The Christmas Boutique

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  On the wall opposite the dais stood a large fireplace flanked by a rack of fire tools and a newly filled log holder, evidence of Matt’s labor at the woodchopping block. He was surely also responsible for the chairs arranged cozily before the hearth and the logs stacked for a fire, awaiting only the touch of a match. Gretchen stole a glance at Sarah and was pleased to see a small smile on her lips. She surely recognized her husband’s thoughtful gesture and found reassurance in it.

  “This is where we’ll hold the Christmas Boutique,” declared Sylvia, gesturing with arms outspread. “We’ll put our sewing machines and other equipment in temporary storage, arrange the classroom partitions to create aisles, and use our worktables to display the items for sale. We’ll deck the halls, serve hot cider by the fireplace, put on some Christmas carols, and make everything so merry and festive that our visitors will browse happily for hours.”

  “Not only browse, but buy,” Sarah added.

  Sylvia turned to Nancy and Melanie and peered at them expectantly over the rims of her glasses, which she wore on a silver chain around her neck. “What do you think? Will this suffice?”

  “It’s absolutely perfect,” said Nancy, “but one last caveat—”

  “Nancy, no,” murmured Melanie. “Not when we’re this close to sealing the deal.”

  “Your generosity is overwhelming,” said Nancy, her gaze taking in Gretchen and Sarah as well as Sylvia, “but I feel obliged to remind you that even with our volunteers pitching in, it’s going to require a lot of work to pull this off. The Christmas Boutique is supposed to open at ten o’clock Friday morning.”

  Gretchen knew what the Elm Creek Quilters were capable of, and yet even she felt a tremor of alarm at the thought of all they must accomplish in four days.

  But Sylvia did not flinch. “You can count on us,” she declared.

  Nancy sighed, relieved, and Melanie fairly bounced with delight. A few minutes passed in a flurry of planning and promises, and afterward, Sylvia, Sarah, and Gretchen escorted them to the door, where they put on their coats and gloves and departed in far better spirits than when they had arrived.

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Sylvia turned to Gretchen and Sarah, her cheerful confidence vanishing. “Oh, my goodness. What have I done?”

  Gretchen and Sarah exchanged a look of alarm. “What do you mean?” asked Sarah. “You sounded so confident that we could do it.”

  “I was. That is, I am.” Frowning briefly, impatient with herself, Sylvia straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “A momentary lapse. It won’t happen again. We can do this, and we will, but we’ll need all hands on deck. Let’s make some calls and round up our friends. We haven’t a moment to lose.”

  4

  Sarah

  While Sarah and Sylvia divided up the faculty phone list and summoned the other Elm Creek Quilters to an emergency meeting, Gretchen pulled on her coat and boots and ventured out into the snowy morning to her husband’s workshop in the red banked barn to let Joe and Andrew know what was going on. As Sarah rang Gwen’s number and waited for her to answer, she wished for perhaps the tenth time that day that Matt was there too. They could use his help. He was the estate’s caretaker, a skilled construction worker, and a good, capable, industrious person to have around in a crisis, which this was apparently turning out to be.

  But Matt was a three-hour drive away.

  She had warned him an unexpected, urgent situation might come up in his absence, but he had brushed aside her concerns. “With the orchard and gardens dormant for the winter and the campers away, this is a slow season for me at the manor,” he had said.

  “Things may be slower, but they’re hardly at a standstill,” she had replied. “You’ve never been a seasonal employee. The newest parts of the manor are about a century old, and there’s always maintenance to do. And what about everything else the caretaker is responsible for? Snow removal, tending the furnace, keeping the woodbins filled—”

  “Anything essential, I can do on the weekends.”

  The grin he offered her then was probably supposed to be reassuring, but she was not reassured. Weekends were for babyproofing the manor, preparing the nursery, discussing baby names, giving her back rubs and foot massages, and for holding her while she slept at night and kissing away her worries. She could do without the pampering if she had to, but how long could he expect to squeeze a full-time job into the weekends?

