by Ann Birch
“And are you about to pick out some material too, Anna? There’s a fine silk in a bright green shade over there that would suit you.”
“I prefer not to shop here.”
“Really? Mr. Crimshaw has by all odds the best selection.”
“I’m going along the street to Rowsell’s.”
At that moment, they heard a giggle from the back of the store. It came from Mrs. Widmer, deep in conversation with Mrs. Robinson. Mary looked at them, and said, “God only knows what that one is up to.”
“No doubt serving up a dish of half-baked gossip for Mrs. Robinson to digest. And now, I’ll leave you to finish your shopping, Mary. We shall certainly meet at the ball.”
As Anna went out, the bell jangling behind her, she thought with envy of her friend, a pretty woman with an indulgent husband. Imagine the pleasure of living with someone who said, ‘Buy what you want.’ Dear Sam. Even though she’d been disappointed to find out that he did not have the backbone to stand up to Crimshaw, she liked him nonetheless. She’d have to watch herself. Things between them had heated up a bit too much, and if they got more involved with each other, where could it go? She could not upset that pleasant woman she had just chatted with.
And thinking of Sam, she decided she didn’t care a fig for Robert’s parsimony. She’d just focus on getting something that made her look good. “Buy what you want,” she said to herself. She loved the bright green silk which Mary had pointed out. It was the colour of the willows and maples that had burst into leaf on the front lawn of her new house. But she could not stomach Crimshaw, remembering only too well Jacob Snake’s friend, drunk in his filthy wigwam.
Bright yellow daffodils in clay pots decorated the outside of the shop of Henry Rowsell, Stationer, Bookseller and General Merchant. Here was a decent shopkeeper from whom she had bought English wallpaper for the new house and who had also supplied her with books from his small but indispensable circulating library. He was the first merchant she had known in Toronto. He had befriended her in January by providing an envoy to take her engravings to New York.
Rowsell moved forward to greet her as she opened the door of his shop. “A fine day, Mrs. Jameson.” He was a young man with pink cheeks and an abundance of brown curly hair. In contrast to Crimshaw, who smelled like the moldy interior of a beer keg, this man exuded an aura of sealing wax and ink. “I have just this morning received from Oswego a parcel of books by Sir Francis Bond Head, including Notes Made During a Journey Across the Pampas and...” He broke off, seeing her shake her head. “But these do not tempt you. Perhaps you have heard Sir Francis’s account first hand?” And now his smile changed to a grin.
“Yes, indeed, Mr. Rowsell. I have had the complete story from the llama’s mouth, so to speak.” They both laughed. “But I have a great favour to ask of you today. I need ten yards of fine silk for the Governor’s Ball. I need it soon, and I know you have contacts who might provide it for me on short notice.”
He hesitated and cleared his throat. “Perhaps I might suggest Job Crimshaw, ma’am? I understand he has a large supply of materials in his shop at the moment.”
“I must tell you that I will not give that man a penny.”
Rowsell nodded and shrugged. “The steamer from Oswego is still in the harbour. I shall send a boy immediately with a message to my agent who is on board. He will contact a dry goods store in Oswego, and the silk will be here on the next steamer, that is, within a week. But what colour would you like, ma’am, and how will I know if it will be to your taste?”
“Tell your agent I want silk the colour of our sky today or the green willows by the water. Or the daffodils in the pots on your front stoop. In fact, dear sir, I shall rely on your judgment.”
“And since you have been so obliging, ma’am, allow me to present you with one of Sir Francis’s books. If I may say so, they are not likely to be popular.” Smiling, he wrapped it for her.
TWENTY-FIVE
When Anna’s material was delivered a week later, she looked at the paper-wrapped bundle with some trepidation. It had come with a note from the Oswego merchant:
Dear Madam: I have the honour to provide for you ten yds.of my best silk. Mr. Rowsell described you as an elegant lady with fine red hair and white complexion. After much thought, I have selected this colour, and hope it is to yr. liking.
Yr. obedient servant,
Wm. Woxton
“Mrs. Hawkins,” she called. “Please, come and help me.”
