Sorceress (3 page)

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5

The Institute offices

‘I’m Alison Ellman.’

The woman coming towards Agnes was maybe in her late twenties and wore casual clothes, blue shirt and khakis. She was slim and small, shorter than Agnes, and kind of pretty with short-cut wheat-blonde hair.

‘How did you know it was me?’ Agnes asked.

Alison looked at the young woman in front of her. She was dressed like any student: tennis shoes, denim jeans, white T-shirt, denim jacket. She wore an earring in one ear: turquoise beads finished with a feather. Lots of kids wore ethnic jewellery these days, but the beads had a dull finish, suggesting that they were old. She was slender, slight even, still more girl than woman, but she had presence. She stood upright and when she moved it was with graceful ease. She had high cheekbones and clear features; strong brows and a straight nose above a wide, full mouth and a delicately rounded chin. Her skin was the colour of clear wild honey. She was tall, taller than Alison thought at first glance, taller than Alison herself. As she inclined her head in greeting, her long hair fell forward, soft and silky, as shiny as a raven’s wing. The eyes, though – the eyes were a surprise. They were as grey as the sky on a snowy winter’s day.

‘I was watching you in the exhibition. You looked at it differently from the other people in there. Apart from that, I just took a pretty good guess. I’m very pleased to meet you, Agnes.’

Alison put out her hand and Agnes took it. The girl’s hand was long, thin-fingered and strong. Her wrists were circled with power beads and friendship bracelets woven from leather and bright silk thread. Alison made her mind up quickly about people and she liked this girl, she liked her right away, whatever she did or did not have to say.

‘I’m so glad that you could make it. Journey OK? No problem finding us? I’m so excited about this, you can’t guess. It’s this way.’ Alison shepherded Agnes to a door marked
No Public Access
. ‘Most of the work here goes on behind the scenes. What you see on exhibition is only a fraction of the whole collection, and our work is, of course, much, much more . . .’

Alison led the way up the stairs, more than aware that she was talking too much already.

Alison’s workstation was in one corner of a room banked with modern filing systems and glass-fronted bookcases full of old-looking leather-bound volumes. Alison’s area held a computer, a microscope, a light box and a lamp with a magnifying attachment.

‘I’m planning a follow-up to
The Mary Papers
. I’ll show you what I’ve got so far. I’ve kind of commandeered this wall.’

Agnes followed her down the room past tables piled with document folders and portfolios tied with ribbon. The wall was papered from top to bottom with maps, charts, family trees, computer printouts, photographs and facsimiles of documents. Yellow Post-it notes covered in small fine lettering dotted the field of print like curling autumn leaves. Agnes read the wall from right to left, then back again, scanning fast but careful not to leave any part out. She knew quite a bit about research and this was excellent work, but she saw more than that. The hand-drawn family trees, the carefully drafted charts, the tiny meticulous printed notes told her that this was labour of love that bordered on obsession.

‘This is a lot of work. Real impressive.’

Alison stood, arms folded, peering up at the board through narrow wire-rimmed glasses. She smiled, pleased with the response she had gained.

‘I didn’t do it on my own. I’ve had information from all over.’ She reached forward to readjust a peeling Post-it. ‘Elias Cornwell is right over here along with what’s left of Beulah. The Rivers family are up there alongside the Morses. There’s Jonah and Martha.’ She nodded to different quarters of the display. ‘Remember Jack Gill, the boy on the ship? I’ve even managed to track him down.’

‘How did you get so much?’

‘The response to the book and the web site have been excellent – and my own research, of course.’ Alison laughed. ‘It
is
my job, after all. It’s not so hard to find out about somebody, even as far back as this. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is well documented, there are vital records: births, deaths, marriages, along with church records, court records, gravestones, private papers, containing letters if you’re lucky. Account books, you can tell a lot from them, probate inventories, wills, what people left behind them and to whom and in what quantity; there’s also family traditions and superstitions, plenty of stuff. The key is knowing where to go look. I owe a great deal of thanks to the Internet, of course, and also the New Englander’s love of genealogy.’

