Chapter 14
Monday morning at Emma’s shop, I was bent over a man’s shirt making buttonholes, one part of my mind counting twenty stitches for each side and the other combing back over the previous year with Sarah and wondering what other sorts of things she’d been thinking of.
Dan Wist? For God’s sake, I hadn’t thought of him in years—in fact, I might have been hard-pressed to give his last name.
What else did she recall that I’d let drop away, out of my thoughts?
“What d’you think o’ Maggie?” Emma’s voice was casual.
I looked up in surprise, pulling my thoughts back from where they’d wandered. Emma’s eyes were on an organza ruffle that she was basting onto a skirt near the hem. The fabric shushed across the narrow sewing table as she kept the section she was working on under her hands.
My needle paused as I considered what I might say, for I wasn’t about to share the alarming conclusions James and I had reached.
“Honestly, I don’t trust her. There’s talk that she’s pushing some of us out, which is rotten after she promised she wouldn’t change anything.
On the other hand, she’s been pleasant enough to me.
But she was an actress. There’s no way to know if she means any of it. ”
“Or what her intention is, in being pleasing,” Emma said. “I ’magine twenty years in Swan River has toughened her, made her hard.”
“I know.” I bent over the buttonhole again. “Part of me feels sorry for her. That penal colony sounds like hell, with her marriage the worst part of it. He tried to kill her and burned her hand on the stove.”
“Agh.” She brought the cloth to her mouth to bite the thread. “The things folks do to each other.”
“I know. But she shouldn’t be ruthless to us because of it.”
“No,” Emma said. “There. Ruffle’s done.”
It seemed a good moment to ask the question that had been nagging at me, though even as I spoke, I wondered if I shouldn’t.
“Did James ask you to take me on here at the shop? After my mother died?” I wanted to see her face as she replied, so I paused in my work, keeping hold of the needle with one hand and my place on the buttonhole with the other.
Her eyes were clear, frank. “Aye. Why?”
Heat crept up my neck. The thought of people knowing how desperate we’d been made me squirm. “I didn’t want charity.”
“Oh, it wasn’t charity,” she replied. “He knew I could use the help.” She eyed me for a moment, and when I didn’t reply, a sharp note crept into her voice. “It’s naught to be ashamed of. He was only looking out for you. Some folks might be grateful.”
“Oh, I know. I mean, I am.” I bent over my work to hide my shame at the thought of how that conversation had gone: James pitying me because Ma had died, telling his sister how we might be thrown out on the street. Emma sighing and saying she supposed she could pay me a wage of some sort—
“He’s had your name stitched on his heart since the badger days,” Emma said, more gently.
I felt a second wave of heat rising to my cheeks.
“I was the one who told him to wait,” she said. “You were too young, both o’ you. And you’d just lost your mum and had Sarah to take care of.”
I dropped the sewing into my lap, surprised that she’d spent time thinking of me at all.
Emma’s mouth twitched. “Honestly? You’d no idea?”
She had misinterpreted the reason for my surprise. But I answered the question she asked. “No. I didn’t.” Into my mind came recent moments, like photographs: James’s hand resting on Mr. Yellen’s shoulder, pushing coins into Pat’s till. “He . . . he likes most everyone.”
Her expression softened, and something like pride lit her face. “True.”
I forced a smile and returned to my sewing, thinking she was satisfied. But I’d only made one stitch when she said, “I’m not saying you ought to care for him.” Her voice had sharpened again. “But you should tell him if you don’t, so he doesn’t think otherwise.”
I had the sensation of stumbling backward faster than my feet could manage.
“No—that’s not it. It’s not that I don’t like him.
Of course I do. But for years, he never said anything, so I thought .
. .” I was doing badly at this. “Everything’s always been a laugh with him.
Even the way he asked me to go to dinner.
He did it by tricking me in a game.” I drew a breath.
“I didn’t know he’d been looking out for me. ”
“I see,” was all Emma said, but I could see I’d mollified her.
“As for you being here on charity, put it out o’ your head.
Many a time, I’ve been glad it’s you working here, not someone else.
” Her voice was as practical as Amelia’s.
“You come when you say you will, you don’t shirk, and you don’t pilfer ribbon or lace.
You don’t run a stitch long when it needs short ones, and you stay late if I’m needing the help.
” She darted her chin toward the garment in my lap.
“And your buttonholes are better’n mine. ”
The last line, and her wry smile, softened my discomfort.
“I don’t mind you and James keeping company, providing you can keep this”—she pointed toward the sewing in my lap—“separate from that.”
“I think I can,” I managed, the flush starting up my neck again.
“Good.” She gathered up the organza remnant into a tidy pile, and went to her desk, pulling out a drawer. “I found something the other day. I kept it out for James, but you might like to see it.”
