The Gown Read online

  “They might ask me to give notice. I do feel I must tell you. I will say that I don’t think it’s likely. The rent collector is friendly enough, and he’s used to me handing over the rent each week. As long as we keep the place neat as a pin and pay him like clockwork we’ll be fine.”

  “When you say ‘give notice,’ what does that mean?” she asked. “Would we be in trouble with the police?”

  “Heavens, no. No, it’s not the sort of thing you can get in trouble for. And I only mention it because there’s a chance of having to move if someone at the council ever got wind of Milly going to Canada. I mean, we kept it as quiet as we could. But you know how people talk.”

  Miriam did know.

  She would go to her grave without knowing the name of her betrayer. Had it been one of the other women in her lodgings? Someone at her work? Had Marie-Laure or Robert been tortured into giving them her name? She would never know for certain, never be able to look her enemy in the eye and force them to acknowledge what they had done. There would never be a trial to hold them accountable.

  Ann was waiting for her to answer. “Yes,” Miriam said. “People do talk,” and she smiled as if she were thinking of a harmless neighborhood gossip.

  “When would you like to move in? Milly’s room only needs a good dusting. And of course I’ll make up the bed with fresh sheets.”

  “I have already paid until the end of the week, and I do not think the concierge will give me back the money. So perhaps on Saturday I can bring my things?”

  “That sounds perfect. I can meet you at the station if you like.”

  “I do not have many things. You do not need to trouble yourself.”

  “Well, then. I guess that’s settled. Oh—I should have asked before. Would you like to stay on for supper? I haven’t much in the larder but I should be able to scrape together something edible.”

  “That is very kind, but I ought to return to my pension. There is a curfew and the concierge is diligent in enforcing it. But I will see you at work in the morning?”

  “Yes, of course. Do you know your way back to the station?”

  “I remember.”

  Miriam stood, ready to move to the front door, but Ann held out a staying hand. “Do you mind waiting for a moment? I forgot something outside. I won’t be long.”

  Outside? Ann had only been in the garden for a minute or two, and she hadn’t brought anything with—

  “Here you go,” Ann said. She held three of the peonies. “I’ll just pop them in a tin for you, with an inch or two of water to stop them from drying out. Don’t forget to top them up when you get home.”

  It was too much. “But those were the last of your peonies,” Miriam protested as Ann arranged the flowers in their homely container.

  “They’re calling for rain tomorrow—they’ll be flattened otherwise. And I’m glad for you to have them.”

  “They are beautiful,” Miriam said, her throat still tight with emotion. “I thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome. Until tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Until then. Bonsoir.”

  She stepped out the door, through the little gate, and began to walk down the street. She held the tin of peonies close to her chest and let the scent of them fill her nose. She walked through the gathering dusk, breathing in their magical scent, and with every step her heart grew lighter, gladder, more hopeful. She had made a new friend. She had found a new home.

  And tomorrow would be better than today.

  Chapter Nine

  Heather

  July 13, 2016

  It had been an awful day at work, and now her friends in editorial were insisting that everyone meet up for drinks on the patio at the new bar down the street. They’d been bugging Heather about it all afternoon, and normally she’d have gone, but today she just needed to escape.

  It wasn’t often that a magazine’s editor in chief canned a cover story, and though Richard kept insisting the piece was “stale-dated crap” and “not up to our editorial standards,” Heather wasn’t convinced. The story in question was a profile of the CEO of a controversial tech start-up; they’d hired a respected investigative reporter to write the thing, and at the time Heather had been annoyed that Richard hadn’t assigned it to her. Now she was just relieved.

  When word had leaked out that the piece made him look like a controlling, puerile, and misogynistic jerk, the CEO had freaked out. How he’d gained access to the story before publication was a problem—a big one, since Bay Street had always been known for its editorial independence in the face of corporate pressure.

