Tiffany Girl (14 page)

Miss Jayne flushed.

“Mr. Wilder,” Mrs.
Dinwiddie hissed. Never, ever had she used that tone with him. “That is quite enough.”

He flexed his fists. “I’ll not have you becoming ill. She can jolly well wait until I’m done and the room has warmed or she can come back tomorrow.”

“She will be working tomorrow.”

“Then she can go straight to the de—”

“
Mr. Wilder.
” Another warning, this one fiercer than the last.

He cranked the stem with sharp turns until the gears came to the end of the wick carrier.

“He’s right,” Miss Jayne interjected into the yawning silence. “Quite right. I wasn’t thinking. I’ll wait.”

Finally. Some inkling of sense. Praise the saints that be. Maybe now she’d leave.

“Come and sit beside me, then, while we wait.” Mrs. Dinwiddie’s voice held great affection and not a little reassurance, as if Miss Jayne were the one who’d been wronged. Grabbing the wick with two fingers, he lifted it up and pulled it out of the carrier.

“No, no,” she said. “That’s all right. I’ll just do some warm-up sketches.” Her charcoal began to scrape along the pages of her sketchpad.

Mrs. Dinwiddie did not pick her sewing back up. A sure sign of her displeasure. With him. And it was all Miss Jayne’s fault. He and Mrs. Dinwiddie had been having a perfectly fine visit until she’d entered into their conversation, then actually shown up in the flesh.

Lining the cotton tails of the new wick onto either side of the wick tube, he held them in place with one hand, brought his pocketknife to his teeth, opened it, then used it to tuck the tails down inside the tank. As he worked the wick down, the hairs on the back of his neck began to rise. Somehow, someway, he knew he was being stared at. Not by Mrs. Dinwiddie, but by
her
.

He slanted a glance at her. She was drawing on her sketch
pad. She flicked her gaze to him and froze. He immediately returned his attention to what he was doing, refusing to look at her again. It took a little persuasion, but he finally slid the wick down until the adjuster made contact with the wick carrier.

He wiped his brow with his shoulder. The gears were meshed. By the time he leveled the burning surface, reassembled the tank, filled it with fuel, and installed it back into the heater, the extended silence in the room had caused the tension to rise to even greater heights.

“We’ll need to give it fifteen minutes to soak up the kerosene before I can light it,” he said, collecting the discarded wick and drop cloth.

“That will be fine.” Mrs. Dinwiddie’s voice was civil, but not warm. Nothing like it normally was.

He looked at her.

Her lips were pressed together, her eyes full of censure.

His chest tightened. Scooping up his mess, he scrambled to his feet, swept past Miss Jayne, and headed out back to dispose of it. It wasn’t until he returned to light the heater that he saw Miss Jayne’s sketch.

He pulled up short. A muscular man with broad shoulders and curling, untamed hair held a gallery in one hand, while he crammed a wick into it with the other, elbow out. The lines were quick, rough, and careless, yet he knew immediately what it was. Who it was.

She sat in the chair beside Mrs. Dinwiddie, both of them looking at him. They’d ceased speaking when he’d appeared. Had they been talking about him?

“Excuse me,” he mumbled, then lit the wick, closed the heater, returned the Vaseline to the dresser, and left, feeling angry, confused, and hurt. A hurt not unlike the one he’d felt many times before when he’d been shut inside his room at his grandparents’ house and stood in front of the bolted-down window, looking out at the world from behind a barrier as impenetrable as a solid brick wall.

CARTOON—PAPER PATTERN—COMPLETED WINDOW 
¹²

“Pressing down with her stylus, she outlined each individual color on a giant cartoon Grace de Luze had painted with watercolor.”

CHAPTER

16

M
r. Tiffany had been sequestered in Agnes Northrup’s office for almost forty-five minutes. Flossie glanced again at the woman’s door, wishing she could simply sit at the man’s feet and listen. Already she’d been able to apply what she’d learned from him to her painting techniques. If she could just shadow him, she’d be able to learn so much more. Especially since it was going to take her forever to save up enough money for tuition to the School of Applied Design, much longer than she’d originally thought.

She wondered what he and Miss Northrup were discussing. Was he critiquing her work? Miss Northrup had been with Mr. Tiffany since 1888 and was the manager before Mrs. Driscoll. Nan said the woman had hated it and complained it interfered with her designing. So Nan was to have taken her place. Then Mrs. Driscoll, who had worked for Mr. Tiffany before, swooped in and swiped the managerial position. Miss Northrup had become a full-time designer and been given her own personal office. Nan was given nothing—no promotion, no special working space, no title. She was simply a Tiffany Girl, just like the rest of them.

