Introduction

The Crewel Wing is the sweeping Gothic drama of a freethinking, self-reliant woman caught between Victorian constraints, ancient superstitions, and the deep bonds of family... After tragedy befalls her family, Claire Bietris is now married to schoolmaster James Ableton. They live in the perfect country village where James has always enjoyed peace, even as an outsider. But when a body is found brutalized and half-buried in an ancient long barrow, Claire's new life, and James' own hard-won acceptance, is threatened by dark forces real, imagined, and possibly conjured. A mysterious illness plagues Claire and prescient voices haunt her as she must face the shadowed secrets of her past. With an unsettling dose of magical realism imbued with historic atmosphere, Claire's journey is one of peril, heartache and redemption.

PRAISE FOR THE CREWEL WING

“In The Crewel Wing, Erica-Lynn Huberty mixes a delicious brew of mystery and tender romance, with mesmerizing Victorian atmosphere. Readers seduced by Claire’s story of hidden powers will be equally rewarded by Huberty’s lush, precise prose — rife with whip smart, sly observations on human nature. Like a friend’s cozy cottage on the moors, this book will keep you safe and warm and in good company!”-HEATHER HARPHAM author of Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick

“An absorbing and beautifully-written historical mystery with a sprinkling of magic. Claire is a hugely sympathetic, independent-minded hero whose journey we follow with fear and hope.” ANNA MAZZOLA author of The Clockwork Girl and The Unseeing

“The Crewel Wing sits solidly between the novels of Anya Seton and Diana Gabaldon, rich in historical detail, compelling and immersively told.” SUSAN SCARF MERRELL author of Shirley: A Novel and A Member of the Family

“Intricate, haunting and darkly magical, The Crewel Wing relates the tale of a talented needleworker and her struggle to escape the consequences of family secrets, the threads of which threaten to tangle and entrap her forever.” JANE GOODRICH author of The House at Lobster Cove

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Excerpt

THE CREWEL WING ~ excerpt

1884 ~ 29th February

Hammpen Manor

Pettypoole, Oxfordshire

A boy who works in the village takes his usual route from his mother’s remote cottage across the snowy, hardened fields. He trudges past a herd of sheep huddled in the wind, then climbs onto a wide, lengthy barrow and travels along it. The boy’s name is Davey and he sings to himself as he goes along, his normally pale cheeks apple-red in the cold, his wool cap pulled over his brow.

There are bodies hidden in Pettypoole’s barrows, and Davey knows this: hundreds of them are anyone’s guess, in these burial grounds that were once called burghs in the Old Language. They were forged millennia ago by ancient peoples—likely the same hunters and gatherers that placed jutting stone monuments in confounding patterns around the whole of England. Nowadays, the barrows are nothing more than oblong hills, the bodies beneath mere bone and dust. In Spring, ewes stand atop them and graze until the grass is shorn to dirt.

But today, an uncharacteristic, rasping frost dominates all of Pettypoole. The village cobbles are slick with ice, dagger-shaped icicles clinging to the branches of beech and oak, and copper drains, in glinting deposits. The grassy fields beyond the village are frozen hard and sport a thin layer of new-fallen snow which the boy Davey walks upon.

The barrows sit on the high fields and wolds near the Roman Road and, strictly speaking, they belong to the estate of Hammpen Manor. Herders lease the land from his Lordship, and they and their families usually live in or very near the village, in cottages of golden limestone. Very pretty the village is, with its winding lanes and well-kept gardens, its views of the rolling hillsides. Some, like Davey’s mother, might even call Pettypoole friendly (unlike his Lordship, ‘bless him). Suffice to say, Pettypoole is not the sort of place where someone is led to slaughter unless that someone is, in fact, a sheep.

As he makes his way, Davey does a clumsy skip his mother has warned him many times not to do; because you never cut through Hammpen Manor, even if you are late for your employer, and you most certainly do not dance merrily on the place where the ancient dead are hidden (these particular dead perhaps slaughtered, perhaps just departed from illness or age).

He stumbles. He pitches forward. His hand, planted to break his fall, is gashed open. One cheek smacks to the ground and his straight, stringy hair flops across his forehead as his cap tips off. He is now face-to-face with someone else’s eyes: open eyes, cloudy as scored marbles and slightly protruding.

Around the corpse the snow is sullied in blotchy, brown adhesions. Brown, but with a distinct tint of red. A shoulder swathed in a tattered, black Ulster juts from the crest of the shallow grave.

Likely it’s the dead man’s coat catching on the boy’s boot and not the boy’s skipping, which has caused him to fall. But he is too simple-minded to realize this. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. The term Gothic often invokes a specific type of horror or dark romance, but there are many themes Gothic literature deals with, such as: Otherness, female powerlessness and empowerment, predatory men and societal constructs, repression, sexual awakening, psychological distress or mental illness, the complexities of Science vs. Religion, and the Supernatural world. How do any of these themes relate to The Crewel Wing?

2. Endometriosis is a wide-spread disease affecting 170 million women world-wide. It has been known to exist in some vernacular since Ancient Egypt. Famous women in history had it, such as Queen Mary I of England (Henry VIII’s daughter) and Marilyn Monroe. How does Claire’s medical care and diagnosis compare to modern-day experience of the disease? How far have we come in our use of language and diagnosing of the disease since Claire’s time?

3. What are the different ways people deal with family secrets? How can family secrets affect people and their relationships with others, and with society?

4. How do Claire’s prolonged poverty and peril as a young girl, and James’ identity as a Jewish man in a small, Christian village, shape their personalities and how they approach the world as adults?

5. What are some other Gothic novels you might compare (or pair with) The Crewel Wing?

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