Alison laughed and stopped. Her laugh was getting a nervous edge to it. She didn’t want to go on too much, sensing that Agnes might be drifting off.

Agnes knew that stuff anyway, so she had been only half listening. She did want to know something about the family tree marked Rivers–Morse. It stretched from one side of the wall to the other. Beginning with Rebekah, fourteen generations spread out and on from her.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing to a single blood-red thread snaking through the branching names.

‘It’s the quilt. It follows the distaff side, the female line.’ Alison used a pointer to follow the ribbon along. ‘Starting with Rebekah and going to her daughter Mary Sarah, and to her daughter, and on and on to the tenth generation and this woman, Eveline TraversHarris.’(6)

(6) Refer to the historical notes at the end of the book.

The red line stopped with her, although the tree line branched up and off to include three, in some cases four, more names.

‘What happened?’

Alison pointed up at the names bracketed with
Eveline Travers Harris
:
husband
Clarence Edgar
, died in France, 1918; two infant children (
Etta May, aged 3, and Earl Leonard, aged 18 months
) died of influenza in 1919.

‘Eveline herself lived on. Her death was not recorded until 1981. But she never married again.’

‘So what happened to the quilt?’

‘Seems that Eveline never quite recovered from what had happened to her family. She became reclusive, devoting herself to the making and collecting of quilts and other kinds of needlework. Her death broke the family tradition. Her whole quilt collection, which was by that time extensive and valuable, was sold to a private collector.’

‘So how did you get hold of it?’

‘The purchaser, J. W. Holden, died several years ago. He collected extensively, all kinds of things from the colonial period. On his death, the collection went to the Holden Foundation: this guy was so rich he founded his own museum. Anyway, the quilt was eventually catalogued along with everything else, but the box it was in was wrongly attributed to colonial craftsmanship. It was some time before someone realised exactly how old the quilt inside was. They didn’t feel they could handle it, so they called us for one of our textile conservators to come take a look.’

‘Uh – huh.’ Agnes was having a hard time concentrating. She scarcely heard Alison’s final words. ‘Can I see it? The quilt, I mean.’

‘Sure. They’ve finished working on it. Come with me. It’s not here, it’s in the textile area. I thought you might want to see it. I’ve had it all set out for you to view.’

They went through a storage area accessed via swipe-card-activated, air-locked doors. Machines hummed and little red lights winked high on the walls. Alison took Agnes through another door to a room where the textile conservators worked.

The quilt was laid on a table there ready for them to see. Alison put on cotton gloves before she handled the quilt. She touched it gently, stroking and petting it, as though it was some live slumbering thing. Agnes knew something of the art of quilt making from her aunt and her grandmother. But this was nothing like the bright multicoloured patterned spreads created by them. It was not patchwork but all of a piece. The fabric was coarser, rougher than Agnes had imagined it to be. The colour was not drab exactly, but the deep blue had dulled to faded indigo. The quilting skill and patterning lay in the stitching and that was hard to see, the background being so dark. Agnes peered closer. She knew not to touch.

‘These are the patterns.’

Alison unfolded a large sheet of paper. Released from the uniform monochrome, the motifs burst into life: ferns sprouted, feathers fanned, flowers bloomed, leaves intertwined. The designs were strong but simple, like the bead embroidery of Agnes’s people. There were other patterns too: hearts and knots and abstract spirals surrounded stylised depictions of a cabin in a grove of tall pines and a ship at full sail.

‘Wow! I’d never have guessed –’ Agnes shook her head, the impact the quilt was making on her too hard to express.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Alison smiled. ‘It’s hard to say how precious this is, even without the diary inside it. And valuable? Even the conservator here had never seen a quilt this old before. You could not put a price on it ... ’

Alison spoke on, describing the quilt’s provenance, while Agnes continued to stare at the motifs. They were not just a random collection of patterns. They told a story complete with characters: Rebekah and Tobias, Martha and Jonah, even Jaybird. They were all here right along with Mary.

