Thread and Gone

by Lea Wait

  Mary shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve been here a long time. The men in my family were sea captains.” She hesitated. “I assumed we came from England. Or Scotland. A lot of the original families around here came from the British Isles. I never heard my folks say they were from anywhere else.”

  “Would anything in your house give us a clue? An old Bible with family records in it? Diaries? Ships’ logs?” Ruth leaned forward to get a closer look at the embroidery. “Old documents might hide clues about where your family came from. And where they acquired this.”

  Mary looked embarrassed. “I’ve found a lot of old books and papers. One old leather hymnal was cool, but I didn’t recognize any of the hymns. A few ships’ logs might be mixed in with the rest of the papers. My father had a stack of old papers in his desk, and there’s a trunk in the attic full of leather books and loose papers. A lot are old schoolbooks. I didn’t look at them closely. The papers were hard to read; many had been nibbled by mice. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in old ledgers and textbooks.” She glanced at Rob. “I’ve been trying to find any china or furniture or scrimshaw or pictures in the house that might be worth selling. My mom once told me the captains brought gifts home for their wives after they’d sailed to Europe and the Caribbean and Asia.” She shook her head. “Mom and Dad died about two years ago in a plane crash. I never thought to ask them any more about family history. I wish I had.”

  “I’m sorry about your parents,” I put in. Maybe that was why Mary was going to sell her home. She was closing that part of her life and moving on.

  I silently hoped she was making the right decision. Mama had died when I was ten, and I’d never had a father. But, thank goodness, I’d still had Gram. And now I had our house. It hadn’t been important to me when I was eighteen. Now I understood it was part of me, of my heritage. A part of my past I wasn’t ready to discard.

  “Don’t throw any of those old books and papers away,” Sarah cautioned. “They might be important to you or your children in the future. Or they might help identify things like this embroidery. If you don’t want them, you could donate them to the Haven Harbor Historical Society for safekeeping.”

  Sarah nodded slowly and moved back a step. “I have so many chests and boxes and drawers and wardrobes to go through. I don’t have time to go through every piece of paper.”

  “I told her we should get a Dumpster,” Rob put in.

  Sarah winced. “It sounds as though you’ve taken on a major job, Mary. If you’d like help sorting through everything, I’d be happy to volunteer.”

  Mary nodded. “I’d like that. I don’t know what’s valuable or what’s important to keep. A lot of things are old.” She wrinkled her nose. “Some smell old. But so far I haven’t thrown anything away. I’ve been sorting through the stuff and putting it in cartons in the living room or barn. Like, cartons for glass and china, and cartons for linens. And a couple for the old books and papers. I guess I need to look at the papers more closely.”

  “A lot of old houses along the coast used to be full of souvenirs of places Maine ships sailed. My ancestors were captains, too,” I added. I didn’t mention that many descendants of earlier Mainers had sold those things or given them away. Maine was full of antiques dealers and auction houses that had benefited from families who’d discarded those “old things,” valuable and not valuable, and replaced them with modern equivalents. Not to speak of the treasures that had been unknowingly tossed into Dumpsters.

  “So you think the embroidery is old?” asked Mary, getting back to her reason for being in my dining room.

  Sarah shook her head. “I’m not sure. But even if it’s a reproduction, it’s certainly not twentieth century.”

  “A reproduction of what?” I asked.

  Sarah hesitated. “I’ve been reading about Mary, Queen of Scots. This needlepoint looks remarkably like the stitching she did while she was being held in England.”

  “A queen did it? Then it’s worth a lot of money, right?” asked Rob, grinning and clapping Mary on the shoulder. “We were right to come here.”

  “I don’t know if Queen Mary did it,” Sarah cautioned. “Her only known works are in museums in Scotland and England. But it might be from that period. We’ll have to look at both the letter and the embroidery very carefully. We’d also have to establish provenance.”

  A queen’s embroidery? Very unlikely. Why had Sarah even mentioned that possibility? It was cruel to get Mary’s hopes up.

