The Christmas Boutique

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Dedication

  For Marty, Nicholas, and Michael, with all my love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1: Sylvia

  2: Mary Beth

  3: Gretchen

  4: Sarah

  5: Agnes

  6: Gwen

  7: Diane

  8: The Elm Creek Quilters

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Sylvia

  Thin, pale sunbeams shone tentatively around the edges of curtains drawn tight against the winter cold in the windows of the master suite of Elm Creek Manor. Although Sylvia Bergstrom Compson was eager to get up and seize the day, she lingered in bed, reluctant to jostle her dear husband, slumbering peacefully by her side.

  Throughout the summer and into the autumn, Andrew had risen first. He had often been settled at his favorite fishing spot, a large, round, flat rock beneath a willow tree on the bank of Elm Creek, before Sylvia even opened her eyes. But after winter descended upon central Pennsylvania, more often than not, he pulled the bedcovers up to his chin and slept in long after Sylvia and the manor’s other permanent residents had finished breakfast and were going about the business of the day. How amused Sylvia had been to discover her new husband’s surprising seasonal preference, and after she thought she knew him so well! She suspected that in the years to come—may they have many together—they would discover more intriguing, unexpected quirks and contradictions within each other.

  Perhaps they would discover less endearing traits too, but she and Andrew were both too grateful for their second chance at love to fuss over trivialities.

  Sylvia smiled fondly as she watched Andrew doze beneath the beautiful bridal sampler they had received as a wedding gift only a few months before. The Elm Creek Quilters had surprised her by collecting quilt blocks from her friends, quilting students, colleagues, and admirers from around the world, sewing them together into an exquisite expression of their warm wishes and affection. Sylvia and the other Elm Creek Quilters worked so closely together that it was a marvel how her friends had managed to collaborate on such a complex project without her suspecting a thing. Then again, she and Andrew had surprised them all the previous Christmas Eve when they had come to Elm Creek Manor expecting a festive holiday party, only to discover that they were attending a wedding. Naturally their friends would want to tease Sylvia and Andrew just a little by surprising them in return.

  Now, after nearly a year full of surprises, it would soon again be Christmas Eve, Sylvia and Andrew’s first anniversary. She had been so preoccupied with other matters—wrapping up another successful season of Elm Creek Quilt Camp; bidding farewell to friends departing for distant locales, from Philadelphia to Maui; putting the last stitches into a new quilt, her contribution to her church’s annual fund-raiser for the county food pantry—that she hadn’t had a moment to spare for holiday plans. Perhaps her young friend and colleague Sarah McClure had already typed up a spreadsheet or two delineating arrangements for meals, decorations, and entertainment, but Sylvia thought she and Andrew should plan their anniversary celebration themselves.

  And Sylvia and Andrew’s marriage was such an unexpected blessing that it surely ought to be celebrated in fine style.

  Although they had first met as children, their lives had taken them down different paths, winding ways that had led to and from Elm Creek Manor over the course of several decades. Sylvia had first known Andrew as her younger brother’s classmate, a shy, scrawny, badly neglected boy whose family had recently moved into a ramshackle house on the outskirts of Waterford.

  At school, most children eyed Andrew’s tattered clothes, bruised limbs, and haunted expression and kept their distance, but a few older boys bullied him cruelly until Sylvia’s younger brother put a stop to it. Richard was clever, athletic, and popular, and after he insisted that Andrew be allowed to join in their games, the other boys grudgingly accepted him.

  Andrew and Richard soon became good friends. One afternoon when Sylvia and her elder sister, Claudia, met their brother at the schoolyard gate to walk him home, Sylvia spotted Andrew wearing a jacket Richard had recently outgrown. Later that night, when she told her father what she had seen, he nodded thoughtfully and questioned her about the boy.

  “I don’t know much,” she admitted, embarrassed, but she told him the little she had observed and inferred.

