The New Year's Quilt (Elm Creek Quilts Novels) Read online

  Sylvia grew increasingly ill at ease as the other women discussed their husbands and children and household conflicts, for she had lost her husband and had never raised a child and had abandoned her home. She tried to nod and murmur appropriate phrases when an answer was required, but through no fault of their own, the other women made Sylvia feel like an indulged child sent to dancing school in a starched dress to learn how to mimic the mannerisms of grown-ups. The leek soup was flavorful, the crab cakes a new and unexpected pleasure, but although Sylvia smiled and conversed and hid her discomfort as well as she knew how, she could not wait for the luncheon to end. She longed for the sanctuary of the Compson stables, of the wooded riding trails, of the comforting presences of lighthouses overlooking the Chesapeake Bay.

  After the meal, Mrs. Cass led her guests into a parlor for coffee and more chat. Sylvia longed for a moment alone with Mrs. Compson so she could beg to be taken home, but she knew that Mrs. Compson would kindly but firmly refuse. Her impeccable manners would not permit her to slight their hostess, and she was convinced a change of scene would do Sylvia good. A new riding trail on the Compson estate was all the change of scene Sylvia wanted. The sympathetic gazes and gentle words of the Baltimore ladies were excruciating.

  In the parlor, Mrs. Cass spoke a word to her maid, who disappeared and quickly returned with a bundle wrapped in a muslin sheet. “Your motherin-law tells me you know a great deal about quilts, Sylvia,” Mrs. Cass said as she thanked the maid and took the bundle.

  “My mother taught me when I was very young,” Sylvia replied. “I grew up watching her and my aunts and grandma quilt together.”

  “I’m afraid quilting is a lost art among the women of my family,” said Mrs. Cass, “but I am fortunate to have several fine examples of my ancestors’ handiwork. Although I don’t like to brag, I think it’s fair to call this quilt a masterpiece.”

  Sylvia and two other ladies helped Mrs. Cass unfold the bundle. A murmur of appreciation rippled through the room as everyone gathered around to view the quilt. It was a masterpiece, indeed—twenty-five different appliqué blocks depicting bouquets of spring blossoms gathered in three-looped bows, bowls of fruit with embroidered seeds, symmetrical Turkey red flowers with green stems and leaves, and scenes of eighteenth-century life reproduced in such painstaking detail that they must have been drawn from the quilter’s own observations.

  “You wouldn’t recognize these landmarks, Sylvia, since this is your first visit to Baltimore.” Mrs. Cass gestured to several blocks in turn. “This is a famous clipper ship that sailed in the Chesapeake Bay in the 1840s. This is a train from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and this is the Baltimore Basilica on Mulberry and Cathedral streets.”

  “This is the Peale Museum in its glory days,” said another guest, indicating another block. “Before all that dreadful stucco was added.”

  “It’s a truly wonderful quilt,” said Sylvia. She had seen quilts made in this style before, but the Bergstrom women had never made any like them as far as she knew. She came closer for a better look. “It looks like the blocks were signed in brown ink and the handwriting…yes, a different hand signed each block. Could this be a group quilt?”

  “That’s what the family stories say,” said Mrs. Cass. “My grandmother once told me that this was a Freedom Quilt, made by the women of the family for one of my long-distant great-uncles when he turned twenty-one. For generations we assumed that each block was signed by the quilter who made it, but I’ve discovered that the record in our family Bible disputes those claims.” She gestured to a block in the bottom row. “Hettie Cass would have been only five years old when the quilt was made, and I don’t know any child that age who could sew a lyre and floral spray as perfectly as those in her block.”

  “Is it possible that an older relative didn’t want Hettie to be left out of such an important family project, so she made the block on the little girl’s behalf?” asked Sylvia.

  “I suppose so,” said Mrs. Cass thoughtfully. “It seems like the sort of thing a mother or aunt would do.”

  “I have a similar quilt among my own family heirlooms,” said another guest. “The blocks aren’t identical to these, of course, but the style is very similar. I like to imagine that our great-grandmothers were friends, and that they quilted together.” She smiled at Mrs. Cass.

  “Can you imagine how many hours these women must have spent on their masterpieces?” said another guest. “How did they have time to do anything else?”

