Chapter Three
Three
EMMY stood before the mirror in the upstairs bedroom she shared with Julia, analyzing the dress she’d plucked from Mum’s wardrobe.
She had pressed away the wrinkles, but there had been no way to iron away the trailing scent of Mum’s perfume—a flowery, musty vapor that smelled like an invitation to other things.
The midnight blue frock with its ivory collar and sleeve cuffs wasn’t Emmy’s favorite dress of her mother’s, but it was more fashionable than anything hanging among her own clothes, and she was unashamedly hoping there was luck still lingering in its threads.
Mum had worn the dress two years ago when she interviewed to be a kitchen maid for the millionaire widow Mrs. Billingsley and had come home with the job.
Emmy might not have remembered that detail about the dress except that Nana was still alive then and had been visiting.
It had been a roasting-hot day in July, and the war then was nothing more than a nasty disagreement between a couple of countries on the Continent.
Mum’s mother, visiting from Devonshire, was teaching Emmy to embroider.
The girls saw their grandmother only when she made the trip to visit, which wasn’t often.
Emmy liked it when Nana came, even though Nana and Mum fought about nearly everything.
She was always sad when Nana left except for the fact that the arguing stopped.
On that particular afternoon, Mum had emerged from her bedroom wearing the midnight blue dress, and she posed like a model in front of the girls and her mother.
Julia laughed and Mum laughed with her. Nana shook her head and told Mum it wasn’t wise to get her hopes too high.
Mum had worked in a hotel laundry room up to that point.
To Emmy’s knowledge, she had never been a kitchen maid before.
And she had certainly never worked for someone with money.
“And why shouldn’t I?” Mum opened a compact mirror and ran a tube of lipstick across her lips. She sounded as confident as Emmy could ever remember.
“An upstanding heiress is a different employer than a busy hotel.”
Mum snapped the mirror shut. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re an unmarried mother,” Nana murmured, as though the walls of the kitchen might hear the scandalous truth and broadcast the news to the whole of London.
“It matters. If this Mrs. Billingsley checks your references, she is sure to find out your daughters were fathered by two different men, neither of whom you were married to.”
Mum had narrowed her eyes and grinned at Emmy conspiratorially—the way an older sister might. She thanked Nana for such loving and motherly advice, and slammed the door as she left.
Nana had asked Emmy where her mother had gotten the dress.
Emmy hadn’t known. Sometimes new clothes just appeared in Mum’s wardrobe.
“Don’t you wonder where she gets them?” Nana asked.
“She says the people she works with give them to her when they tire of them,” Emmy answered.
“Sure they do,” Nana muttered, and then she proceeded to show Emmy how to sew a perfect satin stitch.
An hour later, while Emmy worked on a dresser scarf and Nana showed Julia her wooden box full of colorful skeins of embroidery floss, Mum returned exuberant, and with a fancy black uniform over her arm.
Nana went pale. “They hired you?”
Emmy was astonished at the fear in her grandmother’s voice.
“Don’t act so surprised,” Mum said. “I bloody well know how to boil water.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of things you know how to do,” Nana said, softly. It was almost a whisper, but not quite.
Mum turned from laying the uniform over the back of a kitchen chair. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Mum calmly walked to the front door and opened it wide. “I want you out.”
Emmy had looked from one woman to the other; surely she had missed something.
Nana’s lips flattened to a thin line. She slapped the wooden box of floss shut and slid it toward Emmy. “You work on those stitches, Emmeline,” she had said. “It will give you something constructive to do while your mother is out earning her keep.”
Nana kissed Julia good-bye and left. It was the last time Emmy saw her.
Four months later she died of a massive heart attack.
A telegram came to the flat from Mum’s uncle Stuart, Nana’s older brother and a man Emmy had never met, bearing the news of her passing.
Mum read the telegram, lowered the piece of paper to the kitchen table, and then went into her room.
Emmy didn’t see her for hours. When she emerged, Emmy was full of questions.