This morning Mrs. Driscoll had moved Flossie and Nan from the storeroom to the workshop with the rest of the girls. As much
as Flossie loved putting the glass away, it was a rather lonely affair. Out here, she not only enjoyed the camaraderie of the other girls, but she was able to see all the other tasks they performed.

Pressing down with her stylus, she outlined each individual color on a giant cartoon Grace de Luze—a designer who’d been with Tiffany for three years—had painted with watercolor. Finding a spot of rich blue, Flossie ran the point of her stylus around the edge of that single color. She was careful to exert a good deal of pressure on the stylus, for underneath the cartoon were two sheets of carbon transfer paper atop two sheets of heavy manila paper.

When she was finished, Mrs. Driscoll would pull back the cartoon. Underneath, on the manila sheets, would be a perfect outline of where each fragment of colored glass would eventually be placed. Before the two sheets of manila were separated, however, one of the other girls would number each individual section Flossie had delineated. Nan told her they would use those numbers over and over when putting the window together.

Stepping out of Miss Northrup’s office, Mr. Tiffany clapped his hands together. “How are my windows coming along, ladies?”

Flossie wondered if he changed into his fine clothes every time he wanted to visit the Women’s Department, for she’d never seen him looking anything less than the gentleman.

“What do we have here?” he asked, stepping up to watch two girls cut templates with three-bladed scissors.

They were cutting around carbon lines on manila paper that someone else had already traced and numbered. Their special scissors cut an eighth-of-an-inch border around each piece to compensate for the lead that would be soldered there. The glass cutter would eventually use the numbered pieces of paper as her templates.

“Wait a minute. What’s this?” He frowned. “Mrs. Driscoll, this looks like the western section of our
Adoration
window.”

Weaving between the tables, Mrs. Driscoll approached him at a sedate pace. “That’s exactly what it is. They’re cutting out the wreath the woman is holding.”

He pulled out his pocket watch and popped it open. “But, we’ve twelve windows to make before May. How can we still be cutting out templates for the first one?”

“The men’s tasks are new and unfamiliar. Our speed will improve with time.”

“But we don’t have time.”

“Nor can we afford careless errors because we are hurrying when we should be paying attention to detail.”

His lisp became pronounced. “Well, then, let’s give the ladies a little incentive, shall we?”

Mrs. Driscoll folded her hands in front of her. “What did you have in mind?”

“The two girls who do the best work, who complete their tasks quickly and without errors, and who never miss a day of work will be sent to the fair. By me.”

Flossie touched her fingers to her lips.

Mrs. Driscoll gave a small smile of approval. “That would be extremely generous of you, but even more than that, they would like to maintain their positions as Tiffany Girls even after the chapel is complete—even after the men return. My suggestion would be to award them permanent positions if they complete the windows in a timely manner.”

“All of them?” He widened his eyes.

“All of them.”

“Impossible.” He pursed his lips. “But I could probably keep two of them.”

“Two of them get to stay on and two go to the fair, then?”

A slow smile grew on his face. “I’d forgotten what a negotiator you are, Mrs. Driscoll. All right, then, two will remain in the Women’s Department permanently and two will go to the fair.”

The girls squealed with delight, clapping their hands and talking all at once. Flossie, however, had a stirring of unease. Certainly, she was thankful to Mrs. Driscoll for being their champion, but, at school, these girls had been her classmates. Now they would be her competition.

Flicking her fingernail and thumbnail against each other, she glanced about the studio. She wasn’t overly worried about Louise. Their instructor at school was in love with her and it wouldn’t surprise Flossie if a marriage proposal would soon be forthcoming. Theresa, a typewriter girl, had painted nude figures in Paris and done quite a good job of it. Though Flossie was the first to appreciate good art, the very idea of having a nude woman stand at the front of the room made her cheeks warm. Lulu had studied in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Elizabeth’s designs had been published in this year’s
The Art Amateur
.

Aggie, however, was more like Flossie. Neither of them had any distinguishing recommendations in the art world, but they were both hard workers, they both loved to learn, and they both loved to paint. At the beginning of the school year, they’d made a pact. One day their paintings would hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art right next to all those men’s.

Now, perhaps, they could make another pact. One day they would attend the World’s Columbian Exposition and they would become permanent additions to the Women’s Department of Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company.

She caught Aggie’s eye from across the room. The giant Swede gave her a conspiratorial wink and their pact was made.