Miss Seeton Quilts the Village

by Hamilton Crane

  The patchwork quilt had a table of its own, where it draped in full and colourful glory, admired by all. The loving hexagons, in medallion pattern, had been exquisitely hand-worked over paper shapes and many years by a Scottish great-aunt for Louise’s marriage-kist, the large box or chest which in England would be her bottom drawer. The two central medallions Aunt Christine had prudently left blank, for the addition of dates and initials when the time should come. This new addition she had deputed to her younger sister, Janet, whose fingers were not so stiff as hers now were.

  Aunt Janet was a noted needlewoman. Her own wedding gift was a detailed cross-stitch likeness of the bride’s long-dead mother’s family home, one of those small granite castles with stepped grey gables, circular turrets and narrow windows for which the Scots are famous.

  “It may not be a chateau,” said Aunt Janet, “but there’s history and breeding on both sides of your family, Louise, as you must never forget.”

  Louise had promised she wouldn’t. Nigel asked later if perhaps the picture might be a suitable adornment to the walls of their spare room. Louise had quietly smiled.

  Now she was admiring the photographs rather than any of the presents, including Aunt Janet’s cross-stitch, and Nigel could only hope for the best.

  “But these are splendid!” she cried. “Monsieur Jessyp—where is he? We must thank him at once for such a—a kind compliment. To have worked so hard!”

  “They look grand, don’t they? It must have taken ages to put ’em all out like that.” Nigel looked over people’s heads for the schoolmaster, but couldn’t see him in the crowd. He was glad Louise was genuinely pleased. Martin C. had gone to a lot of trouble, and Nigel didn’t like to disappoint a friend by ingratitude. He smiled on his wife for her delighted spontaneity, and in a spirit of reciprocity nodded at the cross-stitch castle.

  “And does it remind you of your history?”

  “Oh, poof!” Louise dismissed her heritage with an airy giggle. “For the spare room, maybe yes, but my history begins now, with you, Nigel, here in my new home. Of course...” Again she contemplated the photographs. “As to history, does not this arrangement have something of the tapestry of Bayeux? The story of one historic day, in pictures.”

  “Hmm...” Nigel was not only modest, he was still looking for the schoolmaster. “Oh—there he is. We’ll squeeze through the ravening hordes,” and he took her by the hand to lead the way.

  “Well!” said Mrs. Henderson. “Well, I really don’t know.”

  “As if we haven’t history of our own,” protested Mrs. Spice.

  “She’s foreign, don’t forget,” said Mrs. Skinner, grudgingly feeling that Mrs. Henderson had expressed what everyone thought.

  “She’s young,” said Mrs. Welsted, the draper’s wife. Mrs. Welsted and her daughter Margery had studied the patchwork quilt and the cross-stitch picture closely, and with envy. They wondered how long it must have all taken—far longer than Mr. Jessyp and his drawing-pins, that was for sure. “Still...Bayeux Tapestry...that’s another matter altogether.”

  “Gloating,” said Mrs. Henderson. “Or so I should call it, with her father a count and most likely descended straight from one of them knights of the Conker.”

  Nobody spoke. Among the general hubbub, this remarkable silence went unremarked.

  “The Frogs burnt the whole of Plummergen to ashes, and tumbled the castle to ruins,” Mrs. Spice reminded everyone at last.

  “And much later than the Battle of Hastings,” said Mrs. Skinner.

  “But nowhere near as bad as the Danes,” said Mrs. Henderson quickly.

  “When Murreystone never come to help,” said Mrs. Spice darkly. To this day, Plummergen cannot forget the Viking invasion of AD 892 and still bears a grudge, ignoring the fact that against two hundred and fifty longships and several thousand beweaponed warriors the men of a neighbouring village that was far smaller could have offered very little in the way of practical assistance.

  “And Queen Anne arriving in her barge to drink a glass of water from the well,” said Mrs. Skinner. “You’re right, Mrs. Spice. We’ve history of our own, sure as eggs.”

  And again nobody spoke as they contemplated the array of presents on the tables, and Mr. Jessyp’s photos round the walls.