  That would be difficult enough if nothing unexpected came up, and something always did. Today it was the Christmas Boutique; the day before, it was decorating the manor for the holidays.

  All of the manor’s permanent residents had pitched in to help. While Sylvia and Gretchen had draped the banisters with evergreen garlands and adorned the mantelpieces with fresh pine boughs, Sarah and Matt had gone up to the attic in search of the Bergstrom heirloom Christmas decorations. Matt insisted that Sarah precede him up the narrow, creaking attic steps—the better to break her fall should she stumble, Sarah supposed, a sensible precaution considering she was not exactly agile in her third trimester. At the top, she shivered and hugged herself for warmth as she stepped into the chilly darkness.

  “Stay put until I turn on the light,” Matt cautioned as he ventured deeper into the space beneath the eaves. He reached overhead for the pull cord, and with one tug, pale light from the single, bare bulb spilled down, illuminating a circle of floorboards. Stacks of trunks, cartons, and old furniture cast deep shadows in the corners beyond the reach of the light.

  To Sarah’s right lay the older, west wing of the manor, the original home of the Bergstrom family, built in the middle of the nineteenth century by the first Bergstroms to immigrate to America from Germany. Directly before her stretched the south wing, added when Sylvia’s father was a boy. In the attic, the seams joining the original house and the addition were more evident than on the first three stories, the color of the walls subtly different, the floor not quite even. Little visible evidence betrayed that fact, as the belongings of four generations of the Bergstrom family covered nearly every square foot of floor space.

  Matt surveyed the attic, grimacing. “We should really help Sylvia get this place organized and cleared out.”

  “Sounds like the perfect job for our caretaker,” said Sarah lightly. “You’re right, though. Who knows what precious Bergstrom artifacts are hidden up here, what family secrets await discovery?”

  “Maybe that’s why Sylvia keeps putting it off.”

  “Maybe so.” Sarah skirted a decrepit armchair and a stack of hatboxes and moved deeper into the attic. “If Joe needs any more furniture restoration projects, I see at least a half dozen pieces in desperate need of his attention.” She paused and glanced around. “The trunks should be right around here. I’m sure I left them close to the stairwell when I put them away last year.”

  “Here,” Matt called from several paces away. “A navy-blue trunk and a forest-green trunk, right?”

  “And the carton with the Evergleam tree,” said Sarah, making her way around a battered pie cabinet to join him. “We can’t forget that.”

  “It wouldn’t feel like Christmas without it.” Matt threw her a grin as he bent his knees to pick up the green trunk. “Just keep it out of Sylvia’s sight. You know the rules.”

  Sarah knew, but she was tempted to test the rules this year. Maybe Sylvia could learn to love the aluminum tree if she gave it a chance.

  Matt refused to let Sarah do any of the heavy lifting, so she limited herself to nudging the trunks and the carton closer to the top of the stairs so he could more easily haul each one down three flights to the foyer. Once there, while their husbands went outside to string lights around the veranda and hang evergreen wreaths on the front doors, Sarah, Sylvia, and Gretchen unpacked and admired the Bergstrom family’s holiday treasures: a garland of gold beads and a pair of ceramic candleholders shaped like sprays of holly and berries. A wooden nativity set Sylvia’s grandfather had carved, and eight velvet stockings embroide
red with the names of Sylvia’s cousins. A china angel blowing a brass horn. A wooden music box shaped like a sleigh full of toys that played “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” Boxes of ornaments from around the world, representing the many facets of Sylvia’s heritage. Whenever Sylvia unwrapped a relic of great sentimental value, such as the ruby-and-gold-glass star for the top of the tree, she would sigh and smile. Sometimes she would wistfully reminisce about how the family had acquired a particular item, or which of her loved ones had prized it the most.

