Elm Creek Quilts [07] The Sugar Camp Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini

Author:Jennifer Chiaverini
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Mystery, Adult, Historical
ISBN: 9780743260190
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

SNOW FELL OVERNIGHT, BUT the next morning dawned clear and brisk. Dorothea set out after completing her chores, bundled warmly against the cold. Her breath ghosted through her muffler in faint white puffs as she broke a trail to the sugar camp, the quilt under one arm. She and her father had begun studying it as soon as Mr. Wright had departed the day before, and they had stayed up late into the evening, uncertain how to decipher the patchwork symbols. Lorena had searched through Uncle Jacob’s belongings for a journal, letters, anything that might explain the meaning of the quilt’s design. Mr. Wright had warned them this would be a wasted effort, for like any good stationmaster, Uncle Jacob knew better than to put his secrets in writing. Some might consider even the wordless symbols of the Sugar Camp Quilt too great a risk. Sure enough, Lorena’s search turned up nothing. Even the sketches Uncle Jacob had made for Dorothea were gone.

Eventually the Grangers concluded that the designs had so many potential meanings the quilt was, perhaps intentionally, incomprehensible to anyone who could not see their actual counterparts. Since Dorothea was fairly confident she understood the first clue, she decided to proceed and hope she recognized the other landmarks when she encountered them.

She committed the patterns to memory and draped the quilt over the bench as she had seen it the night Uncle Jacob went missing. On the day of his burial, she had found it on the ground and had assumed she had knocked it down in her haste, but gazing at it now, she wondered if the runaway named Sam had done so. Perhaps her father was right and he had let the horse lead him there before continuing north. Perhaps her father was right about Sam in other matters.

Dorothea shook off the thought and focused on the five unusual blocks Uncle Jacob had sketched. The star in the center of the quilt, with its longest point directed to the upper left corner, had seemed off-kilter and strange to her before, but now that she understood the quilt’s true purpose, the design resembled a compass rose pointing to the northwest. Since the Four Brothers were depicted in the upper left corner of the outermost border of Delectable Mountains blocks, and since the real mountains lay northwest of the farm, Dorothea surmised that the fugitives were supposed to bear in that direction.

She studied the quilt one last time and left it behind in the sugar camp, regretting the necessity. She would have liked to bring it along in case she had neglected an important detail in the patterns, but she could not afford to be seen using the quilt as a map. Uncle Jacob’s compass was a reassuring weight in her pocket as she made her way through the maple grove, her footsteps muffled by the thin layer of snow covering the fallen leaves. Her father had insisted she take the compass, though she had argued she probably would not need one, since the fugitives did not and had to be able to follow the quilt regardless.

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