Her housekeeper hurried in, wiping her hands on her apron. “What is it, ma’am?”
“Open this package, please, and tell me the worst. I’m too much of a coward to do it myself. I shall look out the front window while you cut the string.”
She heard the snip of the scissors, then...“Oh, ma’am, it be the most beautiful silk. It feels like...like cat’s fur.”
This was good. Mrs. Hawkins had a huge tabby that she loved. It followed her about all day. “But the colour, what is the colour?”
There was a pause. “Out with it, Mrs. Hawkins. Bile green? Pus yellow? Dirty-sheet grey?”
“Oh no, ma’am. Do look for yourself.”
Anna forced herself to turn. Mrs. Hawkins had rolled the silk out on the table. It was not what she would have picked herself. No, because Job Crimshaw had nothing so beautiful. It was the colour of an oak leaf in October, a burnished golden brown. She held it against her face. “Oh, Mrs. Hawkins, what do you think?”
Her housekeeper’s broad smile was answer enough.
Ottilie had sent her a pattern of the “robe de mariage de Seigneuresse Treadwell”, which had been adapted for the winter’s ballgowns in Paris and Berlin. “Treat yourself, dearest Anna,” her friend had written. “This is fashion, comme il faut. Make a splash. Let yourself go. Show the paysannes how to do it.”
“But who can make a dress for me within seven days, Mrs. Hawkins? I know of no one. There is that French woman on Market Street, highly recommended by everyone, but she is up to her eyebrows in material at the moment. Of the people I have spoken to in the last week, six of them have hired Madame, and not one of them is at all certain that she will be able to finish their dresses in time.” Anna laughed. “Oh, it would be fun to see Mrs. Powell swanning about with one sleeve missing and no buttons to close her bodice.”
“We have a friend, do we not, ma’am, who might be able to help. She would be just as good as that frog.”
“Mrs. Sykes? Do you really think she’s up to it?” Anna ran into her bedchamber, returning with the paper pattern. “She did a wonderful job of the curtains. You think she could handle this?” Ottilie had warned her that paper patterns were new to many seamstresses.
Mrs. Hawkins looked at it. “Sure, she could do that easy. And her sister told me this week that she be coming out of the jail soon. The babe will have his mother back, and the sister can go about her business. There be but one problem, ma’am. Supposing she come here to sew, she would be needing to stay. Like an itinerant.”
“An itinerant, Mrs. Hawkins? You mean she’d stay here for the duration of her task?”
Her housekeeper nodded.
“Well then, we could give her three good meals, a flood of tea, and...but we have no extra bedchamber—”
“If you be willing to buy a cot, ma’am, she could put up in the alcove by the kitchen, right next to me and my man.”
“It shall be done. I’ll go to the jail myself today and make the arrangements for her transfer. The jailer and I are quite friendly now. And he’s introduced me to the magistrate, who has the final say in these manners.”
“For sure, it will all work out, ma’am.”
“I think it will. And if she does this job well, she’ll have no problem getting work from the women of the town. It’ll be a new start for her.”
Mrs. Sykes was a small woman. She had thin, supple fingers and a dour countenance with a forehead creased, no doubt, by too much sorrow. But Mrs. Hawkins had insisted that she have a hot bath and a hearty
meal, and Anna had provided a clean gown, and all seemed well enough.
“You will be comfortable at the dining room table,” Anna said to her. “There is plenty of light from the bay window, and you can sew from the time the Chancellor leaves for work in the morning until he returns in the early evening. After that, you may spend the time as you wish. Mrs. Hawkins has a bed for you belowstairs and will provide you with food and drink whenever you request it.”
Anna’s skills had never included sewing. Her dear father, a skilled miniaturist, had taught her to draw. As a young woman, she had read books, written poems, practised on the pianoforte, taken singing lessons and become a governess at sixteen. Now she loved to sit for an hour each morning and watch Mrs. Sykes at work.
