What Was I Thinking? (35 page)

“Well, then. We’ll definitely find a way to
keep you involved in the experiments. Your knowledge would be hard to replace.
Suppose, for the time being, you stay on at half time as my lady’s maid, and
help me find a replacement for you in the household.”

Sarah looked alarmed, and Augusta hastily
reassured her that her salary would stay the same. “With the other half of your
time, you may seek out a good place for your shop and make some notes on what
must be done. We’ll figure it all out, but I think it would be a very great
advantage to have a shop, so I will back you. Sorry,
we
will back you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.
And thank you, miss. Shall I
go, then?”

And I was alone with my partner. “Well! This
has been quite a morning!”

“Yes.” Augusta laughed. “I wonder if Sarah has
always had such ambitions, or if you have changed us all.”

“What I wonder,” I said, frowning a little, “is
whether she knows how to select a location, develop a budget, or write a
business plan.”

“I doubt it very much,” Augusta said, dryly,
“since
I
don’t understand what you
just said and I’ve spent most of my life on the board of a prosperous business.”

“I see. Well, we’ll just figure it out as we go
along, I guess. We can help her with all of it. For one thing, we can get a lot
of good talking done while we stir up experiments. What do you think Mrs.
Horner will choose? I would hate to lose her on the recipe development work.”

“I couldn’t say. This has certainly been a
morning of surprises.” She shook her head.

Chapter Seventeen

Social Life

The repurposed engagement party was upon us
before we had quite finished all the household arrangements. Bert brought all
the servants from the downtown house to help out and we hired some extras from
an agency. I thought Sarah and Mrs. Horner should attend as guests, since it
was now an announcement of the business, but the two of them were violently
against the idea. Bert and Augusta saw my point, but supported the notion that
our other guests might be rude to them, and Augusta reminded me that I had
promised the others they didn’t have to do anything for the business that they
didn’t want to.

Fortunately, we hadn’t said “engagement party”
on the invitations, but merely “for an important announcement,” so we didn’t
have to start the evening with explanations of the canceled engagement.

Of course, all the guests had read the
announcement in the papers, but no one asked about it. That was a benefit of
old-fashioned manners, I thought to myself. In my own time, someone would have
demanded an explanation in the middle of dinner. Now, people only wondered but
didn’t mention it.

Before dinner, there was dancing in the “good”
parlor—the main reception hall in my own time. It was a big, high-ceilinged
room with a marble floor and very fancy furniture. We had never actually used
it since my arrival. It was saved for occasions such as this. A quartet played
in the corner and the guests danced on the marble or sat and chatted on the
sofas.

I hadn’t realized the party was to be a dinner
dance until the week before, when Sarah and Augusta began consulting about my
attire. As they considered what I might wear as the guest of honor—my opinion
was not required, nor, indeed, wanted—it became clear that dancing shoes must
be purchased.

I was horrified. I didn’t know how to dance. I
didn’t even know what dances existed in this time, much less how to do them.
And from the novels I’d read in school, I had terrifying, though vague,
impressions of dance cards and stag lines and wallflowers. I knew which I would
be. Of course, if I were a wallflower, it wouldn’t need to know how to dance.
See? Always a bright side, I reminded myself.

In the event, we waltzed. Bert claimed me for
the first dance, whispered instructions in my ear, led firmly, and I got
through it without disgrace. Then his cousin, Charles, claimed me for a dance
and the evening flowed easily. I knew about half the guests at the beginning
and by the midnight dinner could match most of the faces and names.

It was a beautiful dinner party. At thirty
people, it was much too large even for the gracious dining room, so the actual
dinner was held in the solarium. The staff had removed most of the furniture
and replaced it with an enormous rented table. The electric lights were left
dark as too modern to be appropriate, and candelabra were placed around the
room, glowing from all available surfaces, and reflecting off the large
windows. Centerpieces of fall flowers alternated with tall candles the center
of the long white tablecloth.

My dinner partner, a handsome blond man named
Greg Partridge who had gone to Wash U with Bert, was very charming and funny
and we chatted easily as the numerous courses progressed.

When the savories were brought in, Bert tapped
his wine glass and stood. “Ladies and gentlemen, you were invited for an
important announcement, and the time has come to make it. It is my great honor
to announce that our guest of honor, Miss Jane Addams-Hull…”

Murmurs and glances began. Evidently, not
everyone had heard the change in plans. Bert ignored them, except to speak a
little more firmly. “The beautiful and brilliant Miss Jane Addams-Hull,
university-trained chemist, and my esteemed mother, also beautiful and
brilliant …”

Curious glances started at the mention of that
and I suppressed a smile. You really didn’t expect to hear about the mother of
the groom in an engagement announcement.

Bert soldiered on. “The two of them have made a
partnership, to use their shared acumen in bringing modern chemistry to ladies’
ablutions. Won’t you join me in a toast to the new owners of Titian Ablutions
Products for Ladies?” He raised his glass and sipped, and amid confused glances
and whispers, everyone else toasted us as well.

Charles, who clearly had the
family knack for handling tricky social situations, raised his glass high, and
said, “A toast to my lovely aunt, and to her equally lovely new business
partner!”

When everyone had taken another sip, he said
firmly, “And now, we must have a speech!”

Amid cries of “speech, speech,” Augusta and I
exchanged glances and each pointed at the other. Clearly she hadn’t anticipated
this any more than I had.

I did have experience, however rusty, at making
business speeches, and I knew it was rude to wait to be begged to perform, so I
rose when it became clear that Augusta wasn’t just being polite. She
really
didn’t want to speak.