  Another problem was Richard’s dissolving spine. He’d pushed for the profile, he’d approached the writer, and he’d been fine with the angle the story had taken. So why the change? Heather could only assume he’d run into some pushback from their publisher. Normally no one there seemed to care what went on at Bay Street, as long as they turned some kind of nominal profit. But this had all her spider senses tingling, and the last thing she felt like enduring after such a gross day was an evening of gossip, anxiety, and overpriced cocktails.

  She told her friends she had a headache, and she waved off their pleas to join them, and in less than an hour she was on the couch at home, Seymour purring away at her side, with a bowl of leftover pad thai for dinner and the TV turned to a House Hunters marathon. It was just what she needed, and even after the show’s ridiculously self-centered participants began to grate on her nerves she couldn’t summon up the energy to find a more congenial activity. She was too tired to read, too tired to tackle the mountain of laundry on her closet floor, and too tired to head downstairs and see if Michelle and Sunita felt like going for a walk.

  Only then did she remember the stack of mail sitting on the table by her door. There’d been an envelope from her mom, and she’d been about to open it when the cat had distracted her with his panicked pleas for dinner.

  She heaved herself off the couch and grabbed the envelope. It held a commemorative guide to the queen’s ninetieth birthday, the sort that was nothing but pictures and captions, and her mom had stuck a Post-it note on the front.

  Bought this for you weeks ago but kept forgetting to pop in the mail. Enjoy!

  Love from Mom

  Her mom clung to the belief that Heather was interested in the royal family. And she was, but only in the most casual kind of way. She liked Princess Kate, as she persisted in calling the woman no matter how often her mom complained that it wasn’t her real title. And of course she liked the queen. Who didn’t like the queen?

  But she didn’t worship the royals the way her mom did, with the kind of devotion that involved getting up in the middle of the night for Will and Kate’s wedding in 2011, and doing so while wearing a homemade fascinator and Union Jack slippers. Her mom had wanted her to come for a sleepover so as not to miss even a minute of the festivities, but Heather had wriggled out of the invitation by inventing an early meeting at work. Why get up so early when she could watch it later on DVR and skip all the commercials and boring in-between bits?

  She flipped through the guide’s glossy pages, her writer’s eye tripping over the odd typo, and only began to pay attention when she came to an article on the queen’s 1947 wedding. Heather hadn’t realized how young she had been. Only twenty-one, and still a princess. She’d never noticed how handsome Prince Philip had been when he was young, nor could she remember ever having seen their wedding pictures before. The wedding gown didn’t look familiar, at least not in the way she could close her eyes and instantly see Diana’s dress in all its meringue-y glory. But there was something about it that captured her attention, something that made her look twice . . .

  The star flowers.

  The gown had swoops of embroidery on the skirt and its train, garlands of star-shaped flowers and roses and leafy things that had pearls and little diamonds sewn all over them, and they were exactly the same as the flowers on the squares of fabric that Nan had kept hidden away.

  Hurrying into her bedr
oom, Heather began to rummage through the pile of things from Nan’s house that her mom had insisted she bring home after the funeral. Framed photographs, a big white tablecloth she’d never use, some nice candlesticks that she remembered from every Christmas and Easter. And the white plastic box with her name on it that held the embroideries.

  She sat on her bed, dumped Seymour on the floor when he bounced up to investigate, and opened the box. She was right. Nan’s flowers were exactly the same as the ones on the gown.

  Her laptop was sitting at the foot of the bed. She opened the browser, typed Queen Elizabeth wedding dress embroidery into the search bar, and hit return. Dozens of photographs filled the screen: stars edged with pearls, roses in full bloom, delicate ears of wheat, and interspersed between them were photographs of the queen on her wedding day almost seventy years before.

  Nan’s flowers couldn’t possibly be from the gown itself, for it was in a museum somewhere, or in the attics at Buckingham Palace, and besides, no one was ever going to cut up the queen’s wedding dress. Back and forth she looked, from the embroideries now arranged on her bed, to the images from her search, and back again.

