The Dress Shop of Dreams (21 page)

As the two emotions fight within her, Milly already knows which will win. She’s too old to wait. It took ten years before she fell enough in love with another man to want to have a child with him. And after a year with Hugh they still hadn’t gotten pregnant, though after being checked by doctors it was found that the difficulty lay with him rather than her. So Milly has the possibility and she knows she’ll take it. She’ll hate herself even as she does it, certainly. Guilt will cut into her desire, regret will taint her joy. But the shame won’t stop her, what’s in her head won’t be able to hold back her heart. Milly almost wishes it would, but she knows it won’t. And then Milly has an idea. She doesn’t have the courage to ask him to his face, so she’ll take advantage of their little secret and write to Walt and ask what he thinks about having a child …

It took Etta three months to be certain she was pregnant. She put the first missed menstruation down to her body being overwhelmed
with sadness and stress. The second, she started to suspect but was too scared to visit a doctor. The third, she no longer needed a doctor to tell her what she already knew.

When they parted Etta told Sebastian that they wouldn’t see each other again, that it would be easier that way. He was already marked to take over from Father Isaac Harrison who, after hanging on to his parish for sixty-seven years, was ready at last to see heaven himself after rhapsodizing on it for so long. It would be too hard for him, she felt, to commit to the church if she was always lingering in the background. They couldn’t be friends, of this they were both certain, the temptation to touch each other would always be too much. So it would have to be out of sight and out of mind, if that was at all possible. Sebastian hadn’t wanted to promise but she’d persuaded him. That was when they agreed to divide the city in half. Etta would stay at the north end, within a mile circumference of her shop, and the Saint would stay at the south end, centering on the Catholic church at the crossroad of Regent Street and Lensfield Road. The line that divided them, Downing Street, would be no-man’s land. Of course, it was understood that certain eventualities might necessitate encroachment into each other’s territory, but at least the possibility of chance encounters was drastically reduced.

Etta had told Joe she couldn’t marry him before she’d slept with the Saint. It was too much, she thought, after all she’d done, to betray him in this final way. She’d told him everything and he’d taken it remarkably well.

“I always knew,” he said, still holding the hand she’d rested on his knee when it looked like he might cry.

“You knew?” Etta felt shock, followed by shame. “How?”

“No.” Joe shook his head slowly. “I don’t mean I knew about
you and him. I just knew that it would end like this, I knew I couldn’t hold on to you forever. I knew you’d leave me in the end.”

“Oh, Joe.” For some reason this confession made Etta feel sorrier than all the rest of it. That her fiancé held himself in such slight regard, that he’d been resigned to the inevitability of her betrayal even before it’d happened, that he seemed to hold his own inadequacies and inferiority responsible for everything, rather than her own inconstancy and immorality, made Etta regret it all more deeply than anything else. “I can’t believe you’d think that. I wanted to be with you, it wouldn’t have happened if—”

“If you loved me,” he said softly. “But you don’t, you never did. That’s why you fell in love with him.”

“Oh, Joe,” Etta said again. Tears sprang to her eyes. “It’s not like that.”

He turned to face her then so her hand fell awkwardly from his knee. “Do you love me? Did you ever love me?”

Etta looked into his wide, wet eyes and felt her heart rise up to hold him. “Of course,” she said, “of course I did. I still do.” It wasn’t a lie. She did love him, just not in the way she was supposed to.

They bumped into each other again, a few days after Etta was certain she was carrying Sebastian’s child. They stood in the street chatting awhile, both surprised by how easy it was, how comfortable they felt together. When Joe suggested a cup of Earl Grey in the teashop on King’s Parade, Etta found that she wanted to go. Her body was sick with the baby growing inside, her spirit battered since her separation from Sebastian, and being with Joe felt like being wrapped in a rug and warming
your toes on an open fire. She told him her news before she’d even taken a sip of tea.

He’d given her a wry smile. “Well, I know it’s not mine.”

“No,” Etta admitted, “that would’ve been something of a medical miracle.”

“What will you do?”