  The next morning at breakfast her father told Richard that he looked forward to meeting his new friend. “You may invite Andrew to come home with you after school any time you like,” he added.

  Richard’s face lit up. “Really? Can you drive him home after? He lives out in the country.”

  “We live out in the country,” said Claudia loftily, “and we walk to and from school.”

  Richard frowned. “Andrew lives way out in the other direction, so he’d have to walk to school and then more.”

  Their father raised a hand to end the argument before it escalated. “Richard, I’m happy to drive your friend home. You may tell him I said so.”

  After that, Andrew came home with Richard nearly every day. Sometimes Sylvia asked about his family in a casual, conversational way so it would not seem like an inquisition. Andrew said little in reply, but it was enough for Sylvia to conclude that he was miserable at home and that he worried about his little sister, who was often ill.

  Sylvia wished her compassionate, generous mother were there to advise her, but she had passed away four years before, leaving the family irreparably bereft. She thought maybe they could invite Andrew and his little sister to live at Elm Creek Manor, but she reluctantly abandoned that scheme as impossible. Andrew’s parents probably wouldn’t allow it, even though, as Sylvia and Claudia had noted in a rare moment of agreement, they didn’t seem particularly interested in being parents and weren’t very good at it.

  “Maybe they’d be nicer if not for the Depression,” Claudia mused aloud.

  “You can’t blame the Great Depression for everything,” said Sylvia. “Father says lots of people in Waterford are out of work, many families are going hungry, but hardly any kids show up at school with bruises and messy clothes all the time.”

  The Bergstroms were considered one of the wealthiest families in the Elm Creek Valley, but even they had to watch every penny. Their entire savings had vanished overnight in October 1929 when the First Bank of Waterford had gone under after a larger bank in some far-off city called in its debts. The family business, Bergstrom Thoroughbreds, had earned almost nothing for years. Most of their former customers had lost their fortunes in the stock market crash, and those days hardly anyone could afford to squander money on expensive, impractical luxuries like champion horses. Sylvia’s father assured her that their family would get by. They owned their own land and had no mortgage, and they grew some of their own food. Their forests would provide wood to burn if they ran out of coal. The manor was full of lovely things acquired in more prosperous times that they could sell to pay bills or barter for whatever they could not make or grow themselves.

  As poor as they had become, the Bergstroms were far better off than most of their neighbors. Sylvia knew her mother would have urged them to share what they had with the less fortunate, including Richard’s new best friend. Especially him.

  When the weather turned colder, Sylvia gave Andrew warm, sturdy clothes Richard had outgrown but not worn out. Every morning she filled her brother’s lunch box with enough food for two hungry children, and once she discreetly slipped a toothbrush and a comb into the pocket of Andrew’s jacket while t
he boys were off playing. Gradually Andrew began to fill out, and as the first winter snows began to fall, whenever Sylvia and her sister met the boys at the schoolyard gate, she observed that his face and hands were clean, his smile shy but bright, his hair no more tousled and tangled than any other boy’s.

  In December, Sylvia’s father invited Andrew to spend Christmas at Elm Creek Manor, ignoring Claudia’s protests that he would feel out of place among all the aunts and uncles and cousins returning to the ancestral estate for the holidays. Sylvia was annoyed at her sister and fiercely glad her father had included the boy. His eyes shone with joyful delight as he beheld their traditional Christmas feast—tender Jägerschnitzel, grilled pork loin with mushroom gravy; sweet potatoes; creamed peas; and for dessert, Great-Aunt Lucinda’s Lebkuchen, Anisplätzchen, and Zimtsterne cookies, as well as apple strudel made from the recipe Great-Great-Aunt Gerda Bergstrom had brought over from Germany. Afterward, Andrew gazed, awestruck, upon the glorious Christmas tree in the ballroom, adorned with candles and precious German glass ornaments Sylvia’s great-grandparents had received as wedding gifts ages ago. Sylvia knew this would be a Christmas he would never forget.

