Sins

Rose Pickford exhaled a small sigh of relief as she opened the door and stepped into the familiar scented warmth of her aunt Amber’s Walton Street shop, with its smell of vanilla and roses–the scent blended especially for her aunt.

One day–or so her aunt had told her–Rose would not just be managing the exclusive Chelsea shop where the furnishing fabrics from her aunt’s Macclesfield silk mill were sold, she would also be in charge of advising clients on the most stylish ways to redecorate their homes.

One day.

Right now, though, she was simply a raw, newly qualified art student, working as little more than a general dogsbody for Ivor Hammond, one of London’s most prestigious interior designers.

‘Hello, Rose, we’re just about to have a cup of tea. Would you like one?’

Rose smiled gratefully. ‘Yes, please, Anna.’

Anna Polaski, who currently managed the shop, had
originally come to England with her musician husband, Paul, as refugees from Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. Anna was always very kind, and Rose suspected that she felt sorry for her–because she recognised that Rose, too, was, in a way, an ‘outsider’?

‘I hate January. It’s a horrid month, so cold and miserable,’ Rose said to Anna, as she pulled off the beautifully soft Italian leather gloves that had been a Christmas present from her aunt.

‘Pah, you call this cold? In Poland we have proper winters, with snow many feet deep,’ Anna told her. ‘We shall be having lunch soon,’ she added. ‘I have brought some homemade vegetable soup and you are welcome to join us.’

‘I’d love to,’ Rose replied, ‘but I can’t. I’ve got to be back by half-past one so that Piers can go out and measure up for a new commission.’

Piers Jeffries was Ivor’s senior assistant, a good-looking young man, who affected to like Rose and want to help her, but who at the same time seemed to have the knack of somehow working things so that whenever anything went wrong, she ended up being blamed. Piers might publicly sympathise with her and even take her side with their impatient and quick-tempered employer, but Rose suspected that privately he enjoyed her falls from grace.

‘I need to check the provenance of one of my great-uncle’s designs,’ Rose explained. ‘Ivor has a client who wants to use it and he’s enquired about its origins. The trouble is that he doesn’t know the name, he can only describe it.’

Anna gave a derisory snort. ‘And he thinks you’ll be able to find it in half an hour! Didn’t you remind him that we have over two hundred different designs available here from your great-uncle’s drawings?’

‘There’s a bit of a panic on. The client is impatient to get things moving, and Ivor has promised him the information this afternoon. Ivor doesn’t like it if we make things seem other than effortless. I think it’s one of the Greek frieze designs, so I’ll start with that book.’

‘You run upstairs then, and I’ll send Belinda up with a cup of tea for you.’

Whilst the ground floor of the Walton Street premises were used as a showroom, the pattern books were kept upstairs in the workroom, which was also used as an office.

Since her aunt kept meticulous record and pattern books, it didn’t take Rose very long to find the fabric for which she was searching. Decorated with an imposing Greek frieze border, the fabric came in four different colourways: a warm red, royal blue, dark green and a rich golden yellow. The border pattern came from an original frieze held in a London museum, which her great-uncle had sketched, the piece of stone frieze itself having been brought back from his Continental grand tour by the Earl of Carsworth in the 1780s, according to the notes with the samples.

After writing down this information Rose swallowed her now cold tea before making for the stairs.

Outside it was even colder than it had been earlier, with an east wind that knifed through her, despite the thick warmth of her navy-blue cashmere coat–a present
from her aunt when she had started her job–a coat that created ‘the right impression’, Amber had said.

The right impression
. Sadness shadowed Rose’s eyes as she flagged down a taxi. She would have to pay the fare herself, of course, but that would be better than risking being late back. What her aunt had not said, but what they both knew, was that with her physical inheritance from her mother, it would be all too easy for people to place her not as the niece of one of Cheshire’s richest women, a woman whose first husband had been the Duke of Lenchester and whose second was the local gentry, but instead as the daughter of a poor Chinese immigrant.

The truth was, of course, that her mother had not been anything as respectable as that.

‘Your mother was a whore, a prostitute who sold her body to men for money,’ her cousin Emerald had once taunted Rose.

Rose knew that Emerald had hoped to shock and hurt her but how could she when Rose had heard her late father saying the same thing so often in his drink-and drug-induced outbursts.

She was the reason he had had to turn to drink, to drown out the despair and misery of the life her existence had forced on him, her father had often told her. Her, the child he loathed and detested, and who looked just like her Chinese whore of a mother.

After his death, Rose had been terrified that she would be sent away–back to China, where Emerald had told her that their great-grandmother wanted her to be sent,
but thanks to her aunt she had been given a home beyond her wildest dreams.

Her aunt Amber and her husband, Jay, had been wonderfully kind and generous to her. She had been brought up at Denham Place, alongside her cousin Emerald, the product of Amber’s first marriage, Jay’s two daughters from his first marriage, Ella and Janey, and Amber and Jay’s twin girls. She had been sent to the same exclusive boarding school as Ella and Janey, and, like them, had gone to St Martins, the famous art and design college in London. She was made to feel just like one of the family–a blessed relief after her wretched early childhood, when her taking one step out of place had provoked her father into a rage–by everyone, that was, except Emerald. For some reason, she loathed Rose and even now, her barbed remarks were frequent and just as poisonous as ever.

Now Rose lived with Ella and Janey in a four-storey Chelsea house, Amber’s
pied-à-terre
during her bimonthly visits to London to oversee her interior design business.

Rose thought the world of her aunt. There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for her. Amber had protected her and supported her and, more than that, she had loved her too. So when Rose had realised how much it pleased her aunt that she enjoyed talking about interior design, Rose had determined to learn as much about that world as she could. That in turn had led to her aunt encouraging Rose to train as an interior designer so that one day she could take over the running of the business from Amber.