Page 132 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
It was slow work and I took a mid-morning break when Simon rang and suggested I take the original roses from the dress over to his workshop, to see if we could match them, though he’d make new ones if not. Luckily, he did have some white velvet and silk roses ready-made that were just right: a large one for the skirt and several smaller for the front of the veil.
I carried my booty back and temporarily abandoned the belt in order to add a bit of sparkle to the centres of the roses with crystals and pearls, before attaching them.
I sewed the largest rose on to the skirt where the top layer of tulle was hitched up at one side. Adding the small ones to thefront of the veil took a lot longer. Still, when it was done, the effect was pretty and made the dress look much more special.
I’d been so absorbed in what I was doing that the time had flown by and I jumped when my phone rang again.
This time it was Thom, tentatively asking if I’d had any lunch and, if not, whether I would like to go and have some with him.
I looked at the clock and saw it was already after one, so no wonder it sounded as if a ravening wolf pack was prowling round my stomach!
I accepted gratefully. ‘But I want to check on Golightly first, because I haven’t seen or heard him since breakfast.’
‘No need, he’s here with Jester. Neither of them liked the fine rain much.’
I hadn’t even noticed it had started to rain!
Thom had made tuna mayo sandwiches, which both Jester and Golightly expressed interest in, and I’d brought chocolate finger biscuits as my contribution to the feast.
Thom asked me how the blinging-up was going, before showing me the face of a Pinocchio puppet he was carving.
‘We usually have one or two marionettes for the most popular fairy-tale characters in stock, but this is an order for the larger size and with the vertical type of control bar.’
Then he stirred his coffee with another melting finger biscuit and told me he’d sourced a big enough cat flap on the internet to let Jester squeeze in and out of the workshop and would be installing that after lunch, before he started work again.
‘And I got an ordinary-sized one for my cottage door from the pet shop.’
‘That’s a lot of expense to go to when he’s not even your cat!’ I said. ‘You don’t have to let him come into your cottage, or in here.’
‘I don’t,’ Thom said. ‘He just seems to materialize out of nowhere. I often only realize he’s there when he demands to be let out again.’
‘Golightly has an insidious way of making everyone do exactly what he wants – and I’m starting to thinkweare justhispuppets!’
41
The Bartered Bride
The following morning I put the finishing touches to the belt and then pinned back the uppermost layer of tulle on the skirt and spent several happy hours gluing Hotfix crystals randomly over the layer beneath, so that they would lend a subtle sparkle to the dress as it moved.
Quite often in theatrical costume making you just want the instant effect, and historical accuracy isn’t important.
There would now be quite a fairy-tale sparkle about the dress when it was standing in its corner by the window.
I left the gown on the dummy, but covered with a cotton dustsheet. I’d havelovedto have put it straight out on the mannequin, so it was a pity I’d have to wait till after the TV reveal scenes had been filmed the following day.
Even after I’d packed away everything I’d used, there would still have been time to make a start on the next dress, but by then I could hear Golightly exercising his claws on his scratch board and thought he deserved a bit of company and attention before I went to the book group, otherwise I wouldn’t put it past him to call Catline to complain about my neglect.
*
The TV crew had stayed somewhere local on Tuesday night, so they could arrive quite early. I wouldn’t have time to do more than refresh my memory about the next dress on the list, before their arrival.
This one, Dress 10, would be time-consuming anyway, since it was not so much a dress as an ensemble, dating back to the 1840s.
The bride seems to have been a bargaining chip, used to seal the alliance of a businessman who had seen that steam power was going to be the way forward, and a more socially important family who wanted to come into the firm as partners. The plan was that the businessman’s daughter should live with the upper-class family and be launched into society. Then, at eighteen, she would be married to the son and heir, uniting money with class.
From the copies of some pages from a privately printed family memoir, it sounded as though the young couple bonded in their mutual resentment of this arrangement and eventually it turned into a love match. They were married for over fifty years and had several children.
The wedding portrait showed a young woman with a very determined air, whose handsome, amiable, young husband appeared to be gazing adoringly at her, as did a small spaniel at her feet.
