Stephanie Grace Whitson - [Quilt Chronicles] Read Free Page A

to hum softly. Finally, weariness took over. Rose relaxed, clutching Aunt Flora’s sleeve with one hand and the doll quilt Mama had made her with the other.

CHAPTER 2
    Early April 1880
Brownville, in Eastern Nebraska
    I an McKenna, whatever are you talkin’ about?!” Ellen laughed as she looked down the length of the new, cherrywood dining table to where her husband sat, waiting for her to answer his question. He had to be joking—didn’t he?
    “You’ll like it in Lincoln,” Ian said. “We’ll get Jack his own horse to ride from home to school. It’s less than three miles. In a few years, he can attend the university instead of going away. You can’t tell me you haven’t already started dreading his leaving home.”
    Blast those blue eyes, anyway. Using their only son to persuade her—even if it was true that she’d already started to complain at how fast Jack was growing and how he’d be leaving home in the blink of an eye. Ellen dreaded the day more than she’d let on. Something about that little grave off in Missouri made her unwilling to think of Jack growing up and leaving home. Ian was right. The idea of the university just a short ride away made the offer almost appealing.
    “There’s a new house,” he offered. “Two stories. Brick. Reminds me of Belle Rive a little. In fact, the ladies of Lincoln will likely envy you the parlor and the wide porch. We can screen it in.
    You’ll entertain in style.”
    “Belle Rive,” Ellen said, allowing just the slightest bit of the Southern drawl she had worked to eradicate back into her voice, “wasn’t in the shadow of high, stone walls sportin’ guard towers.” Ian just sat there, tugging on his mustache, waiting for her to acquiesce.
What would my parents say? How could I possibly write home and tell them Ian McKenna’s latest idea of providing for his family was hauling them to Lincoln, Nebraska, so he could be the warden at the state penitentiary?
    “Two years,” Ian said and extended two fingers. “If you hate it after two years, I’ll quit. As for living in the house across the road, give it six months, and if you hate that, we’ll get something in Lincoln—although it won’t be nearly as grand. And you’ll have to put up with an absentee husband now and then if I can’t make it home every night.”
    Taking a deep breath, Ellen pushed herself away from the table and stood up. She crossed the room to look out the windows at the freshly turned earth just outside. She had a lovely garden planned for that spot—as exact a copy of the garden at Belle Rive as Nebraska’s comparatively harsh climate would allow. Thinking on that garden brought back such memories.
    No one, least of all herself, had expected Ellen Sullivan of the Lexington Sullivans to marry someone she’d only known for a few weeks. Her family had not approved, not one little bit. When her father threatened to disown her “over that Yankee,” Ellen threatened to elope. On the last day of August in the year of our Lord 1861, sixteen-year-old Ellen Sullivan and her beau stood on the front steps of Ellen’s childhood home just outside Lexington, Kentucky, and promised to love and cherish one another until death.
    When, little more than a year later, Ellen’s husband donned his new blue uniform and left her on their farm in Missouri, Ellen refused to agree to her family’s pleas that she return home to Kentucky. Firm in her resolve to support President Abraham Lincoln’s Grand Army of the Republic and equally firm in her resolve to keep the vows she had made to follow Ian McKenna wherever he went, Ellen wrote home that death might take Ian from her, but nothing else would, least of all a little skirmish over a state’s right to secede from the United States.
    Death almost did separate Ian and Ellen, but not in the way the young wife feared. In 1864, it slithered into the McKenna’s bedchamber along with the moist breeze of a summer night while Ellen labored to give birth