Artemisia Moretti's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Artemisia Moretti had mended a hundred torn hems, but never a hole in the world. The stranger lay on her workshop floor at dawn, tangled in plaster and broken lath. Above them, the ceiling gaped where the woman had fallen through. Artemisia pressed a hand to the stranger's chest and felt a heartbeat. Then she looked at the clothes. They were wrong. The fabric was thin, machine-woven, printed with tiny letters no loom in Valserra could make. Artemisia had spent thirty years reading cloth the way others read faces. This cloth came from no year she knew. "I'm from the future," the stranger said, sitting up. She did not sound afraid. She sounded thrilled. "1890s. I study this. I've read about your street, your gas lamps. I never thought I'd stand in them." She reached out and touched the wooden thread-spool on the table like it was treasure. Artemisia helped her to a chair. "You cannot walk out there dressed like that. People will stare. They will ask questions you cannot answer." "Then send me back," the stranger said. Her voice caught. "But I don't know how. And I don't want to. I want to stay here." Artemisia understood, then, what the woman needed. Not a way home. A way to belong. And Artemisia's needle could alter more than seams. It could alter a person into this place, stitch a stranger into the weave of Valserra until the town accepted her as its own. She had never tried it on someone from another time. She rose and pulled her finest bolt of cloth from the shelf. Deep burgundy velvet, dark as garnet. She worked through the morning without stopping. She cut the bodice fitted and high-collared. She trimmed the cuffs with cream lace and embroidered small pale flowers down the front. She wound a velvet sash at the waist. With every stitch, she sewed the woman deeper into her own century. The stranger stepped into the finished dress. She stood straighter. The thin, wrong clothes lay in a heap, and Artemisia burned them in the stove. When she turned back, the woman looked like she had been born on this street. "You need a name," Artemisia said. "Yours belongs to another time." The stranger thought. "Beatrice. Beatrice Fiore." "Then you are Beatrice Fiore, and you are my assistant." Artemisia handed her a pincushion. "You will learn the trade. That is how the town will know you." Beatrice pressed the pincushion to her chest and beamed. By afternoon it was done. Beatrice belonged to Valserra now, sewn in past unstitching. But as Artemisia swept the last plaster from the floor, a cold thought settled. She had proven she could do this. If one stranger could fall through her ceiling, more could come. And now she knew exactly how to keep them.