The Forgotten Seamstress Read Online Free PDF Page B

place. A coronation in June when May would become Queen Mary, and after that the oldest son, whose name is David, was to be what they call
invested
as Edward, Prince of Wales. Why those people had to keep changing their names was a mystery to us. What would be wrong with Queen May, or Prince David for that matter?
    Of course we never met any of them because our lives was lived downstairs, and we weren’t involved in the planning because all the robes and gowns were made by official costumiers and designers and all the fittings took place in the royal rooms, where me and Nora had never been and never expected to. But there was such an air of excitement and tension everywhere, and because of so much coming and going, so many visitors and suchlike staying at the palace, we got more and more repairs to do: darning socks and stockings, mending torn seams, taking up hems, letting out or taking in darts.
    We never knew whose clothes we was working on – Miss Garthwaite kept all that close to her chest – but we could tell they was just servants’ clothes. Not the housemaids or outside servants of course, but the housekeeper, the butler, the valets and the ladies’ maids, we did their mending because they were too busy to do their own and because they had to be dressed perfect every time they went upstairs.
    After a while, Miss G came to trust us and started to give us more complicated work on interesting pieces which, we guessed, might belong to the lords and ladies, as some of them fabrics was so soft and beautiful, and the designs like paintings you would want to hang on your wall. Their names were strange to our ears – brocade and black bombazine, chiffon and crêpe de chine, cashmere and organzine – and this made sense when Miss G told us that most silks were called by French words, on account of the weavers who came across the Channel in the olden days.
    Every now and again she was summoned upstairs to make a last-minute mend, or adjust a hem or a dart which the ladies’ maids or valets didn’t have time for, and this turned her into a right flap. When she got back she would be flustered and huffy, snapping at anyone who dared to talk. It would take her a good hour or so to recover her nerves.
    As Coronation Day came closer there was more and more work for us, and Miss G got called more often, to the point that one day we thought she might just go pop with the stress of it all. She never said what she had been doing or who she had been helping, and we wasn’t allowed to ask her, but my curiosity was so keen I felt like a kettle boiling with its lid clamped on tight. When she went out and left us on our own we had a good laugh, Nora and me, and would sometimes get up and jump about a bit just to let off steam.
    On the big day even the underlings like us was allowed to look out of a window on the fourth floor which overlooked the palace gates and The Mall. Well, I’ve never seen so many people in one place, not before nor since. There must have been millions, like when you stir up an ants’ nest by mistake and they all come swarming about, only this lot were so packed in there was no room for them to move, so they were just standing and waving.
    There was a long procession of red and gold uniforms on horseback and eventually there was the top of the coach which looked like a crown itself, and though of course we couldn’t see inside ’cos we were looking from so high up, they told us it was Prince George and Princess May, who would come back as King George and Queen Mary. When the crowd saw the coach we could hear a cheer like a roar of thunder which went on for the whole time till everyone had passed, and then we had to go back to work.
    In the evening we was told there’d be a ten-course banquet for a hundred guests and the chefs and kitchen staff were frantic so we kept well out of their way, and after our supper we were sent back to work because Miss G kept getting summoned upstairs to help the ladies’ maids