I stood up, raised my glass to Bert and then to
Charles, thanking them both for their good wishes. That bought me a little time
to pull my thoughts together. It seemed to go over well, so I stuck with the
theme, thanking Augusta for making me so welcome in her home. I threw together a
few platitudes about progress and future and innovation and the new century,
blathered a little about healthful products for smart women, thanked everyone,
and sat down.

Chapter Eighteen

Business and Busy-ness

After the party, our new lives began in
earnest. Nothing worked out as planned, but it all worked out.

Mrs. Horner, after considerable hesitation,
nerves, and stammering, asked to be made kitchen manager for both the household
and the business. “See, I’m thinking,” she explained, “you don’t want to be
building another kitchen for to do your ointments receipts and such, but
neither do you want so hire some other cook, who would be trying to throw you
out of her kitchen. This way, I could help with the receipts, and manage the
girls what does the cooking, both.”

“Wouldn’t you be overworked?” I worried. “Isn’t
this right where we started? Which is great, by the way—don’t get me wrong—but
you were right when you said it was too much.”

“See, now, I’m thinking we could work around
that, if I had a free hand.” She looked at Augusta, but seeing only
encouragement, went on. “Mrs. Roland started me thinking, she did, when she
said I could be promoted to housekeeper. That got me thinking on what
would I
do if I was in charge.”

Her suggestion was that she
hire
a plain cook to do most of the work of getting meals on the table, as well as
two kitchen maids and a scullery maid, all of her own choosing. “Then, as I
could train them up the way I want, and they’d all know as I was in charge, and
what I says goes. We could all watch the maids and whichever one shows the most
promise, we could put to the stirrin’ and measurin’ on the potions and t’other
could be the cook’s helper.”

Then, to free herself up from all the work of
being cook-housekeeper as she had been all along, she suggested we hire a
butler and put him in charge of all the servants except those in the kitchen.
“The only look out would be, could we find a man who would understand that he’s
to manage everything
except
the
kitchen, and he’s not to cross me there, nor even come in save he’s asked.”

That seemed an excellent solution all around,
so Augusta charged her with hiring the kitchen help and with placing ads in the
papers for a butler.

Finding a butler who was up to the job and
amenable to ceding management of the kitchen staff took some time. We found
many who were willing to leave the day-to-day supervision to a cook or a
housekeeper, but the idea of a kitchen manager who didn’t report to the butler
was too much for all of the candidates who turned up in the first several
months.

We made do, deciding to close up many of the
rooms, and just do what we could handle ourselves for a while. We all worked
together, scandalizing the new staff, to put dustsheets over the furniture in
all the parlors and unused guest rooms and locking those doors.

Augusta and Mrs. Horner settled on a couple of
housemaids to keep the parts of the house we did use from, “Falling to wrack
and ruin,” and Mrs. Horner delegated their management to the new plain cook,
called Cathy.

Cathy truly was a plain cook,
which
pleased only me, but it pleased me quite a lot. I took
advantage of the staff changes to request very simple foods for my daily meals.
I still hesitated to ask for special treatment, but I asked for lean meats and
raw vegetables anyway. Since Cathy herself admitted she, “Waren’t much of a
hand for sauces and they fancies,” anyway, this worked out without too much
difficulty and my digestion thanked me daily. Without Daisy to sabotage it, my
breakfast arrived butter-free every day, though I now ate it in the dining
room.

Augusta and I had decreed that the four of us
who were active in the business must breakfast together every weekday, in order
to plan the day’s activities. She firmly put down the objections from the two
former servants by pointing out that adjusting to change is part of running a
successful business. I concurred, reminding them that as far as anyone now
working in the house knew Sarah had always been the proprietress of a shop and
Mrs. Horner a manager. Therefore, no one was in a position to think they’d
gotten uppity.

The breakfast meetings rapidly became routine,
and then
indispensable,
and no one said any more about
it. Mrs. Horner still spent most of her days in the kitchen, but she now wore
finer clothing under her apron, to suit her new station. Sarah, too,
relinquished her uniform, and, after some extensive shopping with Augusta,
settled on a new wardrobe of simple but elegant dresses suitable to the owner
of a small business.

Augusta and Sarah scouted locations for the
shop and finally decided on a two-story building several blocks away, where the
small stores that catered to the big houses on Forsythe were. I had assumed we
would rent a small space and move up as the business grew, but then, I hadn’t the
habit of thinking like a rich person and I didn’t think big enough.

Augusta bought the place outright and Sarah
decided to move into the apartment above it. The third floor was divided up
into three smaller apartments, which shared one bathroom in the hall. Augusta
negotiated with the tenants to stay on at least a year, and put Sarah in charge
of collecting rents and arranging repairs as needed.

The cosmetics business hummed along and we all
worked frantically, with help from Mrs. Horner’s well-trained staff, to package
our first run in beautiful, blue bottles tied with ribbons. We didn’t have time
to break for meals, but Mrs. Horner wouldn’t brook any nonsense about munching
sandwiches together as we worked, so Augusta and I used mealtimes to have our management
meetings, working out budgets, plans, and—to my mingled horror and amusement—a
marketing campaign.

We would be ready to stock the store by
mid-December, thus catching Christmas shoppers. Sarah would postpone the
services part of the business until after the New Year to allow time for
renovation and hiring.

I took Sarah aside and showed her my one real
bra. She was quite interested, so I explained the idea and told her about lacy
bras, exercise bras, and T-shirt bras, detailing the key features of each.
Augusta thought the whole idea was funny and couldn’t imagine wanting one, but
she had no objection to Sarah spending some of her time on the experiment. I
used all of my pocket money to fund materials and hoped for the best.