  Next morning, breakfast at Rytham Hall was a thoughtful and unprecedented affair. Nigel sat in his usual place, Louise beside him. Sir George at the end of the table cast longing glances in the direction of Farmers Weekly, but could in deference to his daughter-in-law’s presence not bring himself to read it. He ate eggs and bacon in an unhappy silence, and kept rearranging the salt and pepper pieces in front of him.

  Lady Colveden offered coffee. Louise smiled, and said she was growing accustomed to tea, of which as an Englishwoman she must learn to drink as much as she could, as often as possible.

  Lady Colveden looked sharply at her. So she had overheard...she’d hoped the accent would have dulled Louise’s comprehension. She took the bull by the horns.

  “They meant nothing personal towards you, my dear,” she said. “Honestly, it isn’t anything to do with your being French so much as—well, the village is rather proud of its history. Just because we’ve never exactly been the size of a town...Why, some of the families go back as far as Domesday.”

  “Come off it, Mother,” said Nigel.

  “Well, back to the start of the parish register. Four centuries, at least—and you’ve only got to look at the names on the tombstones. Not that I believe there ever was a castle here,” she added. “Dr. Braxted from Brettenden Museum told me all about earthwork ramparts when she was digging up our Roman temple a few years ago.”

  “Even more history,” said Nigel cheerfully. He and his mother then told his wife how an unexpected Second World War grenade had blown itself up, revealing traces of a long-buried mosaic and a hoard of Romano-British silverware.

  “We’ll pop across to Brettenden one afternoon and I’ll show you.” It had been agreed that for the first few weeks Nigel’s hours on the farm should be flexible. Sightseeing, and the paying of courtesy calls, must take priority before the clocks changed and the nights began to draw in. “Is that okay with you, Dad?”

  “What’s that? Oh, yes,” said the baronet, collecting his thoughts as he crunched toast. Farmers Weekly would have to wait; nothing to be done about it. It meant he’d be out of doors so much the sooner, he supposed. More time to catch up and give the boy less to worry about. With resolution he pushed back his chair. “My dear,” he said to Louise, and bowed, and was gone.

  “Poor George.” Lady Colveden smiled at her husband’s hurrying back. “Don’t worry, Louise, he was no different when Julia was first married. I can’t remember how long it took him to relax with Toby around, but he did in the end, honestly.”

  “As honest as Louise being French?” Nigel grinned reassuringly at his bride. “Don’t worry, Louise. They’ll get used to it—but they really love a good moan and if there’s nothing legitimate, so to speak, they’ll invent something.”

  “Nigel.” But his mother’s protest was faint.

  “Oh, this does not trouble me, Belle-Mère,” Louise assured her mother-in-law. “I understand. It is with much the same spirit that we in France...moan, yes? of Albion Perfide. This is no more than custom, such moaning. In the same way les Anglais they call us Frogs, because of history.”

  “Napoleon,” said Lady Colveden. “Not that he came here any more than Hitler did, thank goodness.”

  “The Royal Military Canal wouldn’t have stopped either of the blighters,” said Nigel the realist. “A few strong planks, Bailey bridges or what have you, and they’d have been over in a flash.”

  “But the canal wasn’t just to stop him,” said his mother. “Or even delay him, as of course it would have done.” Nigel smiled, but said nothing. “Either of them. It was for gun emplacements, and transport—guns, and munitions, and food supplies and—oh, everything armies need. They’d have marched along the Military Road i
n double-quick time with horses pulling barges, and sentries on the alert.”

  “Well, thank goodness we’ll never know,” said Nigel. “As you said.”

  “Mm.” She looked at Louise. “But you do seem to have started something, my dear. Everyone’s been talking about it. Phyllis Armitage phoned last night to tell me I’d be roped in—as will you, because you started it—and Molly Treeves, that’s the vicar’s sister who keeps house for him, is getting up a committee. If I didn’t dislike sewing so much, I should say it might be rather fun.”

  Nigel spluttered at the thought of his mother sewing anything beyond a button, but his wife was all polite interest.

  “What is it I started into which I am to be roped? Will it indeed be fun?”

  “Plummergen,” said Lady Colveden, “wants its own Bayeux Tapestry!”

  Chapter Four

  NIGEL CHOKED. “And they want you to make it? Shouldn’t you finish that fire-screen first?”