  “Where’s the Christmas china service?” she suddenly exclaimed as they reached the bottom of the second trunk. “And our Santa Claus cookie jar? My great-aunt Lucinda kept it filled with Lebkuchen, Anisplätzchen, and Zimtsterne from St. Nicholas Day through the Feast of the Three Kings. Anna was going to revive my great-aunt’s tradition as a special holiday treat for me.”

  “We stored the china in the butler’s pantry when we put everything away last January,” said Sarah, surprised by her friend’s alarm. “You decided that would be safer than hauling such fragile items up and down from the attic every Christmas, remember?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Sylvia, visibly relieved. “And the Christmas Quilt?”

  “Upstairs in my closet, rolled up in a bedsheet to keep it clean,” said Sarah. “Where would you like to display it this year?”

  Sylvia’s gaze went to the railing on the second floor, which began at the top of the grand oak staircase and ran the width of the foyer. “Why don’t we hang it above the entrance to the ballroom as we did last year? It’s very striking, and it would be one of the first things our guests see when they come through the front door.”

  “The Christmas Quilt?” asked Gretchen as she smoothed the wrinkles from a green-and-red-tartan tablecloth. “With so many quilters in your family, I would have assumed the Bergstroms had many Christmas quilts.”

  “This particular quilt deserves the distinction,” said Sylvia. “Many Bergstrom women collaborated on it, but it took Sarah to finish it.”

  “We finished it together,” said Sarah, “you and me and Agnes.”

  Sylvia waved a hand dismissively. “Perhaps we helped, but if you hadn’t stubbornly insisted that it was possible to assemble a quilt out of all those disparate pieces, they would still be jumbled together in a box in the attic.”

  “I can’t wait to see it, and to hear more about it,” said Gretchen. “I’m sure it’s quite a story.”

  “If you help me hang the quilt, I promise to tell you all I know,” said Sarah.

  “It’s a deal.”

  As the women decked the halls, beginning in the foyer and moving on to the ballroom, Sarah teased Gretchen with tantalizing hints about the Christmas Quilt, which she called Christmas Memories, although Sylvia rarely used that title in the stories she had shared with Sarah. From the time the first pieces were cut in the early twentieth century, the longtime work-in-progress had been taken up by a succession of Bergstrom women, each of whom used the rich red, green, cream, and gold fabrics to create blocks in her own signature style.

  Sylvia’s great-aunt Lucinda had begun the project before Sylvia was born. Her original plan was to make a quilt from twenty Feathered Star blocks, but the intricate piecing required time and persistence, and other household duties often beckoned her away. Each November, Lucinda would take the pieces from her sewing basket and declare, “This year I’m going to finish the quilt in time for Christmas morning.”

  “You said that last year,” one of the younger children would always chime in, usually Sylvia or Richard.

  “This year feels like the year,” Lucinda would reply, smiling.

  For a few weeks she would make steady progress, but it was such a busy season that she never met her deadline, and after the holidays passed, she would lose interest and pack the quilt away. Eventually, reluctantly, she abandoned it altogether. By then her eyes were not as strong as they had once been, and she no longer felt capable of piecing together the tiny triangles as precisely as necessary.

  Rather than allow Lucinda’s beautiful, intricate handiwork to go to waste, Sylvia’s mother decided to finish the quilt by framing the Feathered Stars with appliqué holly wreaths and plumes. Unlike Lucinda, Eleanor worked on the quilt throughout the year, stitching the green holly leaves and deep red berries to ivory squares of fabric with tiny, meticulous stitches. But although she did not put away the quilt at the end of the festive season, she progressed more slowly than Lucinda had, for she could sew only for an hour or two at a time before headaches and fatigue forced her to set the work aside.

  Sylvia’s mother passed away before she could complete the quilt.