Julia, at five, had only one. Where was Nana now?
But Mum didn’t answer any of Emmy’s questions.
And to Julia, she said Nana was in heaven where everything was perfect, so she ought to feel right at home.
Emmy didn’t understand what her grandmother and Mum had fought about that last day.
As far as she could tell, Mum had been hired to be a kitchen maid, and that was exactly what she became.
Nana made it seem as though Mum was doing something bad in exchange for her new job but Mrs. Billingsley wasn’t running a brothel; she was a respected widow.
And there were no men in Annie Downtree’s life; not since Julia’s father had walked out on her a year before.
Not long after Nana died, Emmy was at the kitchen table embroidering asters onto a pillowcase. Mum, on her way out the door to go to work, had stopped to stare at the colorful collection of flosses in the box and then whacked the lid shut. Emmy kept the box in her and Julia’s room after that.
Julia now appeared in the doorway as Emmy studied her reflection in the mirror. “I want to come to the bridal shop with you.”
Emmy reached for her hairbrush on the dresser. “I need you to stay here.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I’ll be back soon, Jewels. I promise,” Emmy said, running the brush through her hair with quick strokes.
“Take me with you.”
Emmy replaced the brush, and then knelt by her sister and took her hands. “I’ll only be gone for a little bit. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“But it will be dark soon.”
“And I will be back before dark.”
Julia’s fear-filled eyes glistened with stubborn tears. Nights were the hardest. The sirens, when they whined, nearly only whined at night. They sounded like the agonized wail of the desolate.
“Be a love and get Nana’s box of embroidery floss,” Emmy said.
“Why?”
“I’ll show you.”
Julia walked to Emmy’s bed, dropped to her knees, and thrust her hand under the bed skirt. She withdrew the wooden box and brought it back.
“Can you take all the threads out for me? Just dump them on my bed.”
While Julia obeyed, Emmy reached for the satchel that she used for school, and then walked over to the bed and sat down next to her sister.
In between them lay the pile of skeins, a tumble of color.
From the satchel Emmy withdrew a folder marked Geometry, opened it, and pulled out a sheaf of sketches.
“What are you doing with your brides?” Julia asked.
“I might need to show them to the lady at the bridal shop.”
“Why?”
“When I tell this lady that I’ve never worked in a dress shop, she might not want to hire me, but if I show her the brides, maybe she will.”
Emmy reached for the empty box in Julia’s lap.
Its hinges and clasp, at one time golden-hued, had aged to a mossy brown.
Etchings of flowering vines scrolled the front and sides, as did scuffs and scratches from its earlier uses.
Emmy thumbed through the sketches, pulled out her earliest attempts, and then tossed these on the bed.
She opened the lid and placed the best ones—a dozen of them—inside the box.
“There. That’s better than a geometry folder.”
“What if she says no?”
“Then I will be no worse off than if I hadn’t shown them to her, right?”
“What if she takes the brides from you?”
“She won’t.”
“But how do you know?”
“I don’t think she’s that kind of person. Besides, I won’t let her. I won’t let anyone take my drawings from me, okay?”
Julia nodded but a trace of doubt lingered on her face. It was as if she already knew good things had a way of being taken from someone—especially in a time of war.
“What about those?” Julia pointed to the rejects on the bed.
“How about while I am gone, you give those brides some bouquets to carry? You can use my colored pencils and put flowers in their hair and bouquets in their hands. Yes?”
Julia seemed pleased with this assignment. “What if I want to give them something else to carry? Does it have to be flowers?”
Emmy kissed the top of her sister’s fair head. “It can be whatever you want. Give them kangaroos to hold if that suits you.”
Julia laughed and Emmy pushed herself off the bed. “Do I look all right?”
“You look like Mum.”
Emmy nodded. Good enough. “I’ll be right back. Keep the door locked. Don’t answer the bell. Just work on those brides.”
She tucked the box under her arm and headed for the front door, her feet lifting slightly out of Mum’s too-big shoes with every step.