A Song Twice Over (47 page)

Certainly Mr Uriah Colclough thought so, her presence behind him at the altar affecting him so profoundly that he had to be asked twice to give his sister away. Mr Ben Braithwaite evidently thought so too – more than one person remarked on it – if the fierce glances he kept darting at her through the orange plumage of his wife's outrageous hat were anything to go by. And Mr Adolphus Moon, that dapper, amiable little dandy, so liberal with all those fortunes his family had made in West Indies sugar and spice, seemed far more than willing, that bright, clear morning, to share all he possessed with Linnet had not the slight inconvenience of a wife prevented him.

That inconvenient wife herself, Mrs Marie Moon, wore a dress of heavy cream lace threaded with brown velvet ribbon, a brown hat like a highwayman's with a cream feather and a topaz buckle. And, since –
naturally
– she could not be invited to the wedding, she spent the morning in the back room of Cara's shop drinking gin and talking to Odette of love, mainly as it concerned her relationship with Christie Goldsborough, the man she shared – although only, these days, from time to time – with Odette's daughter, and whose cruelty she declared to be of a most rare and exquisite variety.

‘One constantly looks beneath it for signs of remorse and finds none,' she told Odette whose understanding of love was entirely different. ‘It is the fascination of having a purring tiger in one's hands. It is the fascination of giving everything, madame – everything and then twice as much again – with no hope of reward.'

‘It is the fascination of being a damn fool,' said Cara from the doorway, returning from the wedding service in a stunning confection of black and white striped satin and a tall black hat with a white feather curled around the brim.

But Marie, who adored everybody past a certain level of the gin bottle, smiled at her fondly.

‘Ah – but you are not in love with him, Cara.'

‘Neither are you. It is only passion.'

‘
Only
–' Marie raised a quizzical eyebrow, a quizzical jewelled hand and laughed, very merrily. ‘Oh my dear – my very dear –
only
passion. Sometimes I ask myself – I wonder – what you are missing.'

Cara shrugged, entirely undismayed. ‘I am not a lady of leisure like you, Marie, with all the time in the world to play your games. I can't afford your passion.'

Nor love either. Nor anything else, in the hectic months to follow, which could distract her from the task of following through her triumph at the Colclough wedding, when Frizingley's ladies, struck by her transformation of Rachel Colclough from a droopy nun to a delicately swaying water-lily, came flocking – at last – to purchase a similar magic, a new impression, a comforting illusion.

Mrs Magda Braithwaite, still basking in the outrageous glory of her orange stripes and feathers, appeared in the shop the next morning with a list of social engagements at which, knowing herself to be a plain woman married to a handsome husband, she wished to attract attention. Christmas was on the horizon, involving her not only in the seasonal balls in Frizingley's Assembly Rooms at the ‘better end'of Market Square, but in visits to the far more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Bradford where her German cousins gave musical entertainments graced by international concert performers and where such things as cut and style and
originality
were soon noticed. Could Miss Adeane be
very
original? Black lace over orange satin with a Spanish mantilla, gold silk damask with silver embroidery as delicate as the veins of a leaf, a double-skirted carriage dress in black and yellow tartan and black velvet, a claret-coloured velvet cape with a grey fur hem and hood; an Elizabethan extravaganza to wear at her Bavarian uncle's fancy-dress dance, a French fathingale with drum ruffles and an authentic stomacher with black Spanish embroidery studded with ruby beads and gold threads, if Miss Adeane could manage it?

Miss Adeane believed she could manage very well.

Mrs Ethel Lord came the same morning in search of a velvet evening gown which might show off her pearls as well as the new ‘dove grey' Miss Adeane had made for the wedding, indulging herself, at the same time, by ordering a watered silk in pale ice-blue and a delicate silver gauze, both far too young for her as she wryly admitted but perfectly in keeping with the mood of extravagance which overcame her from time to time, whenever her husband's behaviour gave her cause to suspect him of ‘getting up to no good'.

‘He has done
something
I shouldn't like,' she told Cara, lovingly fingering her pearls. ‘Or why has he given me these? And since it is my birthday next month – what do you think?'