  For a very long time it lay forgotten in a trunk among other belongings the grieving family could not bear to part with, but on the fifth Christmas after her death, Claudia unearthed the completed sections and the uncut fabric and decided to finish it herself. Sylvia was skeptical; even though her sister chose Variable Star blocks rather than the more challenging Feathered Stars or appliquéd holly and berries, Sylvia knew her skills were not up to the task.

  All too soon, Sylvia’s doubts proved prescient. Claudia judged her seam allowances so inconsistently that her blocks differed up to a half-inch in size, the tips of her triangles rarely met at a precise point, and she frequently lopped off star tips with adjoining seams. Sylvia pointed out these problems with more eagerness than tact, so it was little wonder Claudia rejected her offer to help sew the remaining blocks. “My trouble is that I have an annoying little sister who doesn’t have anything better to do on Christmas Eve than criticize me,” Claudia snapped. “Great-Aunt Lucinda said I could finish the quilt and that’s what I’m going to do. You’re just angry because you didn’t think of it first. If you had, you wouldn’t have let me help you, and you know it.”

  Claudia was absolutely right, but Sylvia was too proud to admit it. Temper flaring, she rose to storm from the room, but some contrary impulse made her pause in the doorway and retort, “The word ‘variable’ in your Variable Stars shouldn’t refer to their size.”

  How she regretted her angry words on Christmas Day, when, late in the evening after the family’s joyous celebration had drawn to a close, she came upon her sister kneeling on the parlor floor, packing the Feathered Stars, appliquéd holly plumes, and haphazard Variable Stars into a box with the remaining fabric.

  “Christmas is over, so you’re putting the Christmas Quilt away?” Sylvia inquired, amused. “I see you’re following in Great-Aunt Lucinda’s footsteps.”

  “Exactly,” said Claudia shortly. “To the letter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m quitting too. I suppose that pleases you.”

  Strangely, Sylvia was not at all pleased. “Why quit when you’ve already made five blocks?”

  “Because I’ve already wasted too much time on this wretched thing.” Claudia closed the box and rose, then stood there with the box at her feet, regarding her sister challengingly, as if daring her to continue the conversation.

  “Maybe you’ll feel differently next Christmas,” said Sylvia. “Maybe that’s how you’ll follow Great-Aunt Lucinda’s example, by working on it only during the Christmas season.”

  “I will never sew another stitch of this quilt,” Claudia vowed. “I don’t want anything to remind me of this miserable Christmas.”

  Sylvia gaped at her, astonished and bewildered. While it was true that an inevitable thread of sorrow was woven into the fabric of every holiday since their mother’s death, otherwise it had been a happy Christmas. Elm Creek Manor was beautifully adorned with all the familiar heirloom decorations and the charming, whimsical things the children had made at school. The family had gathered together and had enjoyed all their favorite traditions. Granted, the sisters’ attempt to make apple strudel from the traditional Bergstrom recipe had not turned out as well as they had hoped, but their aunts had prepared a delicious feast and all the decadent treats they made only during the festive season. It
had been a wonderful Christmas, not perfect, but wonderful nonetheless. Sylvia knew it was so, but she also knew that arguing the point would only make matters worse. Their Christmas had been full of blessings, but somehow her sister could not see them.

  So the Christmas Quilt was packed away, and was not seen again until Sylvia, Claudia, and Agnes discovered it while the men they loved were away at war. Claudia affirmed her vow never to sew another stitch of it, but Sylvia took it up, piecing several Log Cabin blocks in honor of her dear great-aunt Lucinda, who had adored the traditional pattern. Working upon the quilt brought her a certain peace, a quiet joy amid her loneliness and longing for her husband. That peace was shattered a few months later, and when she fled the manor in the aftermath of Andrew’s devastating revelation, she left the unfinished quilt behind.

  Decades passed, and she had quite forgotten the Christmas Quilt until Sarah’s second winter in Waterford, when Sarah discovered it, coaxed its story out of Sylvia, and resolved to piece all the completed segments together and finish the quilt at last.