  The other women laughed, and Mrs. Cass said, “They didn’t have the amusements and distractions we have today. Quilting with friends might have been the only entertainment available to them.”

  The implication that women quilted only because they had nothing more interesting to do bothered Sylvia. “Whoever made this quilt was a true artist. I imagine she looked forward to working on it whenever she could slip away from her household chores. I wouldn’t be surprised if she turned down invitations just so she could be alone with her fabric and needle.”

  “It’s a pity no one makes quilts like this anymore,” said another lady with a sigh.

  “Some people do,” said Sylvia, surprised that the woman did not know. “Perhaps not in this style, exactly, but intricate and beautiful in their own right.”

  “I suppose they do, on the farm,” another guest acknowledged. “Here in the city, we’re much too busy to quilt, and we have so many fine stores where you can buy well-made coverlets at very reasonable prices.”

  “I don’t believe city women are any busier than farm women,” said Mrs. Cass, with an amused smile.

  “Even in the Elm Creek Valley, the stores carry blankets,” said Sylvia. “If all that mattered was keeping warm, we would buy our coverlets, too. The women of my family quilt—they quilted—as a matter of choice, not necessity. We each had our own style, our own favorite colors and patterns, our own unique way of arranging the pieces—even if two of us chose the same pattern and traced the same templates, the quilts we made would be as unique to us as our faces and our voices. My mother’s quilts say ‘home’ to me in a way no blanket from a store ever could.”

  “I don’t know if my daughters could say something so heartfelt about anything I’ve ever given them,” said Mrs. Cass.

  “When you put it that way,” said the woman who owned a similar quilt, “it sounds like a lovely pastime. I only wish my grandmother had taught me how to quilt.”

  “I could teach you,” said Sylvia.

  For the first time, the women regarded her with genuine interest instead of pity. “Could you?” asked one of the guests, a doctor’s wife. “It seems so terribly difficult.”

  “We wouldn’t have to begin with a quilt as challenging as this,” said Sylvia, indicating Mrs. Cass’s heirloom. “We could begin with something simple—a sampler made up of several different blocks in increasing complexity. Working on each block would help you master a particular quilting skill, so that by the time your sampler is finished, you’ll be able to approach other patterns on your own with confidence.”

  The ladies peppered her with eager questions, but Mrs. Cass’s voice rose above the chorus: “And how often would you be willing to return to Baltimore to teach us?”

  Sylvia threw a questioning glance to Mrs. Compson, who gazed back at Sylvia from beneath raised brows, as curious as the others. She was not going to answer on Sylvia’s behalf, so Sylvia took a deep breath and said, “Twice a month, if it’s all right with Mrs. Compson.”

  “Oh, it will be fine with her,” said the most outspoken of the ladies. “Isn’t it, Josephine?”

  “I suppose I can spare her,” said Mrs. Compson, smiling. “I believe I’d like to join the quilting bee, too.”

  Sylvia and the women decided to meet every other Wednesday for lunch and quilting lessons, with each woman taking a turn as hostess. Sylvia advised her new pupils on the supplies they would need to collect for the first lesson, and the room buzzed as they made plans for shopping expeditions. />
  Everyone bade Sylvia a cheerful farewell as they parted on Mrs. Cass’s front walk. As Mrs. Compson turned the Packard toward home, Sylvia’s thoughts ran with block patterns and lesson plans. It was a pity they couldn’t meet more frequently. Perhaps she could begin each class by introducing a new quilting skill, which the ladies would practice together as a group. She could also leave them with the pattern to another, more advanced block that would reinforce what they had learned in class. Her students would be instructed to finish both blocks before the next class, where Sylvia would inspect them and offer constructive criticism before presenting a new quilting technique.

  Suddenly a thought occurred to Sylvia. “Mrs. Cass’s friends were nice, but did you notice how they only thought of me as poor Mrs. Compson’s widowed daughter-in-law until Mrs. Cass brought out her quilt?”

  Mrs. Compson’s smile was both amused and knowing. “Did you notice that until Mrs. Cass brought out her quilt, you behaved as nothing more than poor Mrs. Compson’s widowed daughter-in-law?”