  “What’s provenance?” asked Mary, moving slightly away from Rob and keeping her eyes focused on Sarah and the piece of needlepoint.

  “Provenance is the tracing of the history of the antique. Proving who owned it, and when. In general, the more important the owners have been, the more important the piece is.” Sarah looked down at the leather case and its contents. “Age is easier to establish if we know who owned the antique in the past, and how it passed from one person to another. This letter might provide clues. Other papers in your house would help us. Most important, assuming the embroidery isn’t American, we’ll need to figure out how it ended up in a Maine home.”

  “How would we do that?” said Mary. “I don’t know where it came from, or when. Or who put it in my attic.”

  “Angie and I could help you try to figure it out,” said Sarah. “That’s part of what we do at Mainely Needlepoint.”

  Sarah didn’t volunteer that so far we’d only taken on a few jobs of that sort. Usually we created new custom needlepoint for high-end stores or decorators. We’d restored several pieces of vintage embroidery, and with the help of a lot of reference books, we’d helped a woman from Castine identify three samplers she’d bought at an auction. But those samplers had all been from nineteenth-century New England. I suspected identifying this embroidery would be a lot harder.

  The history of needlepoint was complicated. I’d been studying books about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century needle crafts. I never thought we’d be asked about a piece of embroidery earlier than that. But Sarah, who was more fascinated with European history than I was, had been reading about earlier stitching. Thank goodness, I thought, as I listened to her talking to Mary.

  We might be able to guess at an approximate date for the embroidery. But could we go further and establish provenance? It seemed a long shot.

  “If you’d like us to take this on as a project, we’d be happy to find out as much as we can about it,” Sarah was continuing. “You’d have to trust us with the packet and its contents for a little while, while we do the research.”

  “And we can’t promise we’ll learn much,” I added.

  Mary looked reluctant. “I thought the stitching was pretty. Rob’s mom was the one who said I should have it checked out. Then Ethan said you folks were experts on needlework. Will you need to keep it very long?”

  “If it’s valuable, how can we trust you to keep it safe?” Rob asked. “What would keep you from selling it and saying you’d lost it?”

  Maybe, having a state trooper for a brother, Rob’d heard too much about crime scenes. Or he just wasn’t very trusting. This needlework had been hidden in an attic for decades—maybe a couple of hundred years—and he was worried about Sarah and me losing it?

  I swallowed my anger. He might not have meant to insult us. “If the embroidery and the case and letter were in a safe, would you feel more comfortable?”

  “I guess so,” said Mary hesitantly.

  “I’ll write up a note saying you’ve entrusted us with the embroidery. We’ll all sign as witnesses. Then tomorrow morning I’ll take the embroidery to my grandmother’s lawyer, Lenore Pendleton.” I looked from Mary to Rob and back. “Do either of you know her?”

  “Her office is here in Haven Harbor, right?” Rob asked hesitantly.

  “Right across from my house, on Pleasant Street,” volunteered Dave.

  “I know her,” Mary said, to my surprise. “She’s my lawyer, too. She helped me after my parents died. Helped fix it so I co
uld live with my friend Cos’s family after my parents died and not have to go into foster care.”

  Rob looked aggravated. Maybe he’d thought he knew everything about his fiancée.

  “I’m glad, Mary,” I said. “I’ll ask her to hold the packet and the embroidery and letter until we know for sure what they are.”

  Mary nodded. “I hope you can find out who it belonged to. It’s fun to imagine a woman sewing that hundreds of years ago. And it would be awesome if a queen made it!”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It would be. But we don’t know that. Don’t even tell anyone that’s a possibility until we figure it all out. We wouldn’t want to get people all excited and then find out we were wrong.”

  “We’ll do our best,” said Sarah, touching Mary’s arm. “And we’ll do it as quickly as we can.”

  “And if it’s worth a lot of money, then you could help us to sell it,” said Rob.

  “No,” said Mary, softly but firmly. “That embroidery must have been important to someone in my family, for it to have been hidden so long. We’ll see what Angie and Sarah find out about it. But it should stay in my family.”