Emma handed me a cardboard folder embossed with the name of a photographic studio. Another picture, I thought.
This one was yellowed at the edges, sepia toned, and again, all four people in the photograph were unsmiling, even grim.
A man and woman, seated. To the left of the woman stood a girl of about ten, with her skirts still short, and a boy of about four sat on his mother’s lap.
His small plump hand was wrapped around his sister’s index finger.
“This is you and James with your parents?” I asked. James’s face was round and soft, with large dark eyes, feathery hair that lay flat against the top of his head, and a rosebud mouth. If I looked, I could see the beginnings of the handsomeness he had now.
“My father died about six months after this was taken,” Emma said. “Mum was afraid for his health. She wanted a picture to remember him by, in case.”
“Was it cholera?” It had swept through Southwark when I was too young to remember, but I’d heard about it plenty.
“Influenza,” she replied. “He had black lung ’cause he worked in the mines up north as a child, so his lungs were too weak to fight it off. Or at least, that’s what the doctor told us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Mum’s heart was broken something fierce,” she said. “I know marriages aren’t always happy, but Mum and Da loved each other.” Her voice dropped. “They were kind. She always said he was a good man.”
I handed the photograph back. “It’s a nice picture.
” I didn’t have a photograph of my father.
My ma certainly hadn’t wanted something to remember him by; after he left, she found everything in the house that reminded her of him—down to the glass mug he used for his shaving soap—and took it to Mr. Ardle’s shop.
Not to mention we wouldn’t have had the money for a photograph.
With the corners of her mouth buttoned down, Emma replaced the folder in the drawer. “Well, then.”
It seemed we were finished talking. She resumed her place at the table.
I finished the buttonhole, slipped the button through to check it, and moved on to the next, all the while wondering why she’d showed me that photograph.
The best I could guess was that Emma wanted me to see that she and James were close from childhood, like Sarah and me.
Or that she knew what my parents’ marriage was like—Ma was more likely to scream “bloody eejit” out the window at Da than call him a good man—and she wanted me to know James would expect something different.
We worked in silence for another hour, until Emma snipped her thread, put away her needle, and draped the skirt over a table.
“Some fabrics came in this morning. I’m goin’ to fetch them.
” She took her coat down from its hook. “When you finish the buttonholes, can you baste Mr. Nichols’s shirts?
I’ll be back in less than an hour. There are no appointments. ”
“Of course,” I said. The door clinked closed behind her.
Three buttonholes left. My hands worked them of their own accord, my mind busy with my thoughts.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to admit even to myself how the thought of James privately caring for me softened my heart. It wasn’t the sort of secret I usually discovered, with the truth better than I imagined.
It took me two hours to baste the seams on Mr. Nichols’s three shirts with red thread and long stitches that showed on both sides of the cloth. I’d barely finished when Emma returned, her eyes sparking with annoyance and her mouth tight.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She unbuttoned her coat, her fingers quick with irritation. “Three bolts of cloth I ordered went missing. And I need them for Mrs. Tompkins’s new dresses. She’ll be fit to be tied.”
“They didn’t arrive?”
“No, they arrived. The duties were paid, and they were logged and shelved. At first, the clerk thought they were just mislaid.”
“Not surprising.” I’d been to the warehouse once with Emma, to help her carry some bundles of woolens and notions, and it was enormous, a cavern of shelves and boxes and narrow aisles, people bustling in and out, fetching and carrying all manner of goods.
I’d nearly been knocked over by a man hurrying through with a wrought iron fireplace grate over his shoulder.
“But when we looked at the book, there was an X instead of my signature.”
“Oh,” I said, dismayed.
“We asked one of the clerks in that department—a brainless gob—and he couldn’t recall anything, but a different clerk said he remembered a woman coming in to fetch them and givin’ my name.”
That was straight-up thieving.
I wasn’t a fool; I knew the damage stealing caused, but I rarely saw it firsthand. I was always already gone by the time it was discovered. “Who knew you were picking them up?”
“No one but you.”
I blinked.
“O’ course I don’t think you did this,” she snapped. I didn’t take offense; it was worry that made her sharp.
“What’s going to happen?”
“Well, I filled out an inquiry, and they’ll send for new ones.”
“It was insured, wasn’t it?”
“Aye. But it’s going to take at least another month to get more—and they were dear—Brussels lace, silk, and chiffon. They took a good part o’ my ready money. Not to mention that Mrs. Tompkins will take five pounds of stuffing out o’ me when she hears.”
“Well, it’s not your fault,” I protested. “Tell her she should go down to the warehouse, if she puts up a fuss. Perhaps they’d find it for her.”
“There’s a thought,” she said, with a snort.