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

  “It’s one of Adele’s favorite discoveries,” Julius confirmed. “She insisted we bring it out for you to use in honor of your wedding. Adele said she could think of no one who would appreciate it more.”

  Delighted, Sylvia ran her hand over the bright, scrappy top. Adele had indeed discovered a treasure. The fabrics indicated that it dated from the latter third of the eighteenth century, but its excellent condition belied its age. Someone must have cherished this quilt, for it had been given the gentlest of care.

  “I imagine this quilt has quite a story to tell,” she murmured, thinking of the unknown quiltmaker who had spent months, perhaps years, sewing the tiny triangles together by hand.

  “I’ll bet this house does, too,” said Andrew admiringly, resting his hand on the carved mantelpiece.

  “The quilt’s provenance is somewhat uncertain, as it is for so many antiques,” said Julius. “But Adele and I would be glad to tell you what we know about the house over dinner tonight, unless you have other plans?”

  They had tickets for a popular Broadway musical that one of Andrew’s old buddies from his army days had managed to get for them. (“His daughter has connections,” Andrew had explained when Sylvia marveled at their good fortune. “She’s going with a fellow who works in the ticket office.”) An early dinner with their proprietors would suit them perfectly. They arranged to meet later that afternoon, and Julius returned to his work while Sylvia and Andrew unpacked.

  With a few hours to spare before dinner, Sylvia and Andrew decided to stroll along the Museum Mile to stretch their legs after the long drive, enjoy the sights and sounds of the city, and make plans for the rest of their visit. The air was brisk, but not unbearably so, and the wind was light enough that Sylvia’s wool coat, scarf, and mittens warded off the cold. “Should we take advantage of the after Christmas sales?” she teased, tucking her arm through Andrew’s as shoppers hurried past with bags from Bergdorf Goodman and FAO Schwarz. She laughed at her husband’s disconcerted expression as he struggled to find a good excuse to refuse. She knew that the afternoon of shopping he had promised her was not his favorite item on the honeymoon itinerary.

  At four o’clock, they circled back and met Adele and Julius at Mon Petit Café, a charming bistro only steps away from the 1863 House. Adele greeted Sylvia with a warm embrace. “Such a lovely bride,” she exclaimed, and told Andrew that he was a lucky man. Andrew proudly agreed, but a wry twist to his smile told Sylvia that he did not expect to receive such a resounding endorsement at the next stop on their honeymoon tour.

  Inside the bistro, a low murmur of voices and the aromas of roasting meats and spices warmed the air. Their table near the window offered a sunny view of Lexington Avenue, but Adele’s irrepressible joy diverted Sylvia’s attention from the sights outside. She seemed about to burst with a happy secret, and Sylvia hid a smile, knowing that her expressive, demonstrative friend would not be able to keep them in suspense for long.

  Andrew, a quintessential steak-and-potatoes man, at first looked askance at the menu when he saw the French names for each dish. Just as the waiter appeared, he brightened and ordered Steak Frites—which as far as Sylvia could discern, was French for steak and fries. Since one of them ought to be daring, she chose Magret de Canard, roast duck breast in raspberry coulis with wild rice, even though she had only tried duck once and had no idea what a coulis was. “Don’t tell me,” she said when Julius began to explain. “I want to be surprised. Perhaps that should be my New Year’s resolution: to take more chances and seek out more surprises.”

  “That’s my resolution every year,” said Adele, raising her wine glass in a toast to herself.

  “It’s worked well for you so far,” remarked Julius. “Think of all you’ve accomplished because you’re willing to take chances. We should all have your courage.”

  “You make me sound much braver than I am,” Adele protested, but her smile thanked him.

  When Sylvia and Andrew urged them to explain, Adele reminded Sylvia of how she had once had a lucrative career as a stockbroker. “I was successful by most people’s standards. I had a corner office, great salary, all the perks—but I was working eighty-hour weeks. I had no time for my friends. I gobbled all my meals on the run. I read stock reports on the treadmill at the gym and answered cell phone calls in the bathroom. You laugh, but I’m serious. I was always working. It never stopped.”

  “Just imagining it wears me out,” said Andrew.

  “It wore me out, too,” Adele confessed. “But whenever thoughts of slowing down or taking a vacation crossed my mind, I drove them away. I had always pushed myself beyond other peoples’ expectations, and to stop doing so would be a sign of weakness, or worse yet, some kind of moral failing. I couldn’t let myself down.”

  “I don’t know who she was doing it all for,” Julius confided to the older couple. “She makes it sound like she was under constant scrutiny and judgment, but I’ve always believed that people are far too wrapped up in their own concerns to pay much attention to others’ struggles.”

  “For better or for worse, that does seem to be the case,” admitted Sylvia, although she could have shared many personal anecdotes of small-town life to the contrary.

  “I don’t blame anyone but myself for the pressure I felt in those days,” Adele said. “All around me were colleagues with the same responsibilities, long hours, and stresses I had, but they were thriving. They enjoyed waging the daily wars. It took me a long time to admit to myself that I wasn’t happy. But I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to stop without giving up, without admitting defeat.”

