Aunt Dimity and the Widow's Curse

by Nancy Atherton

  “Excellent.” I released Bess from her car seat, hoisted her and her stegosaurus into my arms, and closed the car door with my knee. “We’re not late, are we?”

  “It depends on what you mean by late,” Henry replied. “Billy Barlow opened the schoolhouse for Mrs. Craven at six, Bree showed up ten minutes later, and the others started trickling in around eight.”

  “How many others?” I asked, opening the schoolhouse door.

  “A fair few,” said Henry. “Mrs. Craven’s tickled pink by the turnout. I don’t know why she waited so long to hold a quilting bee. She’s having the time of her life.”

  A muffled buzz of conversation met my ears as I followed Henry into the cloakroom. He deposited my bags and the box of brownies on a nearby bench, but the cloakroom was so crammed with coats, hats, and scarves that it took me a few minutes to find hooks for my jacket and Bess’s.

  “I’d best get back,” said Henry. “I’m running the tearoom solo today. Sally’ll have my head if I neglect our customers. Not that I’ll have any to neglect.” He cocked his head toward the schoolroom. “They’re all in there.”

  “Sounds like it,” I said. “Thanks for helping me with the heavy lifting.”

  “It was my pleasure.” Henry stroked Bess’s rosy cheek with his knuckles and left the schoolhouse, closing the front door behind him.

  “Here we go,” I said to Bess, and opened the door to the schoolroom.

  In an instant, the muffled buzz became an unfiltered clamor of cheerful chatter. Nearly thirty women and precisely two men had descended on the schoolhouse, and all of them seemed to be talking at once, which was no mean feat, since most of them were also eating and drinking.

  Despite the late notice, my neighbors had done their level best to make sure that no one who attended the quilting bee would go home hungry. The trestle tables that lined the wall to my left creaked beneath the weight of sausage rolls, savory scones, cheese straws, meat pies, canapés, quiches, and tall stacks of crustless sandwiches, while the tables to my right held enough pastries to stock a London bakery. The communal tea urn sat on a small table in front of the glass display cabinet that housed Finch’s museum of odds and ends, and a table next to it held cups, saucers, cutlery, plates, and a pile of cloth napkins.

  Mr. Barlow and Bree Pym stood at the front of the room, admiring Bree’s handiwork. Bree’s “baby jail” consisted of three playpens that had been taken apart and put together again to form one large, protected play area on the dais. Ten-year-old Maria Sciaparelli appeared to be the chief warden. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the merged playpens, ready to intervene if war broke out between her baby sister, her youngest cousin, and little Horace Malvern III.

  Mrs. Craven flitted back and forth between two groups of seated women, who were evidently practicing the running stitch on layers of fabric sandwiched together in oversized embroidery hoops. A folding table between the two groups held a dozen more hoops as well as a clear plastic box filled with sewing supplies—scissors, thread, needles, thimbles, and several pairs of magnifying eyeglasses for those who’d forgotten to bring their reading glasses.

  The main event was taking place in the center of the room.

  Mrs. Craven’s quilt frame resembled a long, narrow wooden table with trestle legs at either end and a quilt for a tabletop. The quilt had been rolled snugly around the side rails to keep it from sagging in the center, and a floor lamp stood at each end to provide extra light for the quilters, eight of whom were already hard at work.

  The four Handmaidens sat in a row on one side of the frame, facing Charles Bellingham, Donna Sciaparelli, Annie Hodge, and Monica Malvern, who sat on the other side. Their needles flashed as they followed the simple stitching design Mrs. Craven had drawn on the quilt, but the task at hand didn’t keep them from talking a mile a minute.

  The quilt was a stunner. I couldn’t put a name to the pattern, but it looked like an exploding star. Hundreds, if not thousands, of diamond-shaped bits of fabric had been sewn in concentric circles that seemed to expand outward from the eight-pointed star at their heart. The colors—indigo, ocher, crimson, sky-blue—were as dazzling as the pattern. I had no doubt whatsoever that Mrs. Craven’s neglected masterpiece would raise a ton of money for St. George’s Church, once it was finished.