‘ ... like pepper from a pepper pot.’

‘Excuse me?’

Alison smiled. ‘I’m sorry to be so boring.’

‘You aren’t at all.’ Agnes shook her head, embarrassed. ‘I’m having a problem concentrating, that’s all. Didn’t sleep well, I guess. What were you saying?’

‘At some point the back of the quilt sustained damage. The material the conservator found was relatively recent and only tacked, in some places even pinned, and the pins were rusting, damaging the original fabric. It wasn’t an integral part of the piece, so she decided to remove it. When she took the back away, that’s when she found the diary. The original backing had been scorched, making the fabric brittle, causing weak spots and holes to develop. The diary was hidden in the batting, the wadding between front and back, and it had begun to shake out like ... ’ Alison shrugged, turning her gloved hands palms up.

‘Pepper from a pot?’ Agnes supplied.

‘Exactly. To me, it’s like a miracle.’ Alison smoothed the fabric. ‘In normal circumstances conservation involves minimum intervention. It would be unethical to interfere or compromise the object. So even if we had
known
the diary was inside, we could not have removed it.’ She paused again and gave a small smile, as if apologising already for saying something silly. ‘It’s almost as though it shook itself out. As though it was time. Time to give up the secrets it had kept safe for all that long while. Does that sound crazy to you?’

Agnes shook her head. ‘Not at all.’ She looked at the other woman, her turn to wonder how far she could trust her. ‘One time I lost my watch. I put it down and just turned around and it had disappeared. I couldn’t find it anywhere. My aunt says, “It’ll come back when it’s good and ready.” That’s what she believes. To stay lost or be found, it’s up to the thing itself to decide.’

‘I hadn’t heard that before, but I guess that’s what I think, too. That’s why, for me, the quilt is so central. Everything about it is meaningful. Its history, its discovery, everything. That’s why I wanted to make it the centre of the exhibition.’ Alison stopped and looked away. The enthusiasm drained from her voice as she added, ‘Except now I don’t think there will ever be an exhibition.’

‘Why not? You’ve got a whole heap of stuff.’

‘Oh, sure. And we’ve got more than you’ve seen here and on just about everyone. Except Tom Carter, the old guy who lived in the woods? We’ve got nothing on him – or Mary.’ She gave an ironic smile. ‘Right now, old Tom’s not the worry.’

Alison was putting a brave face on it, but disappointment, anguish even, was clear in her pale-blue eyes. Mary was at the centre of everything. Without her all this work, all this research, would come to nothing.

Agnes looked down. She was aware that ever since they’d met, Alison had done most of the talking. Agnes had said almost nothing. Alison was being careful around her, not putting any pressure on her, but she felt the weight of the other woman’s expectations. Now was the time to speak up.

‘May I see the actual diary?’

‘Oh, sure. It’s back in the Documents Room. Follow me.’

Minutes later Alison laid the sheets on the table, fanning them out in front of Agnes, angling the light so that it was easier for her to see.

‘Each individual sheet was conserved and then photographed. The facsimiles are easier to handle. The papers were folded to fit along the channels made by the quilting or into pockets created by the stitching.’ Alison pointed to lines of wear on the photographed pages. ‘Some were in fragments and had to be pieced together.’ She moved lightly over the endless hours of painstaking work this had entailed. ‘After that, the pages were photographed ready for transcription. The writing was a dream to work, so that turned out to be the easy part. When we were through doing that, we had to figure out some kind of sequence. The papers didn’t exactly come out in page order.’ Alison stopped, fearing she was losing Agnes. She was talking too much again, out of fear, out of nervousness, as a means of postponing disappointment. ‘Would you like to see the actual diary?’