Etta shrugged. “I haven’t told my mother yet, though with the looks she gives me sometimes, I think she might just be waiting for me to confess. Dad will be upset, of course, but they won’t throw me out, or anything like that. I won’t be banished to a place for girls of easy virtue.”

Joe laughed. It was such a fresh and welcome sound, like a light in the dark or water in the desert, that Etta laughed, too. She needed this. She needed someone not to react with deathly seriousness to her dreadful situation. She wanted to pretend, if only for a few minutes, that everything was fine and normal, not life-shatteringly awful.

“Thank you,” she said, after they’d fallen into silence again. “That felt good.”

Joe smiled and leaned forward across the table, his tie hanging over his teacup. “Marry me,” he said.

“Do you love her yet?” Sebastian asks.

“No,” Walt admits to the priest. “I think I’m closer every time I say it, as if my heart follows my words, or something like that. I really like her, I care about her, I do. But …”

“But?”

Walt sighs. “But whatever it is I feel it doesn’t even begin to touch how I feel about—–” He shrugs, unwilling to say her name.

“So, why are you still trying?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you trying to love someone you don’t love and trying not to love someone you do? Why don’t you just go with the woman your heart chose, wouldn’t that be easier? Rather than trying to force it to take a hand it doesn’t know how to hold.”

“It’ll learn. And I no longer want to be alone all my life,” Walt explains. “Now I have the chance to be with someone who loves me, who I can learn to love … I’ll let go of Cora one day, I’m sure I will—”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

Walt turns toward Sebastian, looking at him through the wire mesh of the confessional. Walt doesn’t need its protection anymore, but they still sit and talk through it out of habit, which Sebastian thinks is a shame though he doesn’t say anything. Walt regards the priest curiously.

“How do you know?”

“I know more than you might imagine,” Sebastian says. “I know that a heart can hold on for a lifetime, hoping for the impossible, loving, wanting what it will never have.”

The priest falls into silence for a long time and Walt waits.

“I used to wonder why it would hold on,” Sebastian says at last, “why it would cause such suffering. Then one night I had a vision, or something like it …”

“What?” Walt asks, impatient now. “What was it?”

“I’m not so sure you’ll want to hear it,” Sebastian says, “since you’re set on doing the opposite.”

“Tell me,” Walt insists.

“It was just a feeling I had many, many years ago. But a feeling so sharp, so strong that it shook my spirit and I knew it was true.”

“What?” Walt asks, so impatient now he could rattle the mesh and shake the priest by the shoulders.

“My heart holds on because hers does, too,” Sebastian says softly. “That’s what I know to be true.”

Walt frowns. “What does that mean? What do you mean?”

“If two hearts truly love each other then they always will, even when they are apart. Unless they both let go. But if one holds on then it’s because the other one hasn’t yet let it go either.”

“But that’s not true of us,” Walt says. “She’s never loved me, so—”

“Really?” Sebastian asks. “Are you quite certain?”

Walt sits up straight. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know,” Sebastian says with a shrug. “It’s just a feeling I have.”

“Are you sure about this?” Cora frowns at herself in the mirror. She’s wearing a dress of bright red silk with a black net petticoat and feels like a chorus girl. “Is it a trick to convince me I should be a seamstress?”

Etta casts an appraising eye over the outfit. “It’s not quite right,” she admits, “the red is slightly too bright. You need something deeper, more of a maroon.” She turns and walks to the wall of dark winter gowns. “And you should know I never need to resort to tricks.”

Cora waits in the changing room until Etta returns with two dresses. “Try this one first,” she says, handing Cora a simple column of dark red silk.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Cora says, taking it.

“I can’t believe it took you so long.”

“Only twenty years.” Cora smiles, slipping the dress slowly over her head. It falls to her feet, folding her body in silk.

“So?”

Cora brushes her hand across her belly and along her hips. “It feels like sex,” she says quietly, then clamps her hand over her mouth in shock.

Etta laughs. “Really?”

Cora flushes. “I can’t—I don’t know why I said that.”

“The dresses do have rather surprising,” Etta says with a giggle, “and sometimes rather delightful effects on the women who wear them.”

“Well,” Cora says, pulling the dress back over her head and letting it float to the floor, “I don’t think I want that particular effect.”