  Bess dropped her stegosaurus and began to babble excitedly. I lifted my gaze from the quilt to see Grandma Amelia approaching, her arms outstretched.

  “There’s my little darling,” she said, taking Bess from me. “Aren’t you the most beautiful girl in the world? Yes, you are! And the cleverest! And the strongest! And the sweetest! And . . .”

  Amelia’s paean to her step-granddaughter continued while I bent to retrieve the discarded dinosaur, but when I straightened, she turned her attention to me.

  “Spectacular, isn’t it?” she said, nodding at the quilt in the center of the room.

  “There’s no other word for it,” I agreed.

  “Mrs. Craven drew the stitching pattern on it with an air-soluble pencil,” Amelia informed me. “In time, the lines will simply disappear. I didn’t know such a thing existed.”

  “Nor did I,” I said. “But the number of things I don’t know about quilting would fill an encyclopedia.”

  “The frame’s Victorian,” Amelia went on. “Mr. Barlow tells me that it has pegged mortise-and-tenon joints and hand-cut ratchets, pawl gears, and teeth—the last three are the bits that make the rollers roll.”

  “What a treasure,” I said. “It’s bigger than I expected.”

  “The rollers are ninety-two inches long,” said Lilian Bunting, crossing to join Amelia, Bess, and me. “It must have been made for someone with a spare barn or a very large house.”

  “Do you know what the quilt pattern is called?” I asked.

  “Star of Bethlehem,” Lilian replied, smiling. “Teddy was over the moon when Mrs. Craven told him. He thinks it’s the perfect pattern for a church fund-raiser.”

  “How long have they been at it?” I asked, gesturing to the quilters seated at the frame.

  “Not long,” said Amelia. “Mrs. Craven won’t let anyone work for more than thirty minutes. She says it’ll keep us fresher. I say it’ll keep us from becoming hunchbacks.”

  “Go!” Bess demanded, squirming impatiently.

  Amelia lowered her to the floor and gave her two fingers to hold while we walked at a toddler’s pace toward the baby jail. Mrs. Craven looked up at the sound of Bess’s voice and left her stitchery class to walk with us.

  “Here you are at last, Lori,” she said, patting me on the arm. “As you can see, we started ahead of schedule.”

  “Your students are eager to learn,” I told her. “As am I. I’ll grab a hoop after I clap Bess behind bars.”

  “Bree’s baby jail is a marvel,” Mrs. Craven said admiringly. “Such a clever way to keep the little ones safe.”

  “Safe and busy,” I amended. “There are few creatures on earth more destructive than a bored toddler, but Bess will have sparkling companions to amuse her while she’s in the slammer.”

  “She’ll have a surfeit of toys as well,” Lilian commented. “It looks as though Monica Malvern brought Horace the Third’s entire toy box with her.”

  “Maria’s doling them out slowly,” said Bree as we approached, “to make them last longer. She’s an ideal jailer.”

  “I’ll give her Bess’s bag of toys to keep in reserve,” I said. “Better to have too many than too few.”

  “Another inmate!” Bree announced as she scooped Bess up and placed her inside the linked playpens. “Keep an eye on this one, Maria. She’s already hatching an escape plan.”

  Maria grinned, reached for the stegosaurus I held out to her, and used it to lure Bess to the rear of the enclosure, where the rest of the little prisoners were happily stacking wooden blocks, then knocking them over.

&n
bsp; “You may think your baby jail’s a joke,” Lilian said to Bree, “but it’s strangely appropriate to the setting. In Victorian prisons, convicts were put to work sewing mailbags.”

  “I can think of worse ways to spend time in prison,” said Bree.

  “So can I,” said Amelia. “I’d prefer drawing to sewing, of course. Prison life would be almost bearable if I could sketch portraits of the other prisoners. I imagine they’d have very interesting faces.”

  “Interesting stories to tell, too,” Bree put in.

  “The only thing that would reconcile me to a jail sentence,” I declared, “would be a guaranteed supply of Sally Cook’s jam doughnuts.”

  “You needn’t go to prison to enjoy Sally’s doughnuts,” said Lilian. “You’ll find a rather large tray of them tucked between Opal Taylor’s Bakewell tarts and my lemon bars.”