  She tried another search. Princess Elizabeth wedding dress 1947. A Wikipedia page popped up—the gown even had its own entry. November 1947, Norman Hartnell design, Botticelli inspiration, English silk, rationing, etc., etc.

  Norman Hartnell. The name was kind of familiar, but she’d never been very interested in fashion or designers or anything like that. If he had designed the gown, and Nan had the embroideries, maybe she had worked for him in some way?

  Yet a connection with Norman Hartnell raised more questions than it answered. Why wouldn’t her grandmother have told them about something so important? Even if she’d only worked there for a month or two, it was something. It was making dresses for the royal family, and even though people Heather’s age didn’t get worked up about things like that—or at least she’d never found it very exciting—older people sure did.

  She decided it was time to call her mother.

  “Hi, Heather. What’s up?”

  “You know how you thought I should try to find out more about Nan’s embroidered flowers? I finally got around to it.”

  “And? What did you find out so far?”

  “I’m not sure, not yet, but I think she might have had something to do with Norman Hartnell.” There was a weird kind of gasping noise at the other end of the line. “Mom? Are you okay?”

  “Norman Hartnell? The queen’s dressmaker?” her mother finally managed, her voice hushed and reverential and still a little wheezy.

  “Yes. You know the embroidered flowers Nan left me? They’re the same as the ones on the queen’s wedding dress.”

  “Oh, my goodness. I don’t know what to say. I thought they looked familiar, but . . .”

  “And she never mentioned Hartnell or the queen or anything like that?”

  “Never. I mean, she loved the queen, and she was so sad when the Queen Mum died. But she never met them. She’d have told me about that.”

  “Could she have worked for Norman Hartnell? Maybe as one of his seamstresses?”

  “I suppose. Although I can’t imagine why she’d never have told anyone. Why hide something like that?”

  “I know. It doesn’t make any sense. Oh—I just thought of something else. Do you have any more pictures from England? From before Nan came here?”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing any, but I’ll have a look through her albums. Are you going to bed soon? It’s almost eleven.”

  “Very soon,” Heather promised. “Let me know if you come across any other pictures, okay?”

  “Sure. Anything else?”

  “Let me see . . . I’ve got her date of birth, the town where she lived . . . hmm. I don’t have her maiden name. Hughes was her married name, right?”

  “I suppose so.” There was a long pause. “Isn’t it silly that I wouldn’t know?”

  “She never said?” Heather pressed.

  “She might have. But if she did, I don’t remember. Still. It’s probably written down somewhere. I’ll have a look.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Love you guys.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Back to the search. Unless her mother came up with more photos, she had to assume the one in the studio, with Nan looking all serious, was all she had. The picture was at the bottom of the box, under the last layer of tissue paper, and she now set it on the bed next to her laptop.

  Norman Hartnell embroidery studio, she typed, and row after row of images popped up, most of them pictures of 1950s-era dresses. She scrolled down, and there, at the very bottom of her screen, was a black-and-white photograph of a large, high-ceilinged room with hanging electric lights, big windows, and women bent over rows of embroidery frames.

  Heather compared the two pictures. The perspective was different, but the room was similar. The light fixtures were a match, and the way the windowpanes were divided. It was the same room.

  And suddenly it was too much to take in. She’d come back to it tomorrow, or on the weekend when she wasn’t so tired, and maybe by then her mother would have more for her. Maybe then she’d understand why Nan had hidden so much.

  THE EMAIL FROM her mom arrived the next morning, just as Heather was about to go into Bay Street’s weekly editorial meeting.

  From: Mom & Dad

  Subject: Some pix for you!

