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It’s after a family wedding when Elinor takes up her needle and thread for the first time in years. It starts slow and small, as these things do: wool socks for Fergus, stockings for Merida, a blanket for each of her three baby boys, but in the months that follow, she works her way up to tapestries, shirts, quilts, dresses for herself and her daughter. Soon enough, practice becomes habit becomes lifelong passion, and when the queen’s hands aren’t occupied with letters to sign and hands to shake, they’re stitching together bits and pieces of six lives; they’re slowly weaving a story.
And she’s picked up her tools not a moment too soon, she decides: her boys are growing fast, Fergus is always tearing something, somehow, and she can barely keep Merida in dresses and stockings these days. Every time she turns around, her daughter’s stockings need mending, her dresses are too small, she’s ripped the lace in her skirt time and time again. The child grows and grows and grows, and Elinor might have been more amused by the whole thing if she didn’t wake up two inches taller and in dire need of a new nightdress more often than not.
Elinor weaves the days together tight and straight and firm. She’s up early in the mornings. She signs the papers and feeds her boys. She teaches her daughter the lay of the land and begins to arm her with the language she’ll need. She brokers treaties, steals a few kisses from Fergus in the hall (and the kitchen, and the stable) and tucks her three boys into their beds each night. And in the evenings, without fail, she’s sitting by the fire in Merida’s bedroom, mending and stitching, like her mother and her mother and her mother before her. It’s a habit that stretches back with lifetimes of thread, centuries passed in cross-stitch patterns and songs as old as the land itself. Someday, she once told Merida, you’ll sew your daughter’s first tapestry. Someday. (Merida hadn’t looked convinced.)
But here’s where she differs from her mother and her mother and her mother before her: Elinor won’t (won’t, she says, but she really means can’t) throw out the tattered shirts and the outgrown baby clothes. She mends until the burst seams can’t be sewn shut again, she lets out waists and patches things up, but when things are really worse for wear, she folds them up and puts them away. She keeps Fergus’ bloodstained pants, her boys’ first nightclothes, the first dress she sewed for herself. The rational part of her—and Elinor is very rational—says it’s frivolous and silly, and they’d do better cut up and put to good use in quilts and pillow stuffing. The sentimental part—and Elinor is exceedingly sentimental—says to leave them as they are. To keep them.
So she does.
She keeps most of Merida’s old things in a trunk—her stockings, the baby clothes, that beautiful green dress she wore when she decided the mud puddle near the stables was just too tempting—and stows them away. It surprises her at first, this unwillingness to throw out the things she’s created, but when she looks at her daughter (wild red hair down past her shoulderblades, legs getting longer and longer by the day, and when did she get so tall?), she can’t bring herself to part with them. Here are the old shoes, the hair ribbons, the underclothes, the dresses, each getting progressively smaller as she goes, and she wonders, sometimes, at how much time she’s passed with her cross-stitch patterns and cloth. Her fingers and palms and a thousand spools of thread have seen her family through the peaks and valleys, slipped them into the armor of a woman’s love and kept them safe and warm.
“You just don’t know when to stop growing, Merida,” she teases one evening, sitting with a basket of thread in front of the fire. Merida is at her side, rummaging through her old things the way her mother sometimes does and marveling at the notion (as Elinor also does) that she could ever have been so small. Her newest tapestry is in her lap, a vibrant thing that will eventually contain both mother and daughter and the seeds of growth sown between them; Merida’s wide eyes and the hair that will soon reach her waist, her new blue dress, the thin strip of grey that’s begun to weave its way through Elinor’s own hair, the fine lines around her eyes. Merida watches her, needle moving back and forth, with the curiosity she can’t help but indulge. “You’ll be taller than me someday soon, you know,” she says, kissing the top of her head, “big enough to be queen of the whole country.” Merida laughs and folds herself into Elinor’s side.
Sometimes, it feels like they’re the only people in the world. Just the two of them, Elinor and her little girl and her hands moving quickly, gently. She thinks of how much Merida has grown, how long it will be before she picks up her thread and thimble to weave a new tapestry one day to find that her daughter is more woman than girl; already, Elinor can feel her shifting, changing, and she knows she must soon help her through the sea of storms that eventually comes for all young women. She looks to Merida’s old things in the trunk then back to her wild-haired daughter and wonders (and not for the first time) where the time has gone, wonders how many stitches her fingers have sewn, how long it’s really been.
And that’s when Merida reaches down to her knee, picks up a single curly red hair that’s fallen from her head and hands it to Elinor. “Sew it in,” she says, and Elinor does. When she gets to her own image, she plucks a grey hair from her head and weaves it into the tapestry too, right where the grey would start in her hair.
It becomes a simple habit, after that. Each time one of them finds a loose strand of hair, Elinor sews it into her patterns, stitches them tightly so they’ll never come undone. “There will always be a piece of us in here,” she tells Merida, who’s getting prettier by the day and growing bolder by the hour, “everything you think and feel and dream, right now.”
“What do you think, then?”
One more row, a long, wild red hair. She sews it straight as an arrow. “I’m thinking of my Merida and how she won’t stop growing,” she says. “And how she’s picked up her father’s bad habit of leaving weapons on the dinner table.” Merida wrinkles her nose at her, and Elinor taps it with her thimble. “I’m thinking of what a fine queen she’ll make one day,” she says, finishing out the row, “and how much I love her.”
Merida smiles up at her, that slow, crinkly-eyed thing that she most definitely got from Elinor, and reaches over to hug her. She wraps Merida up in the tapestry and pulls her close, remembers when she was small enough to sit on her lap while she sewed a new dress, how she’d fall asleep in her arms and Elinor would carry her to bed. Being a mother is like trying to hold a bear by the tail, she thinks; you’re always overwhelmed, always trying to make just the right step, the best move, dancing on a bed of hot cinders, and there’s not enough time in all the world for everything you want and wish you could say and do at just the right moment, at just the proper time. There is never any time, certainly not enough for everything you think of after the fact; but time won’t stop just because a mother wills it, and right now, Merida is hugging her tight, saying, “I love you too, Mummy.” It’s a beautiful patchwork thing they’ve woven together, she and her daughter; a quilt of every color and then some, mismatched, misshapen pieces stitched together with gold and iron and strands of their hair, bits of themselves, growing bigger and bigger all the time. Not without its wrinkles and tears, of course (and there will be many wrinkles and tears), but those can be smoothed out and put back together again.
She hangs the tapestry on Merida’s bedroom wall, right above the mantle. She thinks, someday, she might make one big enough to hold them both; something life-sized, a warm cocoon to crawl into when they need it. And maybe when her hair has gone greyer and Merida’s hand is steadier with a needle, she’ll start, but for now, there’s a warm fire, socks to finish and stories to tell as Merida pulls out relics of not-so-long-ago. Time will wait for no mother, but Elinor’s got an infantry at her fingertips. She will sew herself into the skin of a wise woman, teach her daughter to weave her own armor and grit her teeth if the stitches give out; after all, they can always be put back together again. “You’ll be a fine queen, indeed,” she says, “once you stop outgrowing all the clothes in your closet,” and Merida’s laughter is like bells in her ears.