, not for the first time, if the Van Rippers had not been gifted so much as cursed.

She wrapped her fingers around the cold black rail. Her knuckles turned white.

No
. She would not revive the Stitchery. She felt as certain and sure of that as of her next breath. The old days were done.

“I’m sorry,” she told Ruth as she walked back into the sitting room. “I can’t do it.”

“Why on earth not?” Ruth said. “You don’t believe in magic anymore?”

“Of course I do!” Aubrey said, nearly yelling. And the moment she said the words she knew they were true. She did believe in magic, she always would—if only because she wanted to believe, and if only because—in the end—she’d come to accept that her belief in magic, the very heart of it, was and would always be a belief in questions. She would never know what Mariah had been trying to tell her on the day she died, but maybe that, too, was part of the Stitchery’s message. Her shoulders slumped; she looked up at Ruth through the wisps of her bangs. “If I do this,
if
I do, I do it on my terms. The best way that
I
know how.”

Ruth laughed. “As if that was ever in question.”

Aubrey’s chest rose and fell. “Okay.”

“Yes?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes,” she said.

“Woo-hoo!” Nessa, who had been sitting quietly, tackled Aubrey in a hug. “Hell, yeah!”

Aubrey laughed and tried to detangle herself. Nessa did not let her go. Even Ruth’s face had softened.

“Does this mean I get to cast my own spells now, like a guardian?” Nessa asked.

Aubrey managed to get her arms out of Nessa’s vise grip, only to wrap them around her niece again. “That’s one you’ll have to take up with your mother,” she said.

Just before the Van Rippers moved into their new brick home on Broadway, in the heart of Tarrytown, it was said that the mice in the basement and the bats under the eaves abandoned their nests and roosts even before the exterminator arrived—because they heard the Van Rippers were on the way.

It was Nessa who came up with the proper name for the new yarn shop, which occupied the first floor of a narrow brick walk-up not far from Jeanette’s. In an evening of Merlotinfused bawdiness, she’d listened to her mother and aunts bandy about potential names, from the nostalgic (Whatever Wool Be) to the dyspeptic (Ewe Beginnings); from the reverent (Thy Wool Be Done) to the irreverent (The Wool Monty). But it was Nessa, stone-cold sober at thirteen, trying to hide her pinkening hair by tucking it under endless woolen hats, who suggested the winning name. And so when the yarn shop opened its doors in September, four months after Ruth Ten Eckye passed away, it was called, very simply, Honest Yarns.

To Aubrey’s mind, the space was everything a yarn shop should be: cozy and warm, colorful and cheery. It smelled like clean wool and linen—and sometimes like cheap old-lady perfume that reeked of artificial rose. Some women who were new to Tarrytown or who were passing through on their visits to old houses like Kykuit or Sunnyside were drawn to the yarn
shop strictly by its physical wares. Gorgeous fibers in every hue lined the walls—mohair, cashmere, self-striping, roving, cotton, bamboo, merino, angora, alpaca, thick–thin, hand-painted, hand-spun, and blends of flax, hemp, and even a few acrylics (because they served a purpose, Aubrey said, for baby clothes). But other women, Tarrytown natives, came for other reasons, more secret reasons. And it wasn’t long before the women of Tarrytown had divided themselves into two factions: those women who attended the Thursday-night knitting circles at the Van Ripper yarn shop—women who sometimes smiled to themselves in the crush of grocery stores and day care centers, as if they had a secret on their minds—and those who did not attend.

As for Horseman Woods Commons, it was a success from the first brick to the last. Consumers came, and tourists came, and retirees came and set up their yoga classes and wine tastings and espresso machines on its upper floors. But it wasn’t long after the bulbs began to need replacing and the sidewalks were covered with gum that Steve Halpern suffered the upset of his life: Dan Hatters—whom nobody outside of the Tappan Watch had even heard of before—rallied with the support of his former neighbors and took Steve Halpern’s chair. Tappan Square had vanished, but the Tappan Watch had swelled. And the Van Ripper yarn shop came to be looked at as a place of foment, because women sitting in close circles with their knitting and crocheting, talking and drinking wine, were capable of big, dangerous things.

