‘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?’
‘Yeah, I would. Very much.’
The pages were kept in individual files, each one cased in a plastic wallet to protect paper that had darkened with age and was crumbling at the folds and margins, as brittle and fragile as unrolled papyrus.
Alison took out the pocket labelled Page 1.
The words were closely packed but not crowded, they looked orderly on the page. The writing was a remarkably uncluttered cursive italic, elegantly executed and surprisingly easy to read. It could have been modern. Only the fading ink gave it away as belonging to a different time. The letters were small but evenly formed. The pen strokes were firm and cleanly curved. Mary had nice handwriting, no wonder Elias Cornwell wanted her to scribe for him. Apart from the occasional restrained flourish, there was little of the elaborate looping that Agnes had expected to see.
Agnes read to the bottom and then scanned back to the top again. She leaned to look closer. The page inside the envelope was torn across the corner, so it actually began:
a witch. Or so some would call me ...
It was time for her to speak.
‘Our history is very different from yours,’ she looked up at Alison. ‘Or maybe I should say our way of recording it is different. We don’t have so much of this.’ She indicated the pages in front of her and the other boxed materials stacked around. ‘Very little was written down until recently. But there are stories.
‘Each teller tells the story as though it is within their own memory. My aunt used to tell me stories that sounded like they happened to her when she was a young girl, but they were told to her by her grandmother, who had heard them from her grandmother, and so on. That’s how the family history accumulates.’
‘And one of these stories could be about Mary?’ Alison hardly dared to breathe.
‘I think so. It’s hard to work out dates, because it’s not as though time is stretched in a long line like so.’ Agnes threw her arms wide. ‘It’s more as if it’s all of a piece. Past, present, future going round like so.’ She brought her hands together and made a hoop, touching thumb to thumb, forefinger to forefinger. ‘As if the past is out there somewhere and events are still happening, but in a place that we can’t access.’
‘So what is this story? The one you think might be about Mary?’
‘It is about a woman who came from some place else and was adopted into the tribe. She had two sons, one dark, one fair with yellow hair. One son became a renowned warrior, a chief. The other?’ Agnes frowned. ‘I guess it doesn’t say what happened to him. Anyway, some said she came to the people from Rahwehras, the Thunderer, because she came out of a storm, and she came at a time when the people were sick. She helped to heal them and stayed with them, a powerful medicine woman.’ Agnes frowned again. ‘There’s some more, I think, but I can’t remember it.’
‘What makes you think she was Mary?’
‘There is a mystery surrounding where she came from, and some of the legends say she had eyes that were grey like mine, the colour of smoke. The eyes were the first thing I read that made me think there could be a connection. But there’s other stuff too, a whole bunch of clues. My aunt has this box. It’s about so big.’ Agnes linked her hands again to describe a circle. ‘It’s made of bark and decorated with embroidery. I used to study it when I was a kid. It has little knots of white flowers with a line of red strawberries creeping around the edges and in the lid is sweetgrass. Gives a real good scent when you open it – not that I was supposed to open it.’
‘How old was it?’ Alison asked.
‘Hard to tell, but it had been made to contain medicine objects. Even Sim – he’s my cousin and older, kind of like my big brother; he always took the lead when we did daring stuff – even he said not to touch it. But you know kids, right?’ For nearly the first time she smiled. It was like sudden sun on a cloudy day. Alison was dazzled. ‘The more you tell them not to, the more they’re going to want to do it.’
‘So you opened it?’ Alison smiled in reply.
Agnes grinned. ‘You bet.
I remember it had this little toggle thing that was tough to undo. My hands were trembling so much I nearly spilled the stuff.’
‘So what was inside?’
‘Not a whole lot, not as far as I was concerned. I was real disappointed. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for, gold coins maybe, or diamond rings. What I found was medicine stuff, a bear’s claw necklace, wampum strings and a ratty old neck piece; but there was also a ring that did look like gold and a locket black with tarnish. In one corner of the box there was a little curled-up bit of paper, worn kind of soft and furry so it looked like doe skin. I didn’t pay it much attention once I’d checked it out for secret writing, but now I’ve been thinking. It could be a corner. That corner.’ She pointed down at the plastic pocket on the table. ‘The one that’s missing.’
‘Was there any lettering on it?’
‘Like I said –’ Agnes shook her head – ‘no secrets.’
‘I could see if there is.’ Alison switched on the magnifying lamp. ‘Read it, too. There’s all kinds of stuff I could do. Match the tear. Match the paper. If we could do that, we could prove she was one and the same person!’
‘I think I’m right.’ Agnes’s dark brows drew together. ‘But I’ve only ever seen these things once. I’d have to see them again to be sure.’
‘Maybe you could bring them here?’
Agnes shook her head. ‘The box and its contents are highly sacred. I doubt my aunt would allow them out of her hands.’