  Sylvia nodded, although she did not see how leaving a miserable job could be construed as admitting defeat. There was far more virtue to be found in diverting from a course that clearly wasn’t working than in plodding down a road one knew led to a bad end.

  “So I went through the motions.” Adele sighed and toyed with her fork. “And then came September eleventh.”

  When she fell silent, Andrew gently asked, “Did you lose loved ones?”

  “I don’t know anyone who didn’t. I lost several friends that day, acquaintances I knew through work, clients—” Adele took a deep breath. “There are no words. There just aren’t any words for it.”

  Her listeners nodded.

  “Adele also lost her home when the Towers collapsed,” said Julius.

  “Oh, dear,” said Sylvia. “I had no idea. You never mentioned it.”

  “My apartment building was covered with soot and debris,” Adele explained. “None of the residents could go home. I stayed with a friend—slept on her sofa, tried to figure out what to do next. Weeks passed before we were allowed to return for some belongings. Everything I owned was covered in a thick, white shroud of dust. I threw a few salvageable things into a bag and never looked back. It was hard to care about things when so many innocent people had lost their lives.”

  Sylvia reached out and patted her hand. “I understand, dear.”

  “I had long since returned to work. After all that had happened, it seemed trivial to brood over my dissatisfaction with my career. My feelings hadn’t changed; I just stopped thinking of them as important enough to act upon. Then one December afternoon, I was out apartment hunting when I passed the 1863 House.”

  “She went inside, took a tour, and made an offer within a week, even though she had never run a bed and breakfast in her life,” her husband broke in, shaking his head in proud incredulity.

  “It didn’t happen quite that quickly,” Adele said, laughing. “I did my due diligence. I made a business plan. But if I hadn’t seen that quilt in the window, I might still be toiling away on Wall Street.”

  Sylvia was eager to hear how a quilt had played a role in Adele’s story, and she urged her friend to continue. Adele explained that not long before she bought the 1863 House, her therapist had encouraged her to take up a creative hobby—something for pure enjoyment completely unrelated to her job. Since her grandmother had quilted and b
ecause at that low point in her life she felt drawn to items of warmth and comfort, she signed up for a beginner’s quilting class at the City Quilter.

  “I was a newly minted quilter, with all the zeal of a recent convert,” said Adele. “When I walked past the brownstone that day, I glimpsed a quilt through the window, a Crazy Quilt draped over the davenport. I wanted a closer look, but rather than risk arrest by peering through the window, I knocked on the door and asked the proprietor if I could come inside for a closer look.”

  The proprietor was a quilter herself, and so pleased by Adele’s interest that she offered to show her all the antique quilts in the inn. One very special quilt she saved for last, withdrawing it from a custom-made, muslin-lined wardrobe in the family’s private quarters on the fifth floor.

  “It was the quilt I placed on the bed in your suite,” Adele said, confirming Sylvia’s guess. “Can you imagine sewing together all those tiny triangles by hand? And those fabrics—it’s a veritable catalog of mid-to late-nineteenth-century prints. The proprietor unfolded the quilt with such reverence that I had to know why. She told me that the quilt had come with the brownstone when she and her husband bought it forty years before. The previous owners had told her that the quilt was there when they purchased it, too. Intrigued, she traced its ownership as far back as she could and finally concluded that the quilt had probably belonged to the original owners of the house.

  “As she returned the quilt to the wardrobe for safekeeping, she remarked that the quilt and the house had been together so long that it would be a shame to part them. She only hoped that whoever bought the house would cherish both quilt and residence as much as she had.” Adele smiled. “That’s when I knew I had to make an offer.”

  “Was it the quilt you wanted, or the house?” asked Andrew.

  “I couldn’t have one without the other,” Adele pointed out with a laugh. “I wanted the quilt, sure, but I wanted the house and the life at least as much. Talk about hubris. I didn’t think there would be anything to running an inn. Change the sheets every once in a while, take reservations, serve bagels and coffee—” Adele rolled her eyes. “I thought if I could handle Wall Street, I could handle a little B&B. Let’s just say I had a very sharp learning curve. But I never regretted it. I closed on the property on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. As I signed the papers, I told myself that 2002 would be my new beginning. No more would I stay in a safe, predictable routine that made me miserable. Predictability is a trap and safety is an illusion. Love and happiness, on the other hand, are real, but you don’t find them without taking chances.” She smiled at Julius. “Love for my work eventually led to love of another kind.”

  After she took over the inn, she explained, she wanted to discover all she could about its history. The previous owners shared what they knew, but Adele suspected the former single-family residence had a richer and more intriguing story to tell. Since Hunter College was nearby, she contacted its history department for advice. That phone call led to a meeting with Julius, a professor who had written several books on New York history. They fell in love, and a year later, they married.

