A writing career isn’t the lounge-chair-on-the-beach endeavor some people make it out to be. It contains equal parts worry, exaltation, hard work, and more worry. There are few pursuits that can capture my attention enough to both give me a mental vacation and restore my creative energies. Researching and constructing period clothing is one.
If you ask me to describe the first historical garment I created, I’m afraid I can’t. A Medieval nun’s habit for a high school play? A 16th century Persian outfit for a RenFest? Whatever it was, it launched a decades-long fascination.
Period clothing is an affective experience, involving all my senses and firing my imagination. With every thread-wound button I make and the feather I tilt just so in my cap, I wander the streets of London when Shakespeare was alive and the (first) Globe Theatre was still standing. In circa 1901 mourning attire, I attend a funeral and then recover in a Suffragette tearoom. In mid-1700s Creek Indian clothing, I argue with a Scots trader in North Florida who won’t give me a new knife in exchange for the deerskin I’ve cured. On the promenade in 1820 Brighton, I blush deeply under my straw bonnet brim when a certain gentleman gives me a smile. My drop spindle creates yarn from raw wool, as I sit and spin in my 10th century Anglo-Saxon costume.
Go on, pick an era and place…I’ve probably got the outfit. I won’t say I’ve never purchased something, but ninety percent of what’s hanging in my wardrobe or packed in a tower of hatboxes in my bedroom was made by my own hands.
The historical clothing I make and the historical fiction I write are two sides of the same coin. Historical garmenture, for me, is a tutorial in the people and times about which I write. Clothing from the past—whether Victorian corsetry or Jacobean embroidery—always makes it into my books.
My paranormal romance, Bound Across Time, features CeCe, a hardline paranormal denier who falls in love with an 18th century ghost. Her first clue that Patrick, the handsome man she’s just met in a castle tower, isn’t from the Here and Now is his clothing: loose linen shirt, coarse wool breeches, knitted hose, and leather shoes with buckles. Over the course of the novel, clothing—his, hers, theirs, on, off—is an extended metaphor for impossibly different worlds trying very hard to mesh.
Some of the historical clothing I’ve made is on my website: www.anniermcewen.com. While you’re there, Subscribe to my once-a-month, always entertaining, and sometimes completely lunatic e-newsletter. In love and corsets, I am…ANNIE
Book Trailer: https://shorturl.at/ajuE0
Excerpt from Bound Across Time, by Annie R McEwen
You’re
an idjit, Patrick. Death was always too good for you.
He
should have gone slower with her, no doubt about it. He was a lout, a brute, to
startle her so thoroughly, and that was never his intent. He could have—no, he
should have—whispered, or moaned, or shimmered from a distance. Instead, he was
hasty.
Hasty?
He was a burning brand of desire. Who could blame him after two
hundred-fifty…how long had it been? He’d lost count of the years.
That
was still no reason to be an imbecilic knave, popping up like codswalloping
Punch on a puppet stage while wearing the same filthy linen he was tipped
overboard in when the Earl didn’t have the decency to give him a proper burial.
At least the sea water had washed away the blood.
His
honor, his common sense—perhaps they’d washed away as well. Within reach of
this woman, he could remember nothing he’d learned of subtle romance and
courtly manners. All he could think of was making her his, now until the end of
time.
What
an embarrassment he was, to his sainted mother, to his upbringing, to the
gentleman he was reared to be. An embarrassment to every Irish bard who ever
sang songs or wrote poems about women who were doves, and lilies, and other
things he couldn’t remember.
He
did remember that they were fragile and easily startled. Easily driven away.
Next time, I will be slow. I will slowly and gently explain things to her.
Unusual things. Highly unusual, uncanny, frightening, nigh incomprehensible
things.
Sure,
now, Patrick, me boyo, that’ll be a stroll along the banks of the Shannon.
By
the right hand of God, but she was beautiful. Slumbering on the stone floor,
her skin smooth ivory but gilded, as though the sun had kissed her once and
then fallen in love, unable to leave. She’d lost her cap, and her hair—rich,
deep brown and burnished with red, like brandy—tumbled around her neck and
shoulders. Her sun-brushed skin, high and perfect cheekbones, the delicate
slant of her eyes, the plump swell of her breasts above the top edge of her bodice,
the curves of the body he could imagine pressed to his own aching and lonely
one…
Beauty
itself, she was, not only of body but of mind. In the weeks before she’d seen
him, he’d watched her exercise that beautiful mind among the slower thinkers of
the Castle, who doubtless envied her. She was stubborn, spirited, and
quick-witted—he liked that.
He crouched over her crumpled form, not touching, only taking in her scent.
Rose attar and mint—he liked that, too.
The
only thing he didn’t care for was the name she went by, See-see. What sort of
name was that? It was something you called a canary. He would never call her
that, not when the French name with which she’d been christened was just like
her.
Céleste,
meaning heavenly.
She was waking now. He rose and backed away. Time for him to depart, as he must, and breathe a prayer. Not for himself, there was no point to that. If God had ever listened to him, he wouldn’t be where he was, and he deserved no better. His prayer would be for her, the angel who defied or escaped God’s curse to light his endless night.
Come back, Céleste Gowdie. Please come back.