  If Sylvia needed any more proof of the boy’s happiness, his reluctance to go home after the celebration convinced her. Her father had to coax him into the car by likening it to Santa’s sleigh and reminding him of the wrapped box he had found beneath the Christmas tree bearing his sister’s name, a gift Santa surely intended Andrew to deliver.

  Later, Sylvia was in the kitchen drying and putting away dishes when she heard her father return. “Do you know what Andrew said to me as I drove him home?” she overheard him tell Great-Aunt Lucinda, who had met him at the back door. “He said that this was the best Christmas he had ever known. We’ve compared these past few Christmases to those of the twenties and rue how we’ve come down in the world, and yet this little boy was overwhelmed by our abundance.”

  “That’s a lesson for us all.”

  “I can’t help thinking how much more we could do for Andrew and his sister if—”

  “No, Fred. I know your heart’s in the right place, but you can’t take children from their parents.”

  “If you saw their home, you’d feel differently.”

  “There’s much more to a home than material comforts.”

  “That’s precisely my point. From what I’ve seen, the children don’t receive many spiritual comforts either.”

  Worried, Sylvia stole closer to the doorway, but even though she held her breath and strained her ears, her father and great-aunt had walked off down the hall, their conversation fading until she could no longer hear them.

  In the months that followed, her father’s worries proved prescient. Richard and Andrew were eight years old when Andrew ran away from home. Richard hid his friend in the wooden playhouse their father had built near the stables and exercise rings, setting him up with warm blankets and comic books and smuggling him food at night while the rest of the family slept. Sylvia discovered their secret one autumn night when she woke to the sound of her brother creeping past her bedroom door. She followed him to the kitchen, where he filled a bag with leftovers, crept outside and across the bridge over Elm Creek, and unwittingly led her to the hideout.

  The boys begged her not to tell her father, but she thought she had no choice. He contacted the authorities, who conducted a brief investigation and immediately removed Andrew and his sister from their parents’ custody. Sylvia’s father offered to take the children in, but the law gave preference to relatives, and the children were sent to live with an aunt in Philadelphia.

  After Andrew’s sudden departure, an angry and bewildered Richard missed his best friend terribly. At first he wrote Andrew numerous letters, but their father did not know where to send them. It was a long time before Richard forgave Sylvia for betraying them.

  For years thereafter, Sylvia thought of Andrew and his little sister at Christmastime and hoped they were celebrating somewhere warm and safe, that they were happy, cared for, and loved. Now, at last, she had no doubt Andrew was.

  Sylvia felt her breath catch in her throat as she gazed upon her husband while he slept, remembering the small, frightened child he had been. Even now his lined face was almost boyish in repose, his brow furrowed slightly as if in concentration, his breathing steady and even. Sylvia wished with all her heart that she could reach back through time, embrace that little boy, and assure him that one day his unhappiness would be behind him. He would know sorrow but also great joy, and after many years, Sylvia and Andrew would rediscover each other.

  But before then, they would have another meeting, and another parting.

  From the time he was quite young Richard had longed to explore the world beyond the Elm Creek Valley, and when he turned sixteen, he convinced their father to enroll him in a young men’s academy in Philadelphia. A few days into the term, he discovered that one of his new classmates was none other than his long-lost friend Andrew Cooper, a scholarship student, one of the brightest young men in the class. This happy news helped Sylvia bear her brother’s absence a little better, but she still missed him terribly and wished he had not been so impatient to leave home. But except for the occasional lament to her closest friends in her quilt guild, she kept her feelings to herself. It was autumn of 1943, the entire world was at war, and with so many families losing brothers and sons every day, she felt ashamed to complain when her brother was merely away at school.