  By that time Adele had settled into her new career. She loved everything about her new life—meeting people from around the world, sending off her guests each morning with a delicious breakfast, introducing them to intriguing places off the usual tourist track, making them feel like true New Yorkers no matter how brief their stay in the city. When she found the time, she continued to research the history of the lovely old brownstone. With Julius’s help, she learned enough about research methods and historical scholarship to qualify for a Master’s degree, if only she had been officially enrolled.

  Sylvia, who had heard some of Adele’s stories at Elm Creek Quilt Camp, said, “I do hope you’ll share some of that history with us.”

  Adele promised she would, and as soon as their delicious meal was finished, they returned to the inn. “The name 1863 House comes from the year the brownstone was built, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed,” she told them as they climbed the front stairs. Inside, she showed them down a long hallway that had been converted to a gallery, displaying framed enlargements of black-and-white illustrations that appeared to be political cartoons. Sylvia recognized caricatures of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee in various states of distress, and others of a somber but noble Abraham Lincoln in metaphorical narratives—sewing a divided nation together, visiting his Southern rivals in their nightmares. Other drawings parodied long-forgotten political figures and controversies, while another seemed to mock the simultaneous efforts of both the North and the South to recruit freed slaves for their armies.

  “The man who built this residence was an artist and political activist named John Colcraft,” Adele said. “You wouldn’t know it from his political cartoons, but he was a South Carolinian by birth.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed that,” Andrew remarked, peering closely at an illustration of a particularly tough-looking Union general wiping his shoes on a map of the Confederate states.

  “His family had made its fortune in cotton, and as the second son, John often traveled North on business for his father. On one of those journeys he met a Quaker woman named Harriet Beals, who was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, to a family of staunch abolitionists. By 1858, John had embraced her faith, renounced slavery, and married her, although not necessarily in that order.”

  “I’ve always wondered how a man who owed his livelihood to the exploitation of slave labor managed to win the heart of a dedicated abolitionist,” Julius remarked.

  “He must have been a fine talker,” said Adele, with a glance that suggested she knew another man who fit that description. “Don’t forget, he did renounce slavery. He also begged his father to free his slaves, but his father refused and disowned his son. Or the son disowned the father, it isn’t entirely clear. John Colcraft later wrote that on that day he had lost his birthright but regained his soul.”

  “Fine words, indeed,” said Sylvia, though her own experiences had made it impossible to consider any familial estrangement without regret, without wondering what might have been.

  “The couple settled in Philadelphia for a time, which is where John began his artistic career.” Adele led them down the hall at a pace that allowed them to examine the framed cartoons more carefully. “As a Quaker and a pacifist, he battled the evils he saw in the world around him with a pen rather than a sword. He began with innocuous illustrations for a city neighborhood, but as the Civil War approached, his drawings took on a more editorial slant. As his fame—or in certain circles, notoriety—grew, he moved to New York and became a regular artist for Harper’s.”

  “Which brought them here,” Sylvia guessed, admiring the front room of the house as Adele and Julius led them inside and invited them to sit.

  Adele nodded. “At the end of 1862, John received a considerable inheritance from his mother’s side of the family—‘untainted by the stain of slavery,’ as he put it—and he used it to build this home for Harriet and their two children. They moved into it in the spring of 1863, at a time of rising tensions in the city.”

  The Emancipation Proclamation had been in force for several months by then, Adele reminded them. Proslavery organizations responded to the increasing political power of abolitionists by warning working-class New Yorkers of the increased competition for laborers’ jobs that would inevitably follow should slavery be abolished and the freed slaves move North. A new, stricter draft law only fanned the flames of unrest: Every male citizen between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, as well as all unmarried male citizens between thirty-five and forty-five, were considered eligible for military service and could be chosen for duty by lottery. Certain exceptions could be made, however. If a man could hire a substitute to take his place or if he could pay the federal government a three-hundred-dollar exemption fee, he would not have to serve. African-Americans were not subject to the draft because they were not considered citizens.

  Working-cl
ass men, who would bear the brunt of the new law, were outraged. “Then, as it would now, the conflict played out in the press,” said Adele. “John Colcraft was right in the thick of it, skewering his political opponents and satirizing racism and hypocrisy on both sides.” She gestured to the four walls. “His most significant work was created in this very room. That desk is a reproduction of the one he used, based upon his own sketches of the original.”

  Fear, anger, and racial tensions rose throughout the city as spring turned into summer and the first lottery approached, Adele told them. On July 11, the first names were drawn, and for nearly two days the city remained quiet, holding its breath, waiting to see if the danger had passed. But early in the morning of July 13, the tensions erupted in violence and bloodshed. At first the rioters targeted only military and government buildings, which to them represented all that was unfair about the new conscription process. People were safe from attack as long as they did not attempt to interfere with the mob’s destruction. Before long, however, the rioting took an uglier, more sinister turn as the long-simmering racial tensions finally boiled over. Mobs began attacking African-American residents, their businesses, and any other symbol of black community, culture, or political power.

  “Even children were not safe,” said Adele. “A mob armed with clubs and bats descended upon the Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth and Forty-Second, where more than two hundred children lived. They looted the place of anything of value—food, clothing, bedding—and then they burned down the building.”