Louise Reefe has spent decades searching for the Lover’s Turn, a legendary knot said to seal love forever – or undo it with a single slip.
Louise Reefe has spent a lifetime chasing a ghost – though, to hear her tell it, this ghost exists. Also, this ghost is a knot. Reefe, a maritime historian turned itinerant detective of ropework, has spent much of her adult life searching for the Lover’s Turn, a knot with reportedly mythic properties.
In the oral traditions of fishing villages around the country, it is said that if the knot is tied, two lovers are bound; if untied, their love unravels.
Like all good legends, the Lover’s Turn comes with stipulations – some say the lovers must tie it together, others claim the knot must be sealed with seawater, still others insist it must never be named aloud, lest it slip away like a poorly cinched bowline.
But these are minor details to Louise, who is currently single. She just wants a glimpse of the knot. That would be a start. She spent hours combing the library and archive at the Guardian City Maritime Museum but found nothing except more stories.
The pauper girl and the prince
The most famous is that of the pauper girl and prince. The girl tied the Lover’s Turn when she broke with protocol and ran to tie the Prince’s shoelace that had come loose. She looked up into eyes suddenly full of adoration.
On their wedding day, she affixed the knot to her dress, a small token to remember the beginning of the story. But in the frenzy of the Grand Henry, a popular dance at the time, she twirled with such ferocity, the knot came loose.
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In that instant, she saw the love light fade from the prince’s eyes revealing nothing but indifference and confusion. Heartbroken, she fled before the final notes of the Grand Henry had died away, vanishing into the night.
The knot that escapes the record
JW Budworth, author of the definitive Budworth’s Compendium of Nautical Knots makes no mention of the Lover’s Turn, the book concerning itself solely with actual knots that might help a sailor.
And yet, “it exists,” Reefe says, firmly, over a cup of tea in her small apartment in Petticoate Chafe, which is so full of knotted rope and string it feels in danger of strangulation.
She gestures towards three different editions of Budworth’s magnum opus. She turns to page 27 in one, to an illustration of The Bitter Fool’s Knot, its twin bights and turns arranged with flourish. “That knot was once a secret, too, now it is a staple of the sprat industry”
A bounty for the Lover’s Turn
She has taken her search public, offering a bounty of 100 guineas to anyone who can provide a reasonable proposal of how the Lover’s Turn might appear and how it might function.
The challenge has drawn a motley assortment of hopefuls: knot theorists from Cambridge, deep-sea fishermen from the North Sea, a puppeteer from the Americas who insists he once tied it accidentally while restringing a marionette and spent many fruitless hours enamored by the puppet.
A magician from the Twilight Circus made an offer to Louise, saying that if he showed her the knot, she must marry him. “How could I refuse,” she reflects. “I mean, literally, if that was truly the Lover’s Turn I would be powerless.
“I let him try it on my wrist. It held firm for nearly an hour. Then it collapsed, like all the others. I felt nothing.”
The persistence of a knot-seeker
Reefe’s white whale has not made her a pessimist. “The thing about knots,” she says, “is that they are stories made physical. The Lover’s Turn is a good story. So why shouldn’t it be real?”
“I have followed surgeons at their work, cavers in their explorations and climbers up their mountains,” Reefe says. “I have examined poachers’ snares and stagehands’ twists. If it is out there, I will find it.”