  Sylvia sat back against her seat, chagrined. It was true that she had not really made an effort to get to know any of the ladies, not even Mrs. Cass. Their kindhearted sympathy had been so unbearable that her only aim had been to get through the afternoon. She had not even bothered to learn any of their names. She could not fault them for not seeing the person behind the grief.

  Somewhere deep inside her, a spark of realization kindled and burned, a small but steady light. There was still a person behind the grief. Until that moment, she had forgotten.

  Sylvia spent the next week planning her lessons and preparing patterns. She had tried to teach quilting only once before, when Agnes admired the quilts her sisters-in-law had made and wanted to make a wedding quilt for her and Richard. Sylvia tried to steer her toward basic patterns, but Agnes insisted upon making a Double Wedding Ring, with disastrous results.

  Agnes finished only one lopsided ring of her quilt before word came that her new husband had died. Sylvia doubted she would ever make another.

  Sylvia wondered what would become of Agnes. After Richard’s death, she had stayed on at Elm Creek Manor instead of returning home to her parents, who had not approved of her hasty marriage. Now that Sylvia had left, would Agnes remain at Elm Creek Manor with Claudia and Harold? Sylvia could not imagine the young widow finding any happiness in that arrangement—but she quickly drove her concerns from her thoughts. Agnes was free to make her own decisions. It was none of Sylvia’s business whether she stayed to help look after the Bergstrom legacy or if she departed forever as Sylvia had done. Agnes had been a Bergstrom less than a year. She would likely put her girlhood romance behind her and marry again, with, Sylvia hoped, a much happier ending.

  The next Wednesday, Sylvia and Mrs. Compson returned to Baltimore and met the aspiring quilters at the home of the doctor’s wife. After another delicious lunch, Sylvia demonstrated how to make a simple Nine-Patch block, starting with making templates from cardboard, tracing the shapes on the wrong side of the fabric, cutting and pinning, and sewing the pieces together with a running stitch. Sylvia heard herself echoing the advice and warnings she had heard since childhood from the Bergstrom women: trace the templates with a sharp pencil, make the stitches small and even, mind the seam allowances, don’t stretch the fabric out of shape. The Baltimore ladies took eagerly to her lesson, and each finished a twelve-inch block by the end of the afternoon. Sylvia left them with patterns and instructions for a Sawtooth Star block and promised to see them two weeks hence.

  The following session, each lady had completed a Sawtooth Star, with the quality ranging from acceptable to expert. Sylvia hesitated as she examined one woman’s block, uncertain what to say. While her color choices were among the best in the group, her stitches were uneven and seam allowances almost nonexistent. A child in the Bergstrom family would have been instructed to pick out the stitches and try again. A Bergstrom woman might have passed the block around the quilting circle for a laugh, but then she would have known to start over, perhaps after seeking advice from more experienced quilters in the family.

  “What do you think?” asked Mrs. Simmons, after Sylvia studied the block in silence for much longer than it had taken her to evaluate the other women’s work.

  “You have a wonderful eye for color,” said Sylvia.

  “Thank you, dear, but what about the sewing?” When Sylvia hesitated, Mrs. Simmons said, “I’m prepared for your honest opinion.”

  “Well,” Sylvia said, “what do you think of your work when you compare your block to what your friends have done?”

  “Oh, tell the truth, Doris,” teased another lady, a Mrs. Cook. “She knows you didn’t do your best but she’s too well-mannered to say so.”

  When the other ladies laughed, Mrs. Simmons gave Sylvia a guilty smile. “I was a bit pressed for time at the end.”

  “She starting working on the block last night, while the rest of us began the day after our last lesson,” another woman called out. “She finished the last seam in the car on the way over.”

  “Tattletale,” retorted Mrs. Simmons, giggling. To Sylvia she added, “I had hoped no one would notice.”

  Her hastiness certainly explained her results, and Sylvia couldn’t help feeling disappointed in her pupil. “I’m sure you see the problems with your block as readily as I do,” she said as kindly as she could. “If you put more effort into your next blocks, I’ll be able to evaluate your skills more accurately and offer you better guidance next time.”

