A striking image, Sarah-Jane… Of the versions at the link, I prefer the one that seems to be in mid-tones. The lightest is for me rather too stark, though it is clear from it that what in the darker versions do look a bit like pen-nibs are indeed the beaks of birds.
I do have a small cavil. It concerns “tenterhooks”. To be on tenterhooks is to be in a painful state of suspense or expectation, but, as Fliss has pointed out, the woman “seems entirely at ease with being swept away”.
I have another, very local problem—which no doubt will bother no one else at all. From the window of the room I am writing in I can see beyond our garden a late-eighteenth-century weaver’s cottage with its characteristic row of north-facing first-floor windows which, in the heyday of handloom weaving, would have housed perhaps two looms on which wool from sheep pastured on the moors above the village was woven into worsted. Indeed, until about ten years ago our daughter lived in just such a cottage in a village about four miles from here. A key feature of this cottage industry was the tenter-field, where the woven cloth was stretched out to dry on wooden frames called tenters. It was attached to the frame by rows of hooks on its upper and lower rails—the so-called tenterhooks. The plot on which our house stands was used in that period for just this purpose. What is more, I could take you to a number of locations in these parts which incorporate in their name the word “tenter-field”. As I say, this is for me a local problem—but, as you also note in your post, “the words matter too”.
Good luck with this!
Clive
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