  “Bakewell tarts, lemon bars, and jam doughnuts?” I exclaimed. “I love quilting bees!”

  “Let’s hope you feel the same way by the end of the day,” said Mrs. Craven, chuckling.

  I naively assured her that I would.

  Four

  Lilian sat between Amelia and Bree in our quilting class, but she merely listened while the rest of us discussed the pub’s repainted sign, the selection of breakfast cereals at the Emporium, and various other hot topics. While the vicar’s wife liked to keep abreast of the latest gossip, she wisely refrained from contributing to it in public.

  Her husband showed up at half past nine to bless our endeavors. Everyone stood as the vicar delivered the uncharacteristically brief homily he’d composed especially for the occasion.

  “Quilts, like friendships, bring warmth and comfort to our lives,” he said. “May the Lord guide your needles and may the stitches you sew be as strong as the bonds of neighborly affection that unite our village. Amen.”

  He then took a seat at the quilt frame and executed a single workmanlike stitch.

  “Impressive,” I murmured to Lilian.

  “He’s been practicing since Thursday,” she murmured back.

  “I’ll quit while I’m ahead, shall I?” said the vicar, standing.

  His industriousness was rewarded with a round of applause, a cup of tea, and one of his wife’s heavenly lemon bars.

  The rest of the morning passed in a nearsighted blur. With Mrs. Craven’s help, I learned how to hide my knots in the batting; how to catch all three layers of cloth with my needle; and how to sew a quick succession of stitches by rocking my needle up and down through the fabric several times before pulling the thread through.

  The hardest lesson I had to learn was to relax.

  “If you’re tense, you’ll end up with sore shoulders, a stiff neck, and a headache,” Mrs. Craven told me. “We’re not prisoners sewing mailbags, Lori. We’re neighbors enjoying a pleasant pastime. Make knots in your thread, my dear, not in your muscles.”

  My first stitches could not have been mistaken for a robot’s. They were distinctly human, and if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Craven’s leather thimbles, I would have left a trail of bloodstains on the fabrics sandwiched in my embroidery hoop. My technique improved with practice, however, and by the time I took a seat at the quilt frame, I’d achieved a level of competence that allowed me to chat, sew, and keep an eye on Bess without skewering myself or anyone else within reach of my needle.

  When we finished one section of the quilt, Mr. Barlow turned the rollers to expose a new section and we began again. Mrs. Craven set an old-fashioned egg timer to ring at the end of our thirty-minute shifts. My first session felt like a life sentence, but the more I relaxed, the more quickly the minutes ticked by.

  A midmorning shift change was in progress when Peggy Taxman barreled into the schoolhouse, claimed a seat at the frame, and astonished us all by demonstrating hitherto hidden quilting skills. Her needle seemed to dance across the colorful diamonds, and her stitches were indistinguishable from Mrs. Craven’s.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” she bellowed.

  Startled, little Horace the Third burst into tears, but Bess burst into a gale of giggles. She thought Peggy Taxman was hilarious.

  “My gran taught me how to quilt,” Peggy continued. “It’s like riding a bicycle—once learned, never forgotten. But I mustn’t stay all day. I’ll complete this section, then be on my way.”

  Peggy was as good as her thunderous word. The rest of us watched in awe as she moved from chair to chair, quilting like a woman possessed. When she was done, she waved off a cup of tea, declaring that she didn’t have time to spare for such frivolities, and headed back to the Emporium.

  “Will wonders never cease?” I said to Mrs. Craven.

  “Quilting can be addictive,” she observed. “The longer you’ve been away from it, the stronger its pull on you. If you’re not careful, Lori, you’ll find yourself falling under its spell.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve already fallen,” I assured her, and it was true. By my third shift, quilting had begun to feel like a form of meditation. When I mentioned its calming effects to Lilian, she nodded.

  “It would explain why Mrs. Craven is such a gentle soul,” she said. “Her craft is a source of inner peace.”

  “Maybe we should buy a quilt frame for Peggy,” I muttered, and Lilian suppressed a snort of laughter.