‘An emerald would be nice,' said Cara, bringing out an apple green brocade, ‘set as a pendant on a heavy gold chain, so that, with a dress of this colour, with the neck cut just so …?'

Mrs Lord ordered the green brocade, a green plaid carriage-dress, a green velvet pelisse and, having run through Cara's stock of greens, a fawn silk – because she liked the look of it – and a matching shawl with a coffee-coloured fringe.

Mrs Covington-Pym, who would not condescend to enter a fitting room, ordered – or perhaps commanded – a riding-habit in dark blue with a white silk waistcoat and a ball gown in ruby velvet, requiring one side-seam to be left open so that her maid might stitch the garments upon her whenever she wore them, thus avoiding even the suspicion of a wrinkle. The Larks, with their hunt ball in mind, descended in a high-pitched flock to ‘honour'Miss Adeane with their custom, in exchange for which, and for the undoubted advantages to Miss Adeane in having her handiwork displayed in their historic home and parkland, they would expect a certain discount.

‘I am sure we can come to some arrangement,' murmured Cara very pleasantly, aware not only that Lady Lark was no Mrs Maria Colclough when it came to arithmetic, but that she had a great many rural, North Yorkshire sisters and cousins who, being obliged to travel
somewhere
to a dressmaker, might just as well come to Frizingley.

Mrs Amabel Dallam and Mrs Gemma Gage ordered their entire winter wardrobes, the mother in sweet-pea shades of gauze and taffeta, the daughter in amber velvets, cinnamon and coffee browns, her manner warm if just a little absent, her body unusually passive and supple although, as Cara skilfully pinned and pleated, she could detect no telltale signs of the possible childbearing which Frizingley still supposed had given rise to the rich, dreaming quality to be detected, now and then, in Gemma's smile.

Mrs Marie Moon bought everything which took her fancy, wore it once or twice and then gave it away to the village girls of Far Flatley, thus increasing her husband's reputation for generosity and her own for the criminal extravagance with which – it was generally held – she abused it. Certain gentlemen of the town and of the surrounding squirearchy also began to call, usually at a discreet hour of the early morning when Miss Adeane could safely be consulted alone about the purchase of silk shawls and lace-topped gloves, feathered or painted fans, perfumes in heavy glass bottles, a whole froth of
little
, expensive, pretty things which were not always seen, afterwards, in the hands or around the shoulders of the lady one might have supposed.

Strange and often sophisticated faces started to put in an appearance, elegantly dressed women filling the shop with the rustling of scented skirts and unfamiliar voices, who turned out to be Tannenbaums from Bradford; ladies with double-barrelled names from the North Riding who saw no reason why Miss Adeane could not ‘run up a couple of dresses by tomorrow morning'to be taken home after visiting the Larks; a few rather more exotic creatures, ‘artistic acquaintances'of the Moons from London, doing
their
bit to enlarge the glorious reputation of Adolphus Moon by choosing a whole excitement of frills and fripperies and charging them to him.

Mr Moon came himself with his timid daughter to buy her one plain gown, one simple bonnet, one not entirely Cashmere shawl – since she was still growing – and, at the same time, to mention very discreetly to Miss Adeane that should she care to offer a selection of evening dresses to Miss Linnet Gage at a special price he would be more than glad – without Miss Gage being aware of it, of course – to pay the difference.

‘You see, Miss Adeane, one can only admire a girl of breeding like that one, don't you know, making the best of things – putting a brave face on it all – as she does. A Bartram-Hynde on her father's side, without a penny of her own. Terribly sad when you think of what a name like that
ought
to entitle her to. So if she should take a fancy to this spangled gauze, for instance, then – well – if you could do her proud, eh?'

‘Certainly, sir,' murmured Cara, with the result that Linnet Gage acquired a dress of starry white tulle for the Far Flatley Hunt Ball while Mrs Marie Moon – from whom her husband appeared to keep no secrets – had Cara design her a gown of the same foamy gauze only more of it, the same spangles only larger and finer which – since
naturally
she could not be invited to the ball – she wore the next morning for driving about the village delivering hampers of roast chicken and game pies and a rare selection of her husband's vintage wines to pensioned-off Lark and Covington-Pym servants who – their pensions being very small – did not care a fig for her notoriety.