  “Really, Nigel.” His exasperated mother smiled at his wife. “A silly practical joke your husband played on me one Christmas. No, of course not. Just one panel of sewing, and Louise can help, unless she embroiders or does cross-stitch or patchwork as beautifully as her aunts and would like to make her own.”

  Louise looked startled, smiled nervously, and shook her head.

  “Then we’ll suffer together and encourage each other,” said Lady Colveden. “They’re saying a map of the village, or something historical. I suppose some sort of picture of the Hall, seeing how we’ve been here for ages and so has it.”

  “Two birds with one stone,” gurgled Nigel. They both ignored him.

  “Appliqué,” said Louise, half to herself. “The stitching for the edges so that it does not unravel, as with blankets or buttonholes—this I can do, a little. And also with paper. One traces shapes from a photograph, and cuts pieces of cloth in colours to match...”

  Lady Colveden brightened. “That’s how they made the Overlord Embroidery, Miss Armitage said.” Explanations of the commemorative needlework in honour of D-Day then followed. “Longer than Bayeux—which Phyllis says isn’t a tapestry, because it isn’t woven, it’s embroidered, only different—but we haven’t the time for anything so elaborate as either. Phyllis said it took twenty women five years to complete the Overlord.”

  “If seven maids with seven mops—” began Nigel.

  “I hope,” said his mother, “it won’t take half a year for the builders to finish at Summerset Cottage. I’d forgotten you could be living there soon. Of course you’d prefer to have your own home in the tapestry—or embroidery, or quilt or whatever they call it—rather than work twice as hard to help make ours too. But before you move in you could give me lessons—”

  Nigel laughed. “Mother! When did builders ever complete a job on time? And never, ever before. There’s weeks, probably months, of work ahead to bring that place into the twentieth century.”

  Her ladyship sighed. “It did sound bad, when your father had the surveyors’ report. It’s not that the house is exactly falling down—”

  “—apart from the leaking roof,” interposed Nigel, “and the damp getting into the plaster, and the plumbing pretty much the original Tudor, and the kitchen even older—”

  “Nigel. Pay no attention, Louise, it’s mid-to-late Victorian—certainly not Tudor, even if the house itself is. You know—King Henry VIII?” Louise nodded. “And I agree it’s sadly neglected. George tries to be a conscientious landlord, but when the tenants were paying only a peppercorn rent and it was a gentlemen’s agreement anyway...” More explanations. “And he’s rather shy in some ways. You may have noticed.” Louise smiled. “Once their father was dead he didn’t care for visiting them and left it to me, and of course they paid no attention to what I said, even when they let me inside, which they haven’t done for years.”

  “Three far from fair maidens, and all mad as hatters,” said Nigel. “That’s what he used to call them when he thought we couldn’t hear. When Julia and I were kids we thought they must be the witches in Macbeth—three weird sisters, you see.”

  Lady Colveden seized on his final word. “You can’t see much of a house when you’re kept on the doorstep. If I’d been the sort of person who left visiting cards that’s what I’d have done—” again Nigel choked “—but your father seemed to feel someone should go there and try to keep an eye on things, so I did the best I could...”

  There had been three sisters: Hilda, Gertrude, and Griselda Saxon. Their widowed father, the colonel, bought Rytham Hall during the agricultural slump of the 1920s, convinced he could make it pay. He was mistaken. Had he listened to even half-expert advice, had he been able to keep his temper, he might have done better; but Colonel Saxon always thought he had the right of it, always pulled rank, and imbued his daughters with the same spirit. None of the girls ever married: nobody they met came up to their high standards. While for historic reasons Plummergen has never had a resident squire, the Hall has been where the absentee Lords of the Manor tended to house their bailiffs, and for centuries the village has looked there for civic leadership.

  The colonel sub-let parts of the farm, but kept interfering. Not a single lease was renewed by a single tenant. The colonel’s blood pressure began to trouble him. During the war the Hall was requisitioned, for purposes of which even thirty years later nobody knew any details—or if (like Sir George) they possibly did, they said nothing. Colonel Saxon, dispossessed of his home, most of his servants rushing to join the armed forces or take other patriotic employment, took his daughters to live in Summerset Cottage. The misnamed cottage—a small half-timbered house—was part of the Rytham Hall Estate, situated towards the end of a lane near the church so obscure that, driving south down The Street, it could easily be missed and usually was. The Saxons grew more aloof and exclusive as the war progressed. On D-Day the colonel had a seizure. On VE Day he had a stroke, after which nobody saw him about the village again. His daughters likewise began to disappear from public view. When Sir George Colveden—newly demobbed, eager to turn his six-years’ exhausted sword into a productive ploughshare—became the first post-war tenant of Rytham Hall, the colonel was persuaded to an outright sale, given that the purchaser was another military man and one, moreover, who outranked him.

