Rose had become most comfortable doing her homework in the greenhouse, and she was working on an essay for language arts. It could be any subject, but she had to do three things: A) define the theme and central idea; B) use source materials and select facts from a literary or informative text; C) interpret these facts using background knowledge.

Surrounded by this blooming garden on a cold winter night in her gran’s greenhouse, Rose had been tempted to write an essay about gardening or flowers. She had learned a lot, and there were four shelves of “source materials” crammed with her gran’s horticultural books. But then those fabulous shoes of Jane the Bald’s had dropped into her life. She had just picked them up that day from Berks—the Mean Clean Dry-Cleaning Machine! And they did a wonderful job. So she was now about to begin writing an essay entitled “Jane’s Shoes.” With her iPhone she had taken a picture of them, all nice and clean now, and then begun googling Jane the Bald. There was very little about her, but a lot about the shoes worn by women in that century. Rose began to download some images of other sixteenth-century shoes and printed them out on the color printer her gran had bought her.

Sixteenth-century ladies’ shoes were fantastic. Made of all sorts of fabric, they were heavily embroidered in silken thread, encrusted with jewels just like Jane’s. She could have gone on for ten pages! Jane was an inspiration on so many levels. Most of all she was a riddle—an “enigma”! A word on the spelling list for this week. And now that she thought of the word “enigma,” what could you get out of those same letters? IMAGINE! Not quite. It had one more letter, but nevertheless she tried to imagine Jane living her life not as a fool but possibly a fashion designer! She was so hip. Hip before the word was, well, not a word but just a body part. That was Jane—ahead of her time by about five hundred years or so. A fashion designer or perhaps a spy?

JANE’S SHOES

By Rose Ashley

Chapter 29

A Blade of Light, a Rose Blooms