  That year she looked forward to the holidays more eagerly than ever because Richard would be coming home for semester break. On the day of his arrival, the manor fairly hummed with anticipation as young cousins darted about laughing and playing, aunts and wives cheerfully worked in the kitchen, sending delicious aromas wafting through the halls—baked apples, cinnamon, vanilla, and nutmeg. Sylvia and Claudia bustled about, getting in each other’s way and on each other’s nerves as they finished preparing rooms for their overnight guests and putting up the last of the decorations. Sylvia chose tasks that kept her near the front windows, and whenever Claudia was not around to scold her for idleness, she paused to gaze outside through the falling snow, hoping to glimpse a taxicab approaching.

  She was in the dining room folding napkins when a cousin raced downstairs from the nursery shouting that a car was coming up the drive. Sylvia hurried to the foyer, steps ahead of a veritable stampede of cousins and aunts and uncles, her heart pounding with anticipation and joy. Her father reached the tall, double front doors first and flung one open. “Welcome home, son,” he called out, but then he halted in the doorway, his smile turning to puzzlement.

  Sylvia ducked beneath his arm and stepped outside. “Richard,” she cried, and then she too abruptly paused at the sight of a small figure lingering cautiously behind her brother. Blue eyes peered up at her from beneath a white fur hood, but the rest of the face was concealed behind a thick woolen scarf.

  “Well, sis?” Richard inquired merrily, relishing her astonishment. “Are you going to let us in or keep us standing out here in the snow?”

  His words roused their father to smile broadly, step aside, and gesture for them to enter. Dumbfounded, Sylvia backed into the house and out of the way as Richard guided his companion into the warmth of the foyer. He gave Sylvia a grin and a quick peck on the cheek in passing, but he was quickly surrounded by aunts and cousins sending up a chorus of greetings as they helped him and the young woman out of their wraps. Sylvia glimpsed porcelain skin, a flush of roses in the gentle curve of a cheek, luxurious dark hair spilling over the girl’s shoulders nearly to her waist.

  “Everyone,” said Richard, raising his voice to be heard over the cheerful din, “I’d like you to meet my— I’d like to introduce you to Agnes Chevalier.”

  “Hello,” said the girl, looking shyly around the circle of expectant faces, her voice trembling slightly.

  “Welcome to Elm Creek Manor, Agnes,” said Claudia, stepping forward to take their coats and scarves. She passed them on to
a responsible younger cousin with instructions to hang them up to dry, then turned back to Agnes and placed an arm around her shoulders. “Let’s get you two in front of a warm fire, shall we?”

  As Claudia led Richard and Agnes across the foyer toward the parlor, Sylvia exchanged a quick glance with her father, enough to confirm that he had not expected Richard’s traveling companion either.

  As they warmed themselves by the hearth with hot tea and cozy quilts, Richard explained that Agnes was a student at his academy’s sister school, and that they had met while volunteering for a joint community service day. In his usual offhand way, Richard explained without a hint of boastfulness that her father was a successful attorney, and that her mother descended from a wealthy and prominent political family whose name Sylvia immediately recognized, rendering her momentarily awestruck.

  Unfortunately, in the days that followed, aside from Agnes’s lineage and her undeniable beauty, little else about their unexpected holiday visitor impressed Sylvia very much. Agnes was exasperatingly naive and she tried too hard to please. She knew next to nothing about farm life or quilting or anything else practical. Worst of all, Richard seemed thoroughly besotted with her.

  “I’m beginning to understand why Agnes’s family didn’t object to her spending the holidays far from home,” she murmured to her great-aunt Lucinda as they peeled sweet potatoes for their Christmas Day feast. “They probably find her as tiresome as we do.”

  “That’s unkind, especially at Christmas,” her great-aunt chided. “And speak for yourself. The rest of us like Agnes very much.”

  Sylvia stifled a groan, but she could not deny that her father seemed to find Agnes utterly charming. Claudia was going overboard to make the girl feel welcome, and Claudia’s reticent beau, Harold, was surprisingly warm and friendly in Agnes’s company. Even James, Sylvia’s otherwise wonderful husband of three years, seemed oblivious to the faults and annoying quirks all too evident to Sylvia.