  Dear Heather,

  First things first. No birth certificate or marriage certificate. Not sure I ever saw either although she must have had copies at some point. I guess we could try to order a copy of her birth certificate from the English government. Let me know if you’d like to do that. It seems funny that I don’t know her maiden name but I tended to just accept things as they were when I was growing up. I do have some good news about the pix. Dad and I stayed up late looking through old albums and some boxes of stuff from Nan and we found some photos we hadn’t seen before. Only the three but I hope they will help. Dad scanned them. The first one is of Nan. It’s hard to tell from the picture but she looks to be in her twenties. This is on the back: “109 Morley Rd, Barking, June 46.” The second one, of her and the other woman, must have been taken at the same time. I’m not sure but I think it’s my aunt Milly. She was married to Mum’s brother, Frank, the one that was killed in the Blitz. From what I remember Milly came over to Canada first and my mum joined her in Toronto. She was still pretty young when she died in the 1950s but I can’t remember from what. Mum and I moved out to Etobicoke after that. Again I never thought to ask more and as you know she wasn’t one to volunteer information. The third picture has me stumped as I’ve no idea who this woman is with my mum or why they were all dressed up. From their hats and gloves and the whole shebang I’m thinking maybe they were going to a wedding or maybe it was just their Sunday best? Sorry we didn’t unearth anything more.

  Lots of love, Mom xoxo

  There were three pictures attached to the email. The first was Nan, younger than Heather was now, dressed in the same sort of clothes she’d always worn: a knee-length skirt, plain white blouse, knitted cardigan, sensible shoes. Her hair came to her chin and was tucked neatly behind her ears. In the next photo, the one with Aunt Milly, she was smiling, her eyes squinting against the sunshine, and their happy expressions gave no hint of the war they’d just survived, let alone the sadness they must have felt when Uncle Frank was killed. They stood in a garden that was so small the neighbors’ fences were visible on either side.

  The third photograph had also been taken in the garden. Nan was about the same age as in the other pictures, but this time she was dressed up in a gorgeous dark coat, its wide collar wrapping around her shoulders like a shawl, and on her head was an elegant little hat.

  The woman with her, the one her mom didn’t recognize, was very beautiful, with dark hair and delicate, almost elfin features. She wore a tailored suit, its full skirt falling well below her knees, its fitted jacket flaring out sharply at the w
aist, and she looked, Heather decided, a little bit like Audrey Hepburn in that old movie where she was actually a princess and she escaped for a day or two.

  Well, Nan hadn’t been a princess. She knew that for sure. But what was her connection with Norman Hartnell? And who was the woman in the third photograph? If Nan had saved the photo, she must have cared about the woman. Have known her well. Might they even have worked together?

  The night before, just before turning out the lights, she’d scanned the picture of Nan in the embroidery studio and emailed it to herself. She opened it now and began to study the features of the others in the photograph. Just to Nan’s side, where she had been all along, was the mystery woman, her expression just as serious as Nan’s.

  Her phone rang; it was the boardroom extension. “Sorry, Richard—I got caught up in an email. I’m on my way.”

  She would have to leave off her search until after work.

  THAT EVENING, AND at every lunch break for the rest of the week, Heather scrolled through online archives, searching for anything that even mentioned Norman Hartnell or the royal wedding of 1947 in passing. She began to haunt the downtown reference library after work, ordering up book after book from the stacks, and though she failed to learn anything more about Nan, she did acquire a working knowledge of midcentury fashion, postwar clothes rationing, and the history of royal wedding attire.

  She even emailed the press office at Buckingham Palace, asking if they would connect her with the curator responsible for the queen’s wedding gown and other Hartnell-designed garments, but they didn’t respond, not even after she sent three separate inquiries.

  Late one Saturday night, long after she ought to have gone to sleep, Heather decided to play around with variations on search terms she had already used. Hartnell embroiderers royal wedding 1947 yielded nothing new, as did Princess Elizabeth wedding dress embroiderers 1947. Suppressing an enormous yawn, she forced herself to think. What hadn’t she tried? What snippet of information had she overlooked?