The Dressmakers of London

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Sylvia stared dumbly at the spot on William’s desk where her mother’s will lay open.

This couldn’t be happening. There must be a mistake, because there was no reason that her mother would ever feel compelled to leave any part of Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions to her.

In the first months after opening the shop, her mother had tried to teach her to sew, sitting eleven-year-old Sylvia in a corner with a bit of fabric and instructions for a running stitch, whip stitch, back stitch. No matter how often she tried, Sylvia could never make her stitches look like the perfect examples her mother made for her, and her mother had grown increasingly frustrated until finally declaring Sylvia a disappointment. Clearly, someone who could hardly sew a basic stitch could not be trusted to learn how to measure, cut, pin, baste, seam, press, fit, and finish a garment. That meant that Sylvia’s only use was to help with the running of the shop: accounting, administration, deliveries, and cleaning. The things anyone could do.

Izzie, however, had shown real talent from an early age, the fabric molding to her will in a way that it never had for Sylvia. The more her sister learned, the more acutely Sylvia felt her failure, until it became clear that there was no room for her to squeeze into the little unit that was Izzie and their mother.

And then Hugo had come along. Hugo, who had wanted her to join him in his world of dances and dinners, theater and opera. The drudgery of her childhood became the beginning of a fairy tale, and her husband became the handsome prince sweeping Cinderella away.

So why would her mother ever have thought that Sylvia would want to come back to the shop, let alone need to?

“Well.” She breathed out.

“Well?” Izzie barked out a laugh. “That’s all you can say?”

“What else is there to say?” she asked.

Izzie shot to her feet, her chair teetering dangerously on its two back legs before landing with a dull thud on the carpet of William’s office. “Unbelievable!”

“Izzie—” she started to say, but a sharp shake of her sister’s head killed the words in her throat.

“I have nothing to say to you. Nothing,” Izzie hissed before storming out.

Sylvia’s gaze flicked to William, who sat quietly shuffling the paperwork on his desk.

“I do apologize for my sister’s outburst.”

He gave her a sympathetic look and said, “The loss of a loved one is always an emotional time.”

She dropped her gaze to her gloved hands still clenched in her lap. Everything about what was happening felt wrong. She had to make this right. If only she could figure out…

Her head snapped up. “William, if you will please excuse me for a moment.”

She hurried out of the office and back through the waiting area. Pulling open William’s front door, she looked up and down the road. No Izzie. She darted out to the edge of the pavement, pausing while a lorry passed, then hurried across the road.

Halfway around the corner she spotted her sister’s retreating back clad in her beautifully tailored navy coat.

“Izzie!”

The hitch in her sister’s step told her that Izzie had heard her.

“Izzie!” Cursing her heels, she picked up her pace until she was half running, a hand clamped down on her hat to keep it from blowing off. “Izzie, wait!”

Izzie rounded on her, the skirt of her coat swinging out. “What do you want from me?”

Sylvia stopped abruptly, hands held wide and low. “I know that you’re angry, but we need to talk about this.”

“Why? So that you can lord it over me that, even after years of hardly speaking, Mum still gave you part of the shop? Or do you want to remind me, yet again, how much better you are than me?”

Sylvia jerked back. “I don’t think I’m better than you.”

Izzie snorted. “Yes, you do.”

“That isn’t true,” she insisted.

“Oh, stop it, Sylvia. The moment you met Hugo, you decided that you were too good to have anything to do with your mother and your sister. You dropped us and never looked back.”

Sylvia opened her mouth to protest but something stopped her. Wasn’t what Izzie said at least partially true? Meeting Hugo had opened up her world in ways she’d never imagined possible, but life with him came with expectations. Successful Harley Street doctors who could trace their family tree back to the Norman Conquest on both sides did not marry dress-shop girls. That was why his love for her had been so extraordinary. He’d reached down and pulled her up to him, and she was so grateful she’d set about transforming herself into the sort of wife he would always be proud of.

She’d worked hard burnishing herself with some of the same polish that came so naturally to him. At every dinner and dance Hugo took her to, she watched the other ladies and absorbed silent lessons from them. She devoured every ladies’ magazine she could find and pored over every etiquette book she could lay her hands on. Soon everything from her voice and vocabulary to her carriage and comportment took on a degree of refinement. Although the early years of their marriage had been tinged with the disappointment of trying and failing to have children, Hugo had given her the kind of life even her mother couldn’t have dreamed of, and the discipline and sacrifice had all been worth it.

Until she’d found the love letters from another woman in his desk.

“What do you want, Sylvia?” Izzie prompted. “Because if you don’t have anything to say, I have things to do at the business that we apparently now own.”

“You can have it,” Sylvia said quickly. “You can have Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions.”

Izzie’s eyes narrowed as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Why?”

“You’ve worked there for so long, we both know that it should be yours. Besides, our mother always said that I was a terrible seamstress,” she said, trying a smile.

“ Mum ,” Izzie said, emphasizing the term of endearment Sylvia hadn’t used in years, “would have been happy to teach you if you hadn’t thought yourself too good to learn.”

Sylvia clamped her lips shut. Izzie had been too young to remember what it had been like in those early years, and Sylvia was not going to take the happy memories of their mother away from her sister. Besides, anything Sylvia said would only fall on deaf ears.

“I want you to have the business,” she said firmly. “It should be yours.”

“You can’t just give me half of a business, Sylvia. Besides, what would Horrible Hugo say?”

He’d be horrified to learn that she now owned a dress shop, because he’d made very clear when he’d proposed that she would never have to work again. He wanted her at home, and her time would be far better used on the philanthropic work that ladies like Claire did.

“Hugo has other things to occupy his thoughts. Izzie, think about it. What am I going to do with a stake in a dressmaker’s shop?”

She knew the moment the words were out of her mouth that it was the wrong thing to say, because Izzie lifted her chin the way she’d always done when she was squaring off for a fight.

“I don’t need your charity,” Izzie said.

“I’ll sell it to you then,” she said quickly. “At a fair market price. We can even have it valued if you like. There must be people who do that sort of thing.” Claire was always telling her about the discreet little men who slipped into the homes of the well-to-do to value jewelry and furs, fine art and furniture, and save families from the indignity of walking into an auction house or—worse yet—a pawnbroker. Surely someone must do the same for businesses.

“Fine,” said Izzie. “I’ll telephone you with my offer, and I’ll have Willie draw up the paperwork. The sooner we can have this done the better, so I can go back to the way things were.”

Izzie turned on her heel and strode away, the tails of her coat billowing out behind her. As Sylvia watched her sister go, she wondered why there was a nagging tug at her heart, asking her if she really wanted things to be just as they were.