‘You are quite mad, you know,' Cara told her when, exhibiting the shadow of another black eye beneath another spotted net veil, she brought the dress back for repairs to the hem which, in those country lanes, had been dragged rather considerably through the mire.

‘Then take advantage of me, Cara – as everybody does. Miss Linnet is sure to get another new dress for my foolishness. And my husband is sure to make it up to everybody else – for the embarrassment I have caused, that is – by giving that costume ball he has been threatening them with. Which means you will have dozens of eager ladies to dress as Marie Antoinette and Good Queen Bess and the Spanish Infanta – and Miss Linnet herself as Artemis the Maiden Huntress or the Virgin Mary. Do you feel up to it?'

She did. It was what she had prayed for. A full order book. Her shop bursting at its seams, day in, day out, with women eager to order more. Her workroom throbbing and humming like an agitated hive of bees. And she closed her mind, that autumn and winter, to everything but the need to fill those orders not only on time but
splendidly
, to give value and service and to do just a little more, on each and every occasion, than had been expected, so that those women from London and Bradford and the North Riding would remember and Frizingley's women would forget – fully and forever – the dismal reign of Miss Ernestine Baker.

She placed blinkers on either side of her mind, therefore, drew a deep breath, gritted her teeth and plunged into the work in hand like a swimmer breasting a whirlpool, acquiring, as the hectic weeks went by, three separate faces. The calm, courteous Miss Adeane of the showroom and fitting rooms in her black and scarlet taffeta for whom nothing was too much trouble, who pinned and tacked and chatted, served tea and biscuits and discussed the requirements of one's figure and colouring with all the time in the world, it seemed, at her polished fingertips. A face rarely seen by the women in her workroom to whom she appeared as a sharp-eyed, briskly-spoken demon of energy, driving them on when their own energies faltered, requiring neither sleep nor sustenance herself, it seemed to them, allowing them to cut no corners, scrutinizing every piece of work as it was done and handing back anything which did not pass muster to be unpicked and started afresh as calmly as if the Hunt Ball were a month away, not the day after tomorrow, and Christmas not even in sight. And then the private face, seen only by her dog who never deigned to notice her as, having worked her women fifteen hours, seventeen hours, twenty hours sometimes at a stretch, she forced herself, through the remainder of a painful night, to do what even she could not ask of them, to put her account books in order, to redesign the complicated boning of Magda Braithwaite's Elizabethan dress, to sew with her own hands the fine seam which an exhausted Madge Percy, or even Odette sometimes, had abandoned in tears.

And if her hands were slower than theirs her mind was quicker, her nature infinitely more determined. She would not fail. No one should have cause to complain of her or anything upon which she had put her signature. And when her women had worn themselves out she would carry on. Nothing must be less than perfect. Nothing must be late. Towards Christmas she lay mattresses on her workroom floor and organized her seamstresses in shifts, sleeping or working. She served them port wine and red meat to keep them going, purchased extra lamps and candles for their comfort, dried their tears which, more often than not, she had caused herself, praised them and promised them – should her will be most meticulously done – a bonus.

She employed a decent, elderly man and a respectable-looking young one to make deliveries in her pale blue, gold-lettered boxes. She ransacked Leeds and Bradford for fancy goods, wrinkling her nose at what they offered and driving a hard bargain, encouraging them to send to Manchester and Liverpool for anything that was unusual, exotic, which might be labelled as exclusive to Miss Adeane of Frizingley. She made contact with a dealer in Whitby jet and South Sea coral and various semi-precious stones, rose quartz, agate, moonstones, tourmaline, and, by suggesting to certain ladies that ‘art objects'in these substances were exactly what they had been searching for for years, managed to supply them to everybody's satisfaction. And when Christie Goldsborough required her attendance she gave it, sitting cross-legged as a tailor afterwards on his sumptuous bed, talking to him of prices and profit margins and how much easier her life would be if only he would evict her next-door neighbour, that feckless grocer, and lease his premises to her.