Page 87 of The Wedding Dress Repair Shop
If there had been anything borrowed or blue, it was not in the box.
I’d just arranged the dress over the slenderest of my dressmaker’s dummies so I could photograph it from all angles, when the office door clicked open and Honey appeared in my doorway, yawning.
‘Can I come in, or would I be disturbing you?’
‘No, come on in! I’ve almost finished examining and recording the details of your dress.’
‘So I see,’ she said, interestedly eyeing the dress on the dummy, with its pearly sheen and ominous stains. ‘You know, I haven’t really looked at it foryears. I had it hanging in my study for inspiration, while I was writing the first of my revenge thrillers in a white-hot rage, and I didn’t have it cleaned first. But dried blood never does really come out of silk, does it?’
‘It’s hard to get it out of anything, once it’s dried and set in,’ I agreed. ‘And … there’s quite a lot of it.’
‘I know! When my groom didn’t turn up at the church and I drove to the cottage where he was staying, there seemed to be bloodeverywhere. The best man was groaning on the bed with a head wound and there was a wet and bloody towel hanging off the side of the bed, so when I leaned over it, that’s how the dress came to be stained. I think my fiancé must have been trying to clean the head wound up, before he panicked and drove drunkenly off, instead,’ she added, matter-of-factly.
‘That would account for the paler stain up the front,’ I agreed. ‘I think I’ve heard that scalp wounds bleed a lot.’
‘They certainly do, and I suspect drinking huge amounts of alcohol makes it flow more freely, too. Anyway, the owner of the estate the cottage was on turned up just then. It must have looked a bit Lady Macbeth, with me leaning over the bloody bed, so he called the police. After that, it all got a bit farcical – though not as farcical as when the best man told me what the argument and fight had been about!’
She grinned crookedly and added tantalizingly, ‘But you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the full story.’
‘All right,’ I said, and turned back to the dummy. ‘It is – or was – a lovely dress, though.’
‘I know! At the time it seemed such a waste. However, as it turned out, it did provide inspiration and led to my becoming a major bestselling novelist, so it served a purpose, even if not the original one.’
She looked in the open box. ‘Is that my veil? The headband is quite pretty … and I had a bouquet of creamy yellow roses.’
She laughed suddenly. ‘I was staying at Pelican House for the wedding in a local church and Uncle Hugo was giving me away. When the groom didn’t turn up, I tossed the bouquet away – Viv caught it, though she was already married by then – and hared off back across the square in my wedding dress, jumped in my car and roared off to the cottage to look for him.’
‘What did everyone do when you’d gone?’ I asked curiously.
‘Oh, Uncle Hugo said that since the function room and a buffet was already laid on at the Sun in Splendour, they might as well all go and have a party, which they did. They were still at it when the police let me go and I got back. I was ready for a stiff drink by then.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said, fascinated.
She yawned again. ‘I was up writing till the early hours and I haven’t really got going yet. I’ll leave you to it. I’m expecting Arthur shortly, to look at the first attic gleanings, and I need some strong coffee before we do battle over the prices.’
When she’d gone, I completed my work on her accessories and, apart from one tiny tear to the edge of the veil, where it must have snagged on something, it was all ready for display. I thought I might as well mend that now, since it would only take a few minutes, and searched out the exact same shade of white silk thread as the veil. And, believe me, there are millions of shades of white, not just one!
Then I sat at the table, happily sewing minute fairy stitches into the delicate fabric.
Time flies when you are enjoying yourself and I was definitely ready for lunch by the time I’d finished.
I thought I might have to go and search for Golightly, but no. There he was, curled up in his favourite armchair. He only woke when he heard me in the kitchen.
*
After lunch, Golightly vanished into the great outdoors again and I mentally crossed everything and hoped he would confine his explorations to the courtyard, and also avoid what little traffic there was. The parking was private, but there were always delivery vans …
Golightly had answered the call of the wild and now it was time for me to respond to the call of the workroom. Next on my agenda was Amy Weston’s dress.
In Honey’s random way, she had allotted it the number 13: lucky for some, though not, it seemed, for Amy …
Her dress was on the rail in a zipped bag, and I took that and the box of accessories into the workroom before turning the computer on and scrolling down to her catalogue entry.
Dress 13
Amy Weston
The Bloody Bride