  The other mothers disappeared with their sleepy babies and a flagging Maria around one o’clock, but after a hearty lunch, a stroll around the village green, and a nap on the baby jail’s cushioned floor, Bess was raring to go. Thankfully, Bree volunteered to be her cell mate. Bree, who found quilting every bit as exciting as watching paint dry, was more than happy to exchange needles, thimbles, and thread for storybooks, plush dinosaurs, and games of Big Bad Bear on the green.

  As the afternoon wore on, quilting fatigue began to take its toll. Sally Cook, Christine Peacock, Felicity Hobson, and Charles Bellingham were the first to abandon the bee. Amelia and Lilian departed a short time later, and the villagers who remained began to spend more time sipping tea and nibbling canapés than sewing. While they exchanged views on Opal Taylor’s begonias, Selena Buxton’s foray into the world of ballroom dancing, and Elspeth Binney’s switch from oil to watercolor painting, Mrs. Craven and I soldiered on, sitting across from one another at the quilt frame.

  When I pointed out to my companion that she and I were the only quilters who were actually working on the quilt, she smiled and told me not to worry.

  “Haven’t you noticed, my dear?” she said. “We’re nearly done.”

  “Are we?” I said, flexing my tired fingers.

  “We certainly are,” said Mrs. Craven. “I estimate that we have two square feet of quilting left to do. I’ll have to bind the edges, of course, but I can easily do that on my own.”

  “I believe you could sew the clouds together and make a quilt in the sky,” I told her.

  “I’d need a bigger frame,” she said with a self-deprecating chuckle.

  “Where will you embroider your black-and-white cow?” I asked.

  “It’s a secret,” she replied. “Will and Rob will have fun finding it.”

  “They always do,” I said. “Did your mother teach you how to quilt?”

  “My mother was a seamstress at the manor house in our village,” said Mrs. Craven. “She taught me practical needlework. I learned to mend sheets, shirts, draperies, cushions—anything that could be sewn or woven. I taught myself to quilt much later, when I no longer had to earn a living with my needle.”

  Her casual reference to her old village piqued my curiosity. I’d stopped quizzing her about her former home years ago, after she’d explained that such questions brought back distressing memories of her husband’s illness and death. By mentioning the place where her mother had worked, however, she seemed to indicate that the topic was no longer off limits.

  I gave her a quick glance, then said
cautiously, “You grew up in Old Cowerton, didn’t you?”

  “It was the only place I’d ever lived,” she said, “until I came here.”

  “Is it like Finch?” I asked.

  “It’s larger than Finch,” she said, “but smaller than Upper Deeping. Old Cowerton was an important crossroads in Tudor times. It went into a decline when the railway passed it by, but the motorcar rescued it. The tourist trade has kept Old Cowerton alive for as long as I can remember.”

  “I’ve seen the sign for Old Cowerton on the Oxford road,” I said, “but I’ve never been there. It’s not far from here, is it?”

  “No more than thirty miles,” she confirmed.

  “Would you like to see it again, Mrs. Craven?” I asked. “If you would, I’ll take you. We could make a day of it. Bess and I love to explore new places.”

  “You’re very generous, my dear, but I have no desire to revisit my past,” she said. “And please, Lori, call me Annabelle. You’ve known me far too long to address me as ‘Mrs. Craven.’ Besides, if we’re to finish a quilt together, it’s only right that you should use my Christian name.”

  “Thank you,” I said, sewing with renewed vigor. Mrs. Craven hadn’t invited anyone else in Finch to call her by her first name. I felt as if I’d been granted a singular privilege. “You’re lucky to have such a pretty name, Annabelle.”

  “Do you think so?” she said. “It was a sore trial to me throughout my childhood. I should have been a Mildred or a Myrtle or a Mabel, but my mother wanted me to stand out from the other children, so I was christened Annabelle Beatrice.” She shook her head and sighed. “You can imagine how well that went over in the school yard.”

  “I’m afraid I can,” I said, smiling sympathetically. “Rob and Will get a kick out of calling their sister Messy Bessy. When she’s older, I expect she’ll call them Rob the Slob and Will the Pill. Children have a fairly basic sense of humor.”