  Chapter 3

  Up to the time of the War of the Roses English Embroidery was justly famous, but it then languished, and when the taste for it revived it was never again executed with the same amount of gorgeous simplicity, the patterns becoming too overloaded with ornament for true taste.

  —Sophia Frances Anne Caulfeild and Blanche C. Saward, The Dictionary of Needlework: An Encyclopedia of Artistic, Plain and Fancy Needlework, London, 1882

  I wrote a simple statement describing the letter and embroidery and packet, stating it belonged to Mary Clough, who’d asked Mainely Needlepoint to identify its age and origin. Mary and I signed and dated one copy for each of us, and then Rob, Dave, Sarah, and Ruth signed as witnesses.

  If the needlepoint did turn out to be valuable, I didn’t want anyone questioning who owned it, or what our responsibility for it was. I wasn’t worried about Mary. But Rob hadn’t hidden that he was more interested in money than in provenance or family history.

  By the time Rob and Mary left we didn’t have time to eat dessert before the fireworks started at nine. While Dave and I quickly piled the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, Sarah and Ruth examined the embroidery again.

  “It does look Elizabethan,” I heard Ruth say. “But I’m no expert. I didn’t want to say anything when those young folks were here. They were excited enough with your mentioning Mary Stuart.”

  Sarah nodded. “You’re right. I should have held my tongue. But the primitive bird would definitely fit the Elizabethan period. And two of the flowers are a primitive thistle and a rose.”

  Dave went in and peered over their shoulders. “Symbols of England and Scotland? That should help in identifying the work.”

  “Unless the person who did the embroidering just liked those flowers. We don’t know anything yet,” I put in. “But it would be exciting if it were four or five hundred years old.”

  “Exciting, for sure,” agreed Sarah.

  “But unlikely,” added Ruth. “Not many pieces of fabric or embroidery would be in as good condition if they were Elizabethan.”

  “Even if they were in a sealed packet?” I asked.

  “A packet sealed once,” agreed Dave. “When it was intact the wax would have protected it, kept the air and dampness out. But the seal had been broken. Who knows? It could have been broken two hundred years ago.”

  “Or ten years ago,” I said.

  Ruth turned her walker toward the front door. “Well, it’s a mystery to me. And fascinating. But nothing we’re going to solve tonight. Angie, your dinner was wonderful, but I’m feeling my age. Would you feel insulted if I asked to take a piece of your pie home with me? I’d hate to miss a piece of strawberry-rhubarb. The arthritis in my hands keeps me from doing much baking these days, but I do love desserts. I can sit upstairs and see the overhead fireworks from my bedroom window while I’m indulging.”

  “I’ll drive you home,” said Dave. “But only if Angie’ll give me a piece of pie, too.”

  “I’ll fix you each a piece to go,” I promised, opening the pantry door to find heavy paper plates. “I can’t eat a whole pie. How about you, Sarah?”

  “I’d still like to see the fireworks,” said Sarah. “And then come back here later for pie?”

  “Good. Because I’d like to go down to the waterfront. I haven’t seen Haven Harbor fireworks since I was in high school.”

  I cut generous slices of pie and wrapped them for Dave and Ruth.

  “I’ll walk out with you and carry the pie to your car,” suggested Sarah.

  Dave nodded agreement as he helped Ruth slowly start for the front door.

  “I’ll put the embroidery away while you’re doing that,” I agreed.

  “Thank you again for the supper. It was delicious. I haven’t had a traditional New England Fourth supper in years,” Ruth said as she and Dave left.

  I watched as he helped her and her walker get down the three steps from my porch to the walk. Then I went to get the embroidery.

  It was beautifully crafted, although the outline of the bird used as a pattern was still visible and some silver threads were broken. Could it be as old as Ruth and Sarah wondered?

  I tucked the packet and letter with the embroidery into one of the bureau drawers in Gram’s front hall. The drawer next to the one where I’d hidden my gun.

  No one would break into the house on the Fourth of July and steal a piece of embroidery.