“What you do is very much like my writing,” she said, as the woman gathered the upper arm into a series of puffs with quick motions of her fingers. “You start with vast amounts of material, you cut it down into manageable lengths, you sew the various pieces together into an approximation of what you want, you try it on someone for effect, you make final careful adjustments. And voilà, a finished dress or a polished memoir.”
“Hm,” was Mrs. Sykes’s response to this flight of fancy. Her mouth was full of pins. It was clear she did not want to talk while she worked. Well, Anna could understand that.
Mrs. Hawkins took a keen interest in the creation. Looking at the drawing of the dress one morning, she said, “I declare, I never noticed before that bit of fiddle-faddle that goes down the skirt, right here.” She pointed to an asymmetrically placed string of bows, buttons, and tassels on the skirt. “I know something would work better than them geegaws.”
“Why what could that be, Mrs. Hawkins?”
“Let me work it out, ma’am. It be a surprise for sure.”
Two days later, she showed Anna a strip of black grosgrain with a motif of beautiful beaded butterflies in a rainbow of colours. “How lovely, where on earth did you get it?”
“My Indian, the one that brings the fish, he tells me his wife can do a piece of beadwork. So I say, ‘go ahead’, and here it be.”
It was the finishing touch for Mrs. Sykes’s creation. Anna tried the dress on and looked at herself in the pier-glass in her bedchamber. “Perfect,” she said.
Mrs. Hawkins looked over Anna’s shoulder into the mirror. “Perfect,” she echoed.
But the dressmaker shook her head and pointed at the gown. Anna took it off, and waited in her petticoats while the woman adjusted the busk of bone built into the bodice to keep the low front of the waistline in place. That being done, she handed the dress back to Anna, who put it on again. There was silence while she circled round and round, examining her creation from every angle.
Then she removed the pins from her mouth, put them into the pocket of her apron, and declared, “Now it is perfect.”
“Oh, Mrs. Sykes, what a wonder you are.” For the first time in seven days, the woman’s thin lips parted in a small smile.
Anna modelled the gown for her husband that evening. He put down his newspaper and watched her while she hummed a waltz and twirled round and round in front of his chair.
“Very becoming, my dear, in both colour and style. So lovely, in fact, that I shall not even ask you how much you have had to take from the household accounts to pay for it all.”
“I believe that I shall be like Cinderella at the ball, Robert.”
“And have I been cast as the ugly stepsister? Or the wicked stepmother?”
Anna did not bother to respond. Into her mind came a vision of Prince Charming. He looked a lot like Sam Jarvis.
TWENTY-SIX
On the carriageway in front of Hazelburn, John waited with the coach and pair. It was a beautiful spring night. Sam and Mary climbed up. As they moved at a fast clip west along Lot Street, the oil lamps and candles from the McGill cottage lent a soft glow to the full moon. They were just far enough north of the lake that the stink from the soap factory and the miasma of sewage from the swamp did not spoil the scent of lilacs. Sam looked across at Mary, who sat facing him. How beautiful she was.
She put her hand on her neck and touched the pink topaz necklace he had given her. He had asked Miss Siddons what would be best with the new pink gown, and she had taken a small piece of the leftover material and gone with him to the jeweller’s to pick it out. “It’s lovely,” Mary said, and her smile added its warmth to the spring air. “But could you afford it, dear Sam?”
“Worth every penny,” he said.
They turned south at Simcoe Street and headed towards King. Two blocks away from Government House, they came upon the carriages lined up on both sides of the road, their drivers calling back and forth to each other in the darkness. John drove up to the front door and helped them down.
Sir Francis and Lady Head greeted them at the top of the staircase. Sam had not met the lady before. She was even shorter than the Governor, a small fat woman with a “tolerable” complexion, as Mary had once described it.
“Our new Superintendent of Indian Affairs,” Sir Francis said.
“I hope you have something more rough and tumble for your intercourse with the savages.” Lady Head pointed at his white satin waistcoat and black silk velvet breeches.
Sam laughed, but suddenly into his mind came the memory of Jacob’s neatly appointed wigwam and the bright face of his small daughter. What did Sir Francis and his wife know about “savages”?
