Chapter 2 — Another Woman’s Pattern
By eight the next morning, Ottilie had been told three times that the credit screen was a version-control error.
The first explanation came from a junior producer who could not open the locked playback file. The second came from Harcourt her professional name remained in the centre. Ottilie photographed the sheet beside the platform timestamp and put it inside her canvas bag.
A production assistant watched from the doorway. “They told us the extended credits will go online after the show.”
“Who told you?”
“Saskia’s campaign team.”
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
Before Kit had promised her the main screen.
Ottilie asked the assistant to write the time and instruction in her own words and preserve it somewhere the company platform could not edit. The woman stared at the floor.
“Will I lose my placement?”
“I don’t know,” Ottilie said. “Do not send anything because I asked. Keep your own record.”
The assistant slipped away. Ottilie put the proof back into her bag and went downstairs with the programmes.
She opened a programme. The heavy cream paper resisted her thumb.
Harcourt & Bell: Inheritance
Creative Director: Saskia Reed
Textile development was described two pages later as an exploration of the house archive. Ottilie’s name appeared in the guest list beside Kit’s, set in smaller type beneath members of the Harcourt family.
She took the programmes to the production office. Tom Arlen sat behind a folding desk with two laptops open and a headset pressed to one ear. At forty-seven, the company’s chief operating officer had perfected the expression of a man interrupted by events he had already authorised.
Ottilie put the programme over his keyboard.
“Stop distribution.”
Tom muted the headset. “Kit is handling it.”
“You printed five thousand copies without my credit.”
“The collection belongs to Harcourt & Bell. Individual attribution is being reviewed.”
“The collection contains artwork Harcourt & Bell doesn’t own.”
His gaze moved to the open office door. “This is not the place.”
“It became the place when you handed it to the press.”
A stage manager came in asking whether the press line could open. Tom answered yes without looking away from Ottilie.
“Kit asked everyone to hold position until he gets here,” he said.
“You just opened the press line.”
“The show has contractual timings.”
“So does my licence. It expired at sampling.”
Tom’s face altered by less than a smile. “The legal position is not as simple as you think.”
“It is simple enough to stop putting Saskia’s name on my work.”
She took the programme and left before he could reduce the theft to another process awaiting Kit’s decision.
The main hall had transformed overnight.
Rows of black benches ran beneath a suspended rectangle of light.
The runway floor held a mirror-dark finish that made every cable, hem and ankle look doubled.
Above it, the screen showed the Harcourt & Bell monogram turning slowly through clouds of violet dye.
Ottilie entered through the backstage curtain. Dressers moved between rails with lint rollers stuck to their wrists. A model stood in trainers while Jean Morel corrected the fall of a sleeve with three pins held between his lips.
Jean removed the pins when he saw her.
“They changed the board,” Ottilie said.
“I saw.”
“Who approved the garment labels?”
He glanced towards the wardrobe station. “New labels came at six.”
Ottilie crossed the room. Night Iris hung at the end of the finale rail beneath its muslin cover. She lifted the gown’s inner hem.
The temporary production strip that had carried her reference, OV-17, was gone. In its place, a black woven label read SASKIA REED FOR HARCOURT & BELL.
The stitches were fresh and hasty. One had caught the silk lining too close to the edge.
Jean came beside her. “My team didn’t sew those.”
“Who did?”
“Wardrobe arrived with them attached.”
Ottilie touched the thread with her fingernail. Removing it now would mark the lining. She lowered the hem and covered the gown again.
“Nothing leaves this rail,” she said.
The wardrobe supervisor looked up from a clipboard. “We have first looks in twelve minutes.”
“The textiles are unlicensed.”
“I have Tom’s release.”
“You do not have mine.”
Ottilie called Kit. The call went directly to voicemail. She called again and received the same polished recording.
Across the room, a burst of laughter rose near the press entrance. Saskia had arrived.
She wore a column dress Ottilie recognised before she saw the face above it.
The silk had been cut from a private archive length called Orchard Ashes: pomegranate skins and iron painted into branching repeats, with small gold resist marks where leaves appeared to have survived a burn.
Ottilie had made the original six years ago after clearing her mother’s workroom.
No Harcourt & Bell production order had ever included it.
Saskia had altered the neckline and nothing else.
Two cameras followed her as she walked into the backstage space. Mina Dawes moved with them, recorder held at chest height. Ottilie knew her work: concise industry investigations, expensive access and corrections printed only when the evidence demanded them.
“The pattern feels unusually personal,” Mina said to Saskia. “Where did it begin?”