“Are you sure?” Etta winks while she offers her granddaughter the other dress: a red velvet so dark it’s nearly purple, with a neck so low it falls over Cora’s shoulders and a hem so short it barely touches the tops of her thighs. From the fabric hangs a curtain of jet black beads reaching her knees. The delicate strings of glass swish and shimmer as she walks.

Cora stares at herself, open-mouthed, in the mirror, turning one way and then the other. “It’s … obscene,” she says, not wanting to admit that it’s quite the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, still less willing to admit that it makes her feel more beautiful and powerful than she’s ever felt in her life.

Etta claps. “It’s magnificent.”

“Well, yes,” Cora admits, unable to deny the truth of such a fitting word. “I suppose it is.”

“How does it make you feel?”

Cora closes her eyes to search for the perfect words, but can’t find any more apt than the one her grandmother chose.
“Magnificent,” she says with a sigh. “It makes me feel magnificent.”

“Perfect.” Etta laughs. “And what does it make you want?”

Cora considers. She gazes at the dress and swishes the beads slightly from side to side. As she strokes her fingers around her waist, an answer slips into her heart. Walt. Her eyes widen in surprise.

Etta smiles. “What is it?”

But Cora can’t say his name. She can’t say it to herself, let alone her grandmother. So instead she says something else, something that at least makes some sort of sense.

“I want to know what happened to my parents,” Cora says. “I need to know the truth.”

“Well,” Etta says, “I suppose that will have to do for a start.”

Chapter Twenty

C
ora sits on her sofa in her T-shirt and pajama pants. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and she’s got nothing important to do. She doesn’t have a lab to get to, a scientific breakthrough to make, a chance to save the world or at least make it a bit better than it was before. She’s not exactly sure how she’s going to go about solving the mystery of her parents’ deaths. What’s the next step? She needs to think about it from a scientific viewpoint; solving a suspicious death can’t be any harder than solving world hunger would be, in fact one would imagine it’d be decidedly easier.

Cora glances at a box at her feet, a box of cream linen edged with gold and on it, in colors that change whenever Cora looks again, are embossed the words A S
TITCH IN
T
IME
. Inside the box is the red velvet dress, a talisman, an amulet, a charm, quite the most magical thing Cora has ever owned. She hasn’t tried it on
again since last night but she can feel it lying folded in its special box, waiting, calling to her, whispering promises of possibilities, of what might be to come.

Cora hasn’t had the courage to even open the box and touch it without Etta there. What she felt when she wore it was so startling, so incredible, it hit her with such electric force that Cora needs to wait awhile before submitting herself to it again, stepping into the power of that particular whirlwind.

Last night she dreamed of her parents again, and of Walt. When Cora woke she realized they hadn’t been just dreams but memories. Walt was ten years old, she was twelve. She’d stepped out of her grandmother’s shop to see him waving at her from the bookshop doorway.

“What is it?” Cora asked as she reached him.

“I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“What?”

“We’re going on an adventure,” Walt said. Then, seeing the spark of fear ignite in Cora’s eyes, he reached out his hand. “It’s okay, you’ll love it, I promise. We won’t be going far. It’s just under our feet.”

Cora smiled. “The tunnels.”

“Exactly.”

“But how did you—?”

“My dad knows someone at Trinity College.” Walt sat a little straighter and grinned. “He’s going to show us the caves.”

“When?”

“Today, if you like.”

“Really?” The idea of more than twenty-five thousand bottles of wine, of counting as many of them as she could, rose inside Cora and she was barely able to contain her excitement.

“Sure.” Walt stood up. “Come with me.”

Less than an hour later Cora and Walt were standing at the entrance, gazing down at a deep hole in the ground, a flight of wooden stairs—13 visible steps—that led down into darkness. Next to them stood the Trinity College sommelier, a man whose name, in all the excitement, they’d both already forgotten.

“So kids,” he said, “you ready to follow me?”

“Yes,” Cora piped up. Now that she stood just on the edge of adventure all her fear had evaporated and she bubbled over with excitement to enter this cavern of counting, all these rare and precious bottles simply waiting to be categorized, computed and calculated.