Nancy whirled around to find a young woman in a vibrant yellow sundress, adorned with flowers, standing just behind her. Blonde hair gleamed in a low bun, her blue eyes kind.
“If you subscribe to the idea that there’s beauty in human tragedy, sure,” she replied with a smile, recovering quickly. “The craftsmanship is definitely something. If I were the weaver that did this, they’d have to be stick people.”
The woman laughed. “The Hawk’s story is a tragic one,” she said, her laughter ebbing. “Hardly anyone has ever heard of him, but his story has inspired a lot of books. They just don’t give credit to the original.”
“Typical,” Nancy joked, as that name circled in her mind again, more vulture than hawk. “So, who was he, this Hawk guy?”
A little tingle ran down the back of her neck, the same shivers she got when she knew she was getting close to a big story.
“Well,” the woman said, affecting a tour-guide voice, “he was actually the Laird of Lochlann. A very mountainous, very isolated part of the Highlands. That particular region was almost like its own country, split between two or three lairds. He wasknown as ‘the Hawk’ for how dangerous and precise he was in battle, particularly with a longbow.”
Nancy didn’t think that sounded so special, and was about to say so, when the woman added, “He was killed on his wedding day, June 10th, 1710, while protecting his bride. A love so precious and an ending so tragic that it put an end to a years-long feud. She rallied his people to fight for her, and though she won, no one knows what happened to her afterward, just that there was peace in that part of the world at last.”
“Did he deserve it?” Nancy asked, gazing back up at the tapestry.
“Deserve what?”
“To be killed,” Nancy replied, frowning. “How many lives hadhetaken first?”
The woman chuckled. “I only know what archaeologists and archivists have discovered. I can’t judge a man who died all those years ago, but it’s an interesting question.”
“I bet you get all sorts of questions, working here,” Nancy said with a smile.
“Oh, I don’t work here. I just bring my students to look at the tapestries. It’s a lost art,” the woman replied.
“You’re a teacher?”
She nodded. “Art teacher. I suppose my hope is that I can inspire my students to resurrect these lost arts, though all they want to do is?—”
“Miss Emma!” A little boy seemed to appear out of nowhere, jabbing an accusatory finger toward a corridor off to the right. “Ms. Emma, Tom is touching the tartans!”
The woman with the bright glasses rolled her eyes. “I guess that’s my cue. Enjoy the rest of the exhibit.”
She walked off after the tattle-tale, shouting, “Don’t touch the exhibits!” leaving Nancy in a state of shock that made her brain slow to catch up, delaying the question “How do you know so much about this tapestry, then?” until she was already out of the room.
Miss Emma? An art teacher?
Nancy could see the fragile, yellowed old note in her mind’s eye.
Tell Emma that Charlotte loved the drawing.
She didn’t believe in fate, because if it truly existed, then it had decided to deal her a truly dismal hand, but this was getting too weird to be a coincidence.
How come that woman knew so much about something that Google seemed to know nothing about, details that even the forums Nancy had searched knewzilchabout?
She turned back to the tapestry, frowning from scene to scene, from the happy beginning to the tragic ending and every step in between.
Despite the art teacher’s reprimand to her students, Nancy’s hand began to reach for the old embroidery and woven threads, her fingertips resting gingerly on the sword that had killed the Hawk.
When no alarm started blaring, she lightly touched the poor bride behind him and whispered, “Who are you?”
Another missing woman that no one bothered to find? An ancient mystery, never solved?
Just then, the ground began to shake.
The spotlights illuminating the tapestry blinked wildly, and the room suddenly filled with a great, cracking sound that splintered right through her panicked brain. Children shouted in the distance, their terror feeding her own.
“Help! Help, someone!” she croaked.