  Mrs. Simmons went back to her seat perfectly content, so Sylvia suspected she felt worse about her first student failure than the student herself. Still, she figured everyone deserved a second chance after one bad decision, so she moved on to the next part of the class and introduced the LeMoyne Star block, one of her favorites. This block would be more challenging than the first two because it required the quilter to “set in” pieces, or sew a piece into an angle between two other pieces.

  As the rich colors of autumn faded into the snowy white of winter, the Baltimore Quilting Circle, as the ladies had dubbed themselves, made progress on their quilts. Sylvia made progress of her own, improving her patterns and teaching methods. She learned that good humor could make a difficult evaluation more tolerable, and that students were more likely to take her advice if she brought them around with encouragement instead of demanding they do what she knew was right. Her newfound wisdom came too late to help her when it would have done the most good for her personally, such as in countless childhood conflicts with her sister. It was too late to unsnarl the tangled threads of sibling antipathy now.

  The quilting class continued, with mixed results. Mrs. Simmons dropped out of the group after Thanksgiving, but the others assured Sylvia that her decision had nothing to do with Sylvia’s teaching. Sylvia believed them, but other students’ off-hand remarks suggested that they never intended to make another quilt after completing their first. To them, their expedition into quilting was a lark, not a pastime they were eager to pursue after this one enjoyable outing with friends. Most disheartening of all, the class was evenly divided between those who considered quilting to be an art form and those who considered it to be merely an enjoyable hobby.

  Sylvia tried to persuade them that a quilt could be just as much a work of art as a painting or a sculpture. One woman finally relented, saying, “Perhaps quilts are art, dear—folk art.” The other ladies were satisfied to see the debate end with that, but Sylvia thought it was a grudging compromise on their part, a nice, safe label that put quilting in a quaint little box but that ignored its true value. When she protested that on the day they first met at Mrs. Cass’s house, they had admired her ancestor’s masterpiece and declared it a true work of art, they considered her point briefly before concluding that antique quilts made generations ago could be called art, but that none of the quilts made in their day and age deserved that approbation.

  Sylvia gave up in frustration. Even if only half of her class believed q
uilting was an art, that was six more people who believed it than before the class began. She would have to be content with that.

  Christmas approached, and because the ladies of the Baltimore Quilting Circle were busy with holiday preparations and family gatherings, they agreed not to meet again until after the New Year.

  Sylvia braced herself for the approaching holidays. Memories of Christmas mornings and hopeful New Year’s Days at Elm Creek Manor filled her thoughts as she helped Mrs. Compson prepare the household for a bittersweet observation of the season. Mary and her husband were coming in from Washington, and with James’s brothers and their sweethearts, as well as cousins and aunts and uncles from the city, the farmhouse would be full to the rafters with relatives by marriage Sylvia scarcely knew. James’s absence from the family circle would be conspicuous.

  As they baked Christmas cookies and pies, Mrs. Compson told stories of holidays when her children were young. Sylvia was both amused and pained to hear her tales of James as a young boy. She craved any memory of her husband’s life, even those that did not belong to her, because she would not be able to make new memories of life with him. And yet each story tore at her heart because that little boy and the good, loving man he had become were gone.

  She remembered their first Christmas together as husband and wife, when in accordance with Bergstrom family tradition as the most recently married couple they had ventured out into the snowy woods to find the family Christmas tree. She thought back upon another, lonelier holiday when the men were at war, and she, Claudia, and Agnes had found strength and courage in their love for one another and in the simple joy and hope of the season. Those feelings should have sustained them when tragedy struck, but Claudia had betrayed them and Sylvia could never face her again.

  When the time came to decorate the farmhouse at Compson’s Resolution, Mrs. Compson sent her husband and sons into the wooded hills to bring home six small fir trees. Sylvia was jolted by a sudden memory of walking in the woods with James. They towed the bobsled behind them, James carried the ax, and he smiled as he told her about boyhood Christmases at his parents’ house. “My father always wanted a floor-to-ceiling tree,” he told her, “but my mother preferred a small one to stand on a tabletop. She said that was the way her family had always done it, and to please her, my father went along with it. Over the years they collected too many ornaments to fit on one small tree, but instead of getting a larger one, they chose two small trees and kept them in different rooms. By the time I was in school, we had small trees on tabletops in almost every room of the house. When visitors came, my sister and I would lead tours to make sure they didn’t miss any of them.”