Page 103 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
‘Honey told me you’d seen the updates I’ve been adding to the catalogue,’ I said to Viv. ‘Would you like to come and see the dress I’m working on at the moment? I was in the middle of it when the furniture arrived and it’s an interesting one.’
‘If I won’t be in your way?’
‘Not at all! In fact, if you don’t mind, you could write the notes for me while I’m examining it, so I don’t have to keep breaking off.’
‘Of course – I’d love to.’
‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ said Honey. ‘I need some air and exercise while I work out a plot twist, so I’ll take Rory somewhere we can both stretch our legs.’
Rory clocked the one important word, ‘walk’, and, giving a deep bark, ran ahead of her back to the house.
‘Sometimes Honey makes me think of Emily Brontë,’ said Viv thoughtfully, but I didn’t tell her that she herself always brought Charlotte Brontë into my mind!
33
Roman Spring
Back in the workroom, I took the dustsheet off the dress and folded it away.
‘There we are – dress number four, in Honey’s rather random system, and quite a lavish and spectacular one, too! The bride and groom appear to have wanted to make a big show of their wedding, since it was a controversial one.’
‘I think I remember the story, with the elderly business owner marrying the young daughter of his servants?’ said Viv.
‘Yes, that’s the one.’
‘I had a preconceived idea about the marriage, before I read the copies of the family memoir and their letters to each other, and discovered I was totally wrong.’
‘Yes, me too,’ I agreed. ‘She’d been a clever child and he’d taken a fatherly interest in her – had her educated above her station and then she’d become a sort of secretary to him, if they called them that then. A lot of women were entering that kind of field at the time,’ I said. ‘But it’s evident she had a real business head and became more and more involved in the business. Then, when his health began to fail, he wanted her to be able to take over the firm, since his relatives were only interested inhis money. He thought the safest way to ensure her position was to marry her, but it was a marriage in name only, though a very successful partnership, with shared interests.’
‘In their own way, I think it sounds as if they had fun,’ said Viv.
‘The family memoir says she sincerely mourned him and it was not for some time that she remarried – to the son of the junior partner in the firm, another kindred spirit! It’s the descendants of that second marriage who donated the dress. They sent a photo of a painting of her wearing her wedding dress and a sapphire necklace her husband gave her.’
‘I saw that and it was spectacular!’
‘With those sapphires and the dress, she was certainly wearing lots of blue, like in the rhyme,’ I said, ‘and possibly something borrowed, if the necklace was a family heirloom.’
I handed Viv the pen and notebook, and gave her a quick update on the notes I’d already made about the fabric and construction, before undoing the dress and dictating more notes about the inside of the bodice. Viv was very useful when it came to taking close-up photos, too, holding back the fabric for me.
‘It is very lovely, in an over-the-top kind of way,’ Viv said when I’d finished and was neatly packing the dress with tissue paper before wrapping it up again.
‘It is, and makes a good example of a marriage that was very happy, despite the way it looked to others. It’s been stored very well, too: no damage by moths or anything else. I haven’t looked at the veil and shoes yet. We could do that now.’
‘OK,’ she said, and I unfolded the gauzy layers of the veil first.
‘A long simple veil, made to hang behind,’ I dictated as she scribbled. ‘The silver beading matches that on the dress … and the edges are ribbon trimmed …’
I moved on to the shoes, which were made high to the ankle, with a button closure and low heel.
‘Now, these are unusual for the time because, like the dress, they’re high fashion in the American style, not the English.’
‘They look more like ankle boots,’ she suggested. ‘And not very comfortable!’
‘No, they’re so narrow and pointed, aren’t they? But they were specially made in the same mix of silk satin and faille as the dress,’ I pointed out. ‘And embellished with yet more silver beading.’
‘No expense spared,’ Viv said, writing all that down as I took a few last snaps before packing everything away in the box and restoring it to the rack in the storeroom.
I looked at my watch as I came back and was surprised at the time.
