Title: A Purl of Inspiration
Fandom: Agent Carter
Rating: G
Length: ~800
Content notes: Ladies chatting. Bring on the Bechdel test!
Author notes: Just like Peggy, I, too, suffer from Second Sock Syndrome!
Summary: Peggy joins the real-life long tradition of using knitting as a secret weapon

There were many things Peggy Carter was good at. There were a great deal of things she was merely competent at. Knitting was not on either of those lists. Yet Peggy was not a girl to give up, and if Michael was willing to wear the socks she made, well, then, she would soldier on and stick, as Michael was wont to jest, to her knitting.

Besides, it gave her something to do during lunchbreak at Bletchley. And others to do it with, all of them working from a single tattered copy of a Copley knitting booklet.

“Perhaps,” Susan said, her face scrunched up, her double-pointed needles held danger-close to her face, “I should have started with the scarf.”

MIllie shook her head. “Scarves become tedious, and that’s the halfway point.” It was the voice of knowledge, and Peggy could only agree. Her mother had forced her to learn knitting and darning, stating primly that it was essential knowledge for a ‘good wife’. And since Peggy had met Fred, she’d been putting more and more thought into trying to excel at that job, too.

“Gloves,” Peggy added, “are the absolute worst. All those fingers.” So many little fiddly stitches, and then the finished fingers flopped around as you knit, most awfully.

Millie groaned. “Did I tell you about the time I made one with six fingers? All different lengths, too.” The knitting circle laughed, sympathetically.

“The problem with socks--and gloves,” Peggy said, pausing to slide her work to the front of her needles, “Is that you have to make two of them.” When you finished one, you have no sense of accomplishment; just the the knowledge that now, you need, absolutely, to make a second sock.

“I suppose, unless the man has only one foot.” Susan gave a laugh, that fizzled and fell. It felt dangerous and wrong to even mention the idea. One of their boys, one of their friends, brothers, cousins, to be maimed, crippled in what was already an awful war….

“Drat!” Peggy broke the clumsy silence, squinting down at her work. “And just when I was about to start the toe!”

“What?”

“Oh, I made a mistake in the ribbing--about four inches ago!” A purl stitch dimpled the long line of knit rib on the instep.

Undoing all that knitting? It was hours of work. Hours of boring work. Kind of like codebreaking work, in a way, tedious runs of figures, searching for patterns in long strings of letters or numbers. Rather...like...codebreaking indeed. “Hmm,” she said, studying the grey sock. The stitches weren’t quite even--there were clearly parts where she was knitting tighter than others, so tight the wool squeaked along the needles, where others were loose, relaxed. She’d never be a professional knitter. She’d never be able to knit like her mother, who seemed to crank out jumpers and scarves and mittens, not just with even stitches, but fancy patterns.

But maybe--maybe--she could get her amateurish stitches work for her. And others. “Ladies, have you ever made a mistake in your knitting?”

“All the time!” Millie said. “There are only two stitches, and yet…!”

Susan nodded. “My first project was a washcloth--and I kept yarning over without seeing it until rows later. It just kept getting wider. And holier!” She shook her head. The washcloth had been intended to be a gift for her brother. A gift that had ended up being made under a cloud of cursing and re-used yarn.

“What if,” Peggy said, “What if, we could use these mistakes as a code?”

“Oh, like Madame DeFarge in that Dickens book?” Susan, who often ate lunch with her tray pressing down the latest novel.

“Well, not quite…” Mostly because she wasn’t fond of the idea of writing execution lists. And had only a very distant and foggy recollection of the novel in question. “But yes, I suppose. Our own code.”

“Morse code would work,” Susan said, thoughtfully. “Knits and purls, dots and dashes.”

“We could work out a map grid code, as well,” Millie added, her own knitting in her lap, eyes skyward, thinking.

“Or a code for the kinds of train cars or trucks in a convoy.” Peggy paused. A yarn over for an ammunition car, an increase for troop transport, a purl for medical supplies--it was easily possible, and simple enough to memorize.


“Like that American ‘one if by land, two if by sea’ scheme?”

“Yes, precisely,” Peggy said, getting excited. “And no one would even notice a woman pulling out her knitting back and sitting...practically anywhere!”

“And!” Susan said, “even if they searched her bag, they wouldn’t find anything suspicious.”

“Just,” Millie said, “some awful knitting.”

"Meanwhile," Peggy said, trying to re-engage the sock, with her head already spinning with all the codes they could write, "Do I rip this out and do it all again?"

"Don't be daft," Millie tsked. "Just tell your brother that that purl is," she giggled, "A purl of inspiration!"