The Forgotten Seamstress by Liz Trenow Page B

flower designs and silver threads running through them. Miss G must have kept them for some reason, but most of the scraps was so small I couldn’t think what they’d’ve been useful for. Then I remembered the quilt I’d started at The Castle, what got left behind. Looking through these beautiful strips and squares I got the notion that perhaps I could start a new quilt, to keep me hands and thoughts busy in the lonely times?
    I was just about to stuff some of the fabrics into my pockets so’s I could get started on something, when I got an attack of the nerves.
    ‘What if someone notices?’ I thought to myself. ‘I could be accused of theft.’
    But after a few days I got to thinking that by the time Miss G got back she’d never remember what was there, so I started taking a few scraps at a time, hidden under my uniform, back to the bedroom, and hiding them in the kit bag under my bed. All over that long winter I got a bit possessed by it, working on the design in every spare moment – it was a way of escaping my loneliness. Then I set to cutting out the fabric shapes, tacking them onto paper templates, ready for sewing them together in the right patterns.
    By the time spring 1914 arrived I’d completed the central panel, an embroidered lover’s knot, a double row of pale lavender chain stitch in twelve-strand spun silk twist onto a square of beautiful cream silk damask made up of four smaller squares. I turned the square onto one point, cut eight more triangles of damask and sewed them together in pairs to create four larger triangles which would fill in the corners to complete a new square. I got it into my foolish head that by creating a symbol of my love for the prince I was keeping it alive for the future, and even dreamed, poor mug that I was, that we might one day sleep together beneath my quilt.
    Nora had been stepping out with a footman called Charlie for about three months, and she was so brimming with happiness she couldn’t keep it to herself. At work, she talked about the lad all the time. He seemed nice enough even though he had an outbreak of spots on his face like a raisin pudding, and had to wear pan-cake when in uniform to avoid upsetting them upstairs.
    I was ever so glad to have her friendship back, even though I now played second fiddle to Charlie. Being a footman he ate in the main servants’ hall, and heard a higher level of gossip than us lowly maids, which is how I learned that the prince was back in London to enjoy his first ‘season’. The only time I’d ever heard that phrase used before was about rutting dogs and Nora soon confirmed it was a similar thing for humans. ‘It’s when posh boys are introduced to posh girls and matched up for marriage,’ she told me, and it was bitter news to my ears, hearing about the endless round of balls and parties, and many tales of how the prince loved to dance, and the beautiful young ladies who flocked to his side.
    The cracks in my heart were well and truly broken and then, at the end of July, when we heard that Britain had declared war with Germany, the rest of the world also seemed to be falling apart. Charlie talked about signing up to fight and Nora was desperate to stop him.
    In November, quite out of the blue, I was on my own in the sewing room when Finch appeared at the door and ordered me to report to the prince’s chamber, immediately. Well, of course, I went into a spin, flapping around to make sure I had everything I might need in my ‘basket of necessaries’.
    This was not the usual time – it was the middle of the afternoon – and as I stood outside his door pinching my cheeks and biting my lips to give them a little colour, my heart was like cannon fire in my chest and my nerves jangled so much I was afraid I might faint before I could step over the threshold. The only thing keeping me on my feet was sheer bloody-mindedness. I refused to have him open the door and find me passed out in a heap on the ground.
    Nearly two