  As Lady Colveden explained to Louise, only a nominal sum was paid in rent by the Saxons. It was the security of a secluded home the family craved. When the colonel died of apoplexy (Plummergen attributing his death to blood pressure and bad temper) Sir George agreed to keep the same arrangement for the orphaned daughters as he had for their father. Thus, over the years, as nobody saw them, and the two married servants who stayed with them throughout had mostly shopped in Brettenden, the three weird sisters faded into village oblivion. What was the fun in even the most mischievous of speculation when it could never be possible to find out what the truth—however dull—might be?

  Speculation in Plummergen centred on the modern 1970s rather than the 1940s, historic and worthy of stitchcraft immortality as the latter period undoubtedly was.

  “...near as a touch ran into Bert’s van,” Mrs. Skinner was telling the post office. “What would we have done if they’d hit him and set the van on fire?”

  “All our letters and parcels gone up in smoke,” said Mrs. Scillicough, whose triplets—to village amazement—had survived another year and were soon to have a birthday.

  “And Bert along with them,” said Mrs. Henderson reproachfully. A general chorus was quick to sympathise with the popular postman’s narrow escape.

  “Driving on the wrong side of the road,” enlarged Mrs. Newport. “Coming down from Mrs. Venning’s place, not paying proper attention.”

  “The driver got out to apologise,” said Mrs. Scillicough, who with her sister had witnessed the near miss at the end of the council house road. “Course, being foreign he didn’t say much, but he bowed, and smiled, and said he was sorry.”

  Mrs. Newport nodded. “We yelled at them, but it
was all so quick and they couldn’t hear—air conditioning or summat, I suppose. That big black Bentley—it must of cost a lot. Mrs. Venning could fare worse, for tenants.”

  “She’ll be needing somebody who can pay her fees for that nursing home,” agreed Mrs. Skinner. “Switzerland’s expensive if anywhere is.”

  “She’s not writing any more, but those books of hers still seem to sell,” said Mrs. Henderson. “Always more kiddies coming along to read about Jack the Rabbit.” She looked at Mrs. Newport, who seemed to be putting on a little weight around the middle.

  “Authors don’t make that much money, do they?” said Mrs. Newport, twirling the circular stand on which such volumes as Master Metaphysics in 30 Minutes were displayed. Master Needlecraft and its patchwork, cross-stitch, quilting and embroidery companions in recent days had become bestsellers. Mr. Stillman was reordering. “I mean—they can’t, can they? Or they wouldn’t need to keep writing.”

  The bell above the door tinkled as someone—some two—came in.

  “People go on buying the books, even when the author’s dead,” said Mrs. Skinner.

  “Somebody dead?” Miss Nuttel and Mrs. Blaine bustled into the conversation. “Surely not Bert? There was an accident, you know, but we haven’t seen an ambulance.”

  “Yet,” Miss Nuttel amended. “Nearest hospital’s a few miles away, though. Takes time. Start ringing the bell as they come nearer.”

  “But we’ve heard nothing,” said Mrs. Blaine, “beyond the squeal of brakes, and people shouting—” she and Miss Nuttel had listened hard, long, and hopefully “—and of course we don’t like to interfere.” This remark had everyone agape. “So we didn’t go to look and risk getting in everyone’s way, and maybe doing quite the wrong thing. Neither of us knows any first aid, and then poor Eric...”

  “Blood,” muttered Miss Nuttel. “Can’t say I care for it.”

  “What we did see,” persisted Mrs. Blaine, “was the red of the post office van all tangled up with that huge Rolls or whatever it is those people at Mrs. Venning’s drive. Much too big for the lanes around here, of course.” The fact that The Street is remarkably wide for the size of its village was conveniently ignored. “If they’re planning to stay here long they ought to shop on foot, or catch the bus like everyone else.”