Page 49 of The Vintage Dress Shop in Primrose Hill
Charles huffed in faux outrage. ‘Do I look like I go paintballing?’
Sophy leaned back against the worktop and shrugged. ‘You know what they say about hidden depths?’
‘We’re not going paintballing, but you will need to change into your fancy daytime outfit,’ Charles said and immediately Sophy was intrigued and also a little trepidatious. Knowing Charles, they could be going anywhere; or he could have plans to meet some of the many people that he was acquainted with.
Her nerves gave way to something else when she saw the appreciative look on Charles’s face as she clumped, rather inelegantly, down the stairs in her green brocade dress and silver wedges. She’d tried to do a fancy daytime make-up look too, which involved a lot of mascara and a lipstick that was a daring three shades deeper than her actual lips. For once, she’d left her hair loose, though there would be no driving with the top down.
‘You look enchanting,’ Charles said as Sophy did a clumsy twirl in the hall, and Sophy knew he was just being polite, his version of friendly, butit was very hard to be friendly with a man you were secretly crushing on. Especially when he was so far out of Sophy’s league, like Charles was Premier League and Sophy was EFL League Two and hoping not to be demoted.
‘Whatever!’ Sophy wondered why she’d even bothered with blusher when her cheeks were doing a good job without it. She’d also forgotten that she might need some fancy daytime outerwear, but her denim jacket would have to do.
‘God, woman, learn to take a compliment,’ Charles said, shaking his head as he ushered her out the front door.
‘I’m not wired that way,’ Sophy explained, though the way she tripped over her own wedged feet and would have gone sprawling if Charles hadn’t been there to grab hold of her explained it far better than she could.
Chapter Eighteen
Of course, Charles couldn’t simply tell Sophy where they were going, so she decided to just sit back in the Mercedes’ very comfortable passenger seat and enjoy the ride.
England in spring was so pretty and this part of England was prettier still. Sophy was a Londoner born and bred who could find beauty in the most prosaic of sights: the London Underground roundel, the sun glinting on the slightly murky waters of the Thames; there was even poetry in the brutalist architecture of Centrepoint as it loomed over the northern tip of Oxford Street.
But green fields studded with wild flowers, tiny lambs skipping on unsteady legs, twisty country lanes canopied by trees showing off their new green leaves and village after village of those buttery-stoned houses with thatched roofs was a different kind of beauty. A bucolic sort of beauty that Sophy could appreciate, especially when she was seeing it from the window of a car and didn’t have to be at one with nature, which was sure to lead to nothing good but the stench of manure, and mud. Sophy didn’t do mud. She did wonder, yet again, how she might fare on her grandparents’ sheep farm, but that would only be for a few weeks. Plus, she might well get to bottle-feed some lambs, so that was an added bonus.
Eventually the country lanes became even narrower and twistier, until they took a left onto a long drive bordered by lime trees, according to Charles. The drive seemed to go on for ever until it suddenly opened out onto a circular area in front of a large house.Not even a house. It was aDownton Abbeysort of stately home. Sophy’s fancy daytime wear didn’t seem quite fancy enough now.
Sophy eyed the ornate fountain and, beyond that, formal gardens that looked as if they’d been imported straight from the set of a Sunday-night period drama. If she looked hard enough, she might even see a young Colin Firth emerge from a lake, with a white flouncy shirt clinging damply to his chest.
‘What?’ she grunted when she realised that Charles was saying something to her. ‘Sorry, I was miles away. God, are these people friends of yours? Are they titled? Will I have to curtsey?’
Charles placed his cool hand on Sophy’s, which she’d clenched into a nervous fist. ‘We’re here for an estate sale. We’re not having afternoon tea with the local aristocracy.’
‘I’m very grateful for that,’ Sophy said as the car crunched over the gravel to the car park at the back of the house and, now that she wasn’t having fevered fantasies about a young Colin Firth and freaking out, she could see that there were actually large signs advertising an estate sale, though she wasn’t entirely sure what that was.
Once they were out of the car they followed more signs, which led them through a pair of huge French windows into a long, wood-panelled gallery, and Sophy quickly worked out that an estate sale was like a very posh jumble sale, one with catalogues and items with numbered tags hanging off them. This wasBargain Hunton steroids.
‘We’re not here for any of that,’ Charles said, hurrying Sophy past a series of portraits, which mostly consisted of stern-faced men and even more stern-faced women. ‘Besides, they sold off all the good paintings years ago to pay death duties.’
It went on and on. A heck of a lot of silver plate and cutlery. A gilt-heavy dinner service, which ran the entire length of a very, very long table.A pair of guns, though they looked so old, Sophy supposed that they were actually called muskets or blunderbusses or some such. Tapestries, their colours dimmed over the years. Eventually they came to a corner that had been allocated for clothes.
There was an entire rail of fur coats, which Sophy wanted nothing to do with. Also, some very droopy, long dresses yellowed with age.
‘Not for us,’ she said as firmly as she could, because she didn’t want to travel back in the car with them and she doubted that even Cress’s magic touch would be able to perform miracles.
Charles beamed. ‘The pupil has become the master. Yup, absolutely not for us.’ Then he went very still as he stared at another long table, this one full of large, flat garment boxes.
Sophy knew that Charles hadn’t come here to play when he reached into his pocket and pulled out two pairs of white gloves, like the ones Cress used when she was working on something very old or very delicate or very expensive, or more usually the whole trifecta.
The first item that Charles very gently uncovered, under layers of tissue paper that crumbled to dust, was a long dress, made of a beautiful plum velvet and chiffon, with a lace bodice and undersleeves.
Charles moaned in much the same way that Sophy did when she bit into a Twirl after a two-day self-imposed chocolate detox. But when Charles did it, it made Sophy a little light-headed with lust.
‘A Worth gown, late 1890s,’ he breathed. ‘Slightly torn at the neckline and the trim on the sleeves is a little damaged but on first sight, it’s in pretty good nick.’
It was a lovely dress. Even Sophy could see that. But… ‘For the shop?’
Charles shot her a look that was part indulgent, part exasperated. ‘For a museum, my darling.’ He looked over the heads of browsers, caught someone’s eye and nodded. ‘No wonder I’ve just spotted a curator from the costume department of the V&A and two people from Christie’s. Now, let’s see what else we can find.’
Although Sophy wouldn’t have minded lingering, Charles said they were on a clock and ignored anything that he dated later than 1920. There were still plenty of dresses, which he paused over, then rejected, although Sophy now recognised the names that he recited in much the same way that he’d recited the names of all those precious stones; like they were sonnets, like they were poetry.