For as long as they lived—and for a long time after—it was said the Van Ripper sisters brought strange things into fruition wherever they went. The pink cherry tree in front of their yarn shop was always the first to bloom in the spring. Children swore that pennies chucked at the sisters always landed heads up, and they tested the theory regularly because
once in a while it turned out to be wrong. And one cool day in October, on the day that would have been Mariah Van Ripper’s hundredth birthday, when the skies were clear as blue crystal and the river was calm as glass, lightning struck the Tarrytown lighthouse out of nowhere and fried its circuits. Only the Van Ripper girls seemed not to be surprised.

When it comes to the Stitchery it’s hard to know what to believe. You might say the same thing about Hudson Valley legends.

The Tarrytown in this book offers familiar landmarks, but its politics are imagined. One example: The real Tarrytown has a board of trustees as opposed to a town council. Also, Tarrytown is part of the township of Greenburg, a fact I’ve dispensed with in this story. There is no neighborhood within Tarrytown called Tappan Square, nor is there a specific neighborhood that served as a model. I’ve taken minor liberties with real Tarrytown settings.

The story of Mad Anthony’s charge on Stony Point appears as I’ve read it in various sources, but minor bits had to be tweaked to accommodate the book’s fictions (my apologies to the Lt. Col. François de Fleury, who actually won the top prize).

Regarding Bitty’s claim about the real Headless Hessian’s grave: Despite the “folklore” surrounding a gravestone at the Old Dutch Church that inspired Irving’s tale, no record of such a thing exists. Bitty unwittingly participates in local myth-building. Of course, she isn’t alone.

Theories about the evolution of left- to right-handed knitting can be traced to Richard Rutt’s
A History of Hand Knitting
,
but it must be said that one knitting historian I met said she thought this might have been more folktale than fact. Either way, I loved the story for the Van Ripper’s family tome.

Some of the hand-knits in this book were inspired by great crafts I saw on the Web, many of which have free patterns. So enormous thanks must go to all fiber artists who so generously share their work online. Links to this book’s knitting inspirations are on my site (sorry, magic spells not included).

There are so many people vital (vital!) to this book. Great heaping thanks to my very gifted and inspirational editor Kara Cesare and the ever-diligent and insightful Hannah Elnan. Also thanks to Jane Von Mehren, Jennifer Hershey, and everyone at Random House who so ardently championed my writing. Thanks to Andrea Cirillo and Christina Hogrebe, who have never ceased to dazzle me with their warmth and sagacity, and to the entire team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency. And thanks to Sara Mascia of the the Historical Society of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow for helping me research one very obscure fact (that didn’t even make the final cut of the book!).

Thanks also to Tia, for making me learn to knit even when I insisted nothing could be more boring. To my husband, for first bringing me to Tarrytown because he knew it would set me off. To my siblings and all the friends from my childhood who ran amok in Mom’s backyard (and to Mom, for letting us do it). To members of my church for your support, particularly the ladies of the book club. And finally, to all people who love, read, buy, and talk about books. I mean this: You brighten my world.

Sarah Addison Allen:
The Wishing Thread
is a delightful novel about the bonds of sisterhood, the transformational power of love, and the pleasures and perils of knitting. What sparked your idea for this novel?

Lisa Van Allen:
It started with the knitting. When I knit a gift for someone, I always say a few prayers for the recipient. It’s about sending deliberate thoughts of love and kindness, along with offering a gift. So it wasn’t a far jump from there to “Wouldn’t it be cool if somebody could knit a magic spell into the fabric of a hat or a scarf so that it rubs off on the wearer?”

Of course, in
The Wishing Thread
, the people who go to the Stitchery looking for magic never know what they’ll get. Sometimes the spells don’t work as expected. Sometimes they don’t work at all.

Many people in the town think that the Van Ripper sisters are swindlers, preying on people who are desperate enough to turn to “magic” to fix their problems. But others think the sisters are the real deal and will defend the Stitchery’s magic, tooth and nail. Each sister in the story approaches the idea of magic in her own way.