  Many Haven Harbor residents left their doors unlocked during winter months. Most families had known their neighbors for years. Burglaries were rare. But this time of year the town was filled with tourists. Doors were locked more often, just in case. The majority of people from away were good folks, and their credit cards were critical to Haven Harbor’s economy. But “better safe than sorry,” as Gram would say.

  And I’d promised to keep the packet and its contents safe.

  “Ready to head down to the waterfront?” I grabbed my sweater from a chair in the living room and pulled it on. Maine days were beginning to warm up. This evening the temperature would probably be in the fifties, with chilly sea breezes.

  Sarah nodded, and we started down the hill toward the harbor.

  Most Haven Harbor stores, including Sarah’s, were on Main Street. A few were on Wharf Street, the parallel street that ran along the working waterfront. Light was fading. Stores normally were closed by this time of night. But not on the Fourth of July.

  The fireworks display was a time to attract tourists (and local folks) to restaurants and gift shops. Tonight almost every store was open, from the hardware store to the patisserie to the bookstore. A table outside one of the gift shops was piled with “Haven Harbor, Maine” sweatshirts, hoping people from away would realize being comfortable on a July evening in Maine would require more warmth than their shorts and T-shirts supplied. One enterprising young man had set up a stand on the way down to the town pier to sell mosquito repellant.

  Not a bad idea. I remembered fighting off swarms of mosquitoes while watching fireworks years ago. Tonight, though, the stiff sea breeze should keep biting creatures away.

  On how many Fourth of Julys had I walked the distance from our house to the waterfront to see the fireworks? Some years, when she hadn’t been waitressing, Mama and I had gone together. After she’d disappeared I’d been with Gram, or with one or another of my friends. The last few years I’d been here I’d been working at the lobsterman’s co-op on the pier, steaming lobsters for summer folks and glancing up at the fireworks over my head.

  On days like this one, memories of growing up in Haven Harbor haunted me. Other days, the memories were good ones. Good and bad times were all mixed up in my head.

  I glanced into the Harbor Haunts Café as Sarah and I passed. “Want to stop for a drink after the fireworks?” I suggested.

  “And miss your strawberry-rhubarb pie?” as
ked Sarah.

  “I can bring you a piece tomorrow morning,” I assured her. “I have to take the needlepoint to Lenore Pendleton’s office anyway.”

  “Pie for breakfast sounds good,” she agreed. “One of my favorite Maine customs. Sure, we could stop at Harbor Haunts on our way back. But it’ll probably be crowded. And we each already had several glasses of wine with dinner.”

  Several glasses of wine? I hadn’t noticed.

  Crowds already filled the streets that connected Main Street to Wharf Street, and then to the piers. “Let’s go to the beach. We should have a good view from there,” I suggested, raising my voice so Sarah could hear me as we wove in and out of vacationing and local families, young couples blissfully unaware of blocking the sidewalks, and older couples letting the world pass by.

  Sarah nodded and we turned right, toward Pocket Cove Beach, the small rocky beach between the piers on the waterfront and the lighthouse. Mama had always taken me there to see the fireworks.

  We weren’t the only ones heading in that direction.

  When I was little the annual display was set off from one of the Three Sisters, the small uninhabited islands that sheltered Haven Harbor from the sea. One year someone—certainly not the harbormaster—decided they should be launched from a barge in the harbor itself. The coast guard hadn’t been thrilled with that idea. Nor were the people who’d hoped to have a good view of the display from their boats and, instead, were showered by falling embers.

  In those days fireworks were only set off by professionals. Now anyone could buy fireworks. I suspected the Haven Harbor Hospital was prepared for burned fingers tonight. I hoped nothing worse would happen.

  But I wasn’t worried enough to miss the show.

  “I wish Patrick were here,” Sarah said a bit wistfully as we squeezed our way through the throng to find a good viewing spot near the far end of the beach. Families had been there for hours, staking their claims with blankets and beach chairs and coolers of food and beer or soda. We found a small space on the rocks to sit near the western end of the beach, where it curved toward the lighthouse.