He could hear the sound of laughter and fiddle music from the ballroom. It was ten o’clock, and most of Toronto’s élite had already assembled. Good timing. He liked to make an entrance when there were people about to notice his arrival.
He and Mary cut fine figures tonight, he knew. His tailor had made him new court dress for the occasion. He had a black silk velvet jacket with stand-up collar that nicely contrasted the rose pink of his wife’s gown. Court dress had remained largely unchanged since the reign of George the Fourth, so his old jacket and waistcoat would still have been in style. But the maidservant had sprinkled black pepper over everything to keep out the moths, and he’d sneezed uncontrollably when he’d taken his jacket and breeches out of the armoire in the bedchamber. Better to get something new than to suffer.
They stood in the doorway of the ballroom for a minute while the assemblage stopped its chatter to look in their direction. Sam had never seen so many bosoms on display in one place. The orchestra—some of whom he recognized as soldiers from the garrison—sat behind the ornamental shrubbery at the head of the ballroom. There were loops of greenery everywhere and huge vases of lilacs and mock orange in the corners.
He felt Mary tug on his sleeve. “Come, Sam, we are just in time for the country dance.” She led him to the centre of the floor, where they joined the rows of dancers—men facing women—for the beginning of the intricate set of figures. As they waited for the opening chords of the dance, Sam heard the footman announce “Vice-Chancellor Jameson and Mrs. Jameson.” He had just time to look around and catch a fleeting glimpse of Anna’s white shoulders, narrow waist and the striking red hair twisted to the top of her head and fastened with a bright ornament.
“Hurry, Sam. They’re waiting for us to lead.”
He grasped Mary by the waist and did a quickstep down the rows of partners.
As the dance ended, the Jamesons came forward to speak to them. They made a striking couple. Anna was beautiful, and her husband looked as distinguished as a Vice-Chancellor should, but when Sam looked more closely at his rig, he was pleased to see that though the man had on a new pair of black silk hose, his court dress was definitely not new. And was there a stink of black pepper?
As Sam spoke to Jameson, he noticed George Herchmer Markland standing, arms crossed, on the opposite side of the room under a painting of a former governor. “I’m glad to see Markland here,” Sam said. “It’s a bit of a surprise after what the Gov said about him earlier in the year. I thought perhaps he’d get the cut.”
“No doubt the rumours have died out,”
Jameson said. He turned to Mary. “You are looking extremely well this evening.”
Instead of stringing out the niceties, as she usually did, Mary was staring at Anna’s gown. And Mrs. Widmer was right behind Mary, whispering to her husband from behind her raised fan. Something was definitely askew, if Sam could judge from his wife’s flushed face.
Then the penny dropped. Anna and Mary were wearing identical gowns. He’d often heard from his mother and his wife that such an event was a catastrophe. Just as he was wondering what he should do, Anna put out her hand and touched Mary’s arm gently. She leaned over and spoke into her ear. Sam heard what she said.
“If you will give me a minute, I can put things right.”
Without waiting for a response, Anna raised her voice. It was a low, melodious voice, but it carried.
“Dear Mary, I have always admired your sense of style. I believe I said once—and it has been held against me, I know—that though the women of this town have pretty frocks, they are invariably in the fashion of two or three years ago. You have always been the exception. And now, I look at you and admire you once more. Your beautiful gown is, I know, patterned after the robe de mariage de Seigneuresse Treadwell. It has, this spring, been the fashion comme il faut of Paris salons.”
Mrs. Widmer closed her fan with a click, and the buzz of voices stilled. “My dear friend, Mme. Ottilie von Goethe, daughter-in-law of the eminent writer, sent me a copy of the design of the Treadwell gown and assured me that there would be no one on this side of the Atlantic who could aspire to such a creation. And I believed her. I have been duped. At some expense, I had this gown made.” Anna fingered the bodice of her gown. “And then I come here tonight and find that you have trumped me.” She sighed. “But I do not complain. I have only admiration and envy of your fashion savoir.”