However, she must work on something-piece more shapes she might use later, when her head was clear and she had longer stretches of time. Honor began threading needles. She had poked five threaded needles into her pin cushion when she felt Abigail’s eyes on her.
“What is thee doing?” Abigail demanded. “Why so many needles?”
“I get them ready so I do not have to stop each time I run out of thread,” Honor answered. Belle Mills had not been surprised by her needle threading, but Belle was a seamstress.
“Now isn’t that efficient,” Abigail said in a tone that suggested efficiency was not something to be aspired to.
Honor pinned together two green and brown hexagons already tacked to templates, and began a quick overhand stitch in white thread, her preferred color for sewing, whatever the color of the cloth. She paused at the end of the row to fit in another hexagon, run the thread under the cloth, and begin sewing, two sides now.
Abigail was staring again. “How does thee sew so fast?”
“I keep my thread short.” Honor had noticed that when Abigail threaded her needle she cut off thread as long as her arm.
Abigail picked up one of the rosettes Honor had already made. “Look at those stitches,” she declared, pulling at the seams. “They’re so even. I haven’t seen stitches that fine since I was a girl in Pennsylvania. One of our neighbors had a hand this good.” She crinkled its petals. “Is that paper in there?”
“Yes. Thee has not made patchwork using paper templates?”
“No.”
“In England we sew cloth around paper shapes to keep them accurate, otherwise they won’t fit when we sew them together to make the quilt. See?” Honor handed Abigail some paper hexagons.
“But then the comfort will crackle!”
“We take them out once we have sewn them all together.” Honor loved removing the paper templates from a finished piece, a design that had been stiff and formally held in place by paper growing soft and comfortable.
Abigail was peering at the paper templates. “Ten pound flour,” she read. “One cake rennet. I did not want… away from Dorch… will soon return…”
Honor froze. Even as Abigail read out the scraps of words, she knew it was in Samuel’s hand-a brief note telling her he was visiting relatives in Exeter and would be back in a week. The letter had seemed unimportant at the time, enough that Honor sacrificed it for use as templates. Now it carried more meaning, Exeter being where Samuel had met the woman he married.
Honor held out her sewing box so that Abigail could put the templates back. Abigail took her time, though, continuing to inspect the words on the scraps of paper while Honor waited. At last she dropped them in. “I prefer appliqué,” she said, smoothing out her square of red and green and white. “It makes a simple, pretty comfort.” Honor could see that her stitches were ragged, and of different lengths. It was no surprise that her sewing was so uneven, for to make even stitches the seamstress herself had to be steady. Abigail tended to hunch over her patchwork, her fingers and thread a snarl, and sew a few stitches before abandoning it to look down the road toward the houses near the general store, or to get up for a drink of water. Honor knew such restless sorts, even among Quakers, for she had taught several to sew in Bridport. She attributed her own fine sewing to the prolonged periods of silence at Meeting; these had made her thoughts level and her hand steady, which was reflected in her even stitching. But it seemed that silence did not have that effect on everyone’s sewing.
Honor did not try to teach Abigail, to adjust the way she held her needle or advise her to sit up straight and to use a thimble so she wouldn’t prick her fingers and get blood on the white cloth, or show her how to do a double back stitch instead of making a knot in the thread. It was enough to be able to sit with her and work side by side in a familiar rhythm Honor had known her whole life.
“Wait till the others see thy stitching,” Abigail remarked. “They’ll be asking thee to quilt for them at the next frolic.”
Slowly Honor began to meet other Faithwell residents. Passersby came up to be introduced when they were sitting on the front porch. Abigail took her to the farm west of town that sold milk and cheese, and she met the farmers as well as a few other customers. On the Fifth Day it was raining so hard Abigail declared she would not attend Meeting in such weather. So it was not until the First Day Meeting that Honor met the whole community.
Faithwell Meeting House consisted of a bright, square room with bare whitewashed walls and windows on all sides. It was about the size of Bridport’s, but for half the number of Members, so it did not have the crowded feel Honor knew from home. Benches on four sides faced inward, one of them reserved for Elders-the senior Members whom the community looked to for guidance. An unlit stove sat in the center, its pipe zigzagging up to a hole in the roof.
Honor had been looking forward to Meeting, for she had not attended one since Philadelphia and craved the sense of peace it normally brought. It always took some time for a Meeting to grow still and quiet, like a room where dust has been stirred up and must settle. People shifted in their seats to find comfortable positions, rustled and coughed, their physical restlessness reflecting their minds, still active with daily concerns. One by one, though, they set aside thoughts about business, or crops, or meals, or grievances, to focus on the Inner Light they knew to be the manifestation of God within. Though a Meeting started out quiet, the quality of the silence gradually changed so that there came a moment when the air itself seemed to gather and thicken. Though there was no outer sign of it, it became clear that collectively the Meeting was beginning to concentrate on something much deeper and more powerful. It was then that Honor sank down inside herself. When she found the place she sought, she could remain there for a long time, and see it too in the open faces of surrounding Friends.
Occasionally Friends felt moved to speak and give testimony, as if God were using them as a medium. They spoke thoughtfully, sometimes quoting passages from the Bible. Though anyone could speak if they wished to, Elders spoke more often than others. Honor had never spoken: the feeling she reached at Meeting was not something she could describe in words. Trying to would ruin it.
Yet, though Faithwell Meeting was similar in form to English Meetings, Honor found as she sat, still and silent, that she could not drain her mind. The space was different, the light and the air and the smell, and the many new faces. Then, too, there were the crickets and grasshoppers, and something Abigail called katydids, all noisier and more persistent than any insects Honor had heard in England. Their buzzing and droning and whining produced a wall of sound difficult to ignore.
All of these things were distractions. But Honor had been to unfamiliar Meetings before, in Exeter and Dorchester and Bristol, and she had managed to experience the same silence as at Bridport. At Faithwell, however, she was conscious of being in a place she would be expected to consider home, and because of that, she could not relax and let her mind go. When the silence began to deepen, Honor could not connect to that communal gathering and follow the others. Instead she found herself thinking about Grace’s last, terrible days; about Abigail, beside her, and Adam, across from them on the men’s bench, and the strained atmosphere in the house, and the looks that passed between them which she tried to ignore; of the black man hiding in Belle’s woodpile; of Belle’s jaundiced skin and surprising hats; of Donovan, pawing through her trunk and looking at her with light in his eyes. A few days after her arrival, he had ridden through Faithwell while she and Abigail were hanging out laundry, and had slowed and lifted his hat. Abigail had been horrified.