Saskia turned so the gold resist caught the light. Her auburn hair had been drawn into a severe knot. “With family memory. Women keep fragments, don’t they? Curtains, letters, clothes nobody can throw away. I wanted to make inheritance look like something living rather than reverent.”
Ottilie stepped into the camera line.
“Take it off.”
The nearest camera dipped, then rose again.
Saskia’s expression held. “Ottilie.”
“That silk came from my private archive. You do not have permission to wear it, publish it or call it yours.”
The room didn’t fall silent. It became selective. Steamers hissed. A dresser whispered for a missing shoe. Every person close enough to hear found a reason not to move away.
Saskia laid one hand over her waist. “The archive was supplied to the design team.”
“For reference scanning under limited access.”
“That is not what I was told.”
“Who told you that you could register my work?”
Mina’s eyes sharpened. “Register?”
Saskia looked towards the communications director. The woman gave a small shake of her head, too late to close anything.
Ottilie held out her hand. “Show me the record.”
“We are not conducting an internal review in front of press,” the communications director said.
“You opened the press line while my name was being removed.”
Mina lowered her recorder. “Ms Vane, are you saying the prints in this collection are yours rather than Ms Reed’s?”
“I created the original artwork, the repeats and the dye structures. Harcourt & Bell had permission to sample selected work. I didn’t assign the copyright.”
Saskia’s voice remained soft. “You were present throughout development.”
“Yes.”
“You approved the collection direction.”
“I approved my work under my name.”
Saskia glanced towards the cameras as if Ottilie had confirmed something useful. “The house has records of development. I’m comfortable letting those speak.”
“Then produce them.”
The communications director touched her earpiece. “We need five minutes.”
“You have had six months,” Ottilie said.
Kit entered from the opposite corridor with Tom beside him and two lawyers Ottilie recognised from the acquisition team. His tie was straight now. His face belonged to the public part of his life.
He took in Saskia’s dress, the cameras and Ottilie standing between them.
“Clear the room,” he said.
Mina didn’t move. “Mr Harcourt, is your wife disputing the authorship of tonight’s collection?”
“There is an internal documentation issue. We will provide a statement.”
Ottilie looked at him. “Stop the show.”
His gaze met hers for a second. “Come upstairs.”
“The gowns do not go on bodies while we discuss whether stealing them is inconvenient.”
One of the lawyers murmured in Kit’s ear. Kit listened. He didn’t tell the wardrobe supervisor to stand down.
Mina opened a tablet. “Harcourt & Bell supplied the press pool with its authorship records at seven thirty. This one was included.”
She turned the screen towards Ottilie.
The document carried the company’s design-management header and a timestamp from three days earlier. Beneath a thumbnail of Orchard Ashes, the creator field read SASKIA REED. The registration date preceded the date attached to the show files Ottilie had submitted through production.
That didn’t make the work Saskia’s. A timestamp recorded a filing, not a hand. But on a press morning, it supplied the shape of proof.
Ottilie enlarged the thumbnail. The scan included a pale nick in the lower-right corner, made when her mother’s old plan chest had trapped the silk. Saskia’s family memory had inherited the damage too.
“Where is the source file?” Ottilie asked.
Mina said, “The company says this is the source file.”
“It is a scan of a physical length I made six years ago.”
Kit stepped closer. “Ottilie. Upstairs. Now.”
She heard the instruction before she heard her husband in it.
“Tell them,” she said.
His attention moved briefly to the acquisition lawyers. “We are establishing the facts.”
“You know the facts.”
The cameras shifted towards him.
Saskia stood at his right shoulder in Ottilie’s silk. Neither of them touched. They didn’t need to. The frame arranged its own intimacy: the chief executive and his creative director facing the wife who had interrupted their show.
Mina looked from the registration record to Ottilie.
“Mrs Harcourt,” she asked, “did you copy your husband’s creative director?”
Ottilie looked at the registration image on Mina’s screen. Orchard Ashes carried a filing date three months earlier, during the period when Kit repeatedly told her legal was finalising a licence. Saskia’s application described the pattern as original work derived from childhood orchard memories.
Ottilie’s own first study predated Saskia’s employment by seven years.
“No,” she said. “That pattern is mine.”
Mina asked for proof. Ottilie had it in the archive room at home, on a production server she no longer trusted and in notebooks Kit knew better than anyone. She gave the locations, not the documents, and watched the acquisition counsel write each one down.
Kit said her name once. She didn’t turn the sound into an answer.