Free Bitter Harvest by Sheila Connolly Page A

Violet Cox on the family record. I wonder where she fit? Maybe a cousin? I don’t think it would have been her married name, because it says she was, what, twelve when she stitched this?”
    “Most of these were done by young girls or women,” Seth said amiably. “Needlework was considered an important skill among young ladies.”
    Meg looked away from the sampler to stare at him. “Now why on earth do you know that?”
    “I once wrote a college paper on early New England attitudes toward death, and mourning samplers came into it. Death was a lot harder to ignore in those days. People were vulnerable to a lot of diseases, and there were always accidents, fires. There’s a reason why all those cemeteries were close to town—they saw a lot of traffic.”
    Meg shivered, and not from the cold. “I wonder why this is here in this house, and why it was forgotten? And, look, the parents died close together, not long after the last of those children.”
    “Could have been an epidemic. There was a lot of diphtheria around in those days. Typhoid. Even measles could be deadly.”
    So much death, Meg thought. Did she really want to know what happened? Not exactly, but she did want to know what had brought this piece of cloth and the history attached to it to her house. She knew who had been living in it in 1800. Was the girl a relative? Had the family in the sampler lived—and died—around here? Or was the sampler something that someone had once picked up at a yard sale, and then tossed into the closet and forgotten?
    “You’ve gone quiet,” Seth said.
    Meg smiled ruefully. “I’m just wondering how much I want to know about a family that had such rotten luck—all the kids dying like that, and then the parents. Mostly I’m curious about what the piece is doing here. Well, there’s not much I can do about it right now. If we had power I could go online and at least find out if there was anyone with that surname in Granford at the right time. But we’re stuck back in the nineteenth century, and it’s a little too snowy to walk over to the town hall and ask to see the records. So maybe we should just get back to work? It’ll be dark soon, and it may take us a while to put dinner together, what with having to cook it over an open fire.”
    “You might want to talk to Gail Selden, once you can get to town, and I’ll see if any of the thanatologists I consulted when I was in college can shed any light.”
    “The what?”
    “Thanatologists. People who study death, and how culture copes with it.”
    “Seth Chapin, you are a font of information, even if it is a little creepy. Okay, back upstairs for now. Oh, first let me take care of this before Lolly decides it would be nice to sharpen her claws on it.” Meg found a clean towel and rolled the sampler into it, setting the bundle on the sideboard, where she hoped it would be safe. It would be a pity for it to be destroyed after it had waited so long.
    They finished exploring the front bedroom, which since it was on a corner and had two windows, still had enough light to see by. There were no more surprises, happy or otherwise.
    “The other front room?” Seth asked when they were done.
    “My room? I went over that pretty closely when my parents were here, remember? I don’t suppose anything else will turn up, and it’s in pretty good shape. So now what?”
    “I say we call it a day. It’ll be dark soon.”
    “Sounds good to me.”
    Downstairs the light was fading fast. Max followed them around, but Lolly opted to stay as close as possible to the dwindling fire. The snow was still piling up against the windows. “Is this ever going to end? What’s the longest Massachusetts storm on record?”
    “That I can’t tell you, but it should blow itself out soon.”
    “How long will it take to clear the roads?”
    “What, you’re in a hurry to get rid of me?”
    “No, nothing like that. It just feels so odd, to have no options. You think the goats are all