Page 54 of Borrowed Time

“Well, let’s check with the seamstress first,” he said. “I suppose wearing a secondhand dress is better than showing up to dinner in a gown the Wilcox ladies might recognize, but still, something new would be better.”

“Especially if that secondhand dress turned out to be something the Wilcoxes themselves put up for sale,” Devynn remarked, an amused glint in her eyes.

Seth had a feeling that the Wilcox women would never lower themselves to do such a thing, and probably donated their clothes to charity once they were too worn or had gone out of style, but it wasn’t worth worrying about now.

No, the important thing was to find out if the seamstress actually had something that would work for Devynn.

Except….

“Why weren’t you worried about them recognizing your dress when they stopped to chat with us at lunch the other day?”

A dimple showed on her cheek, and the look she gave him was positively indulgent.

“Because I was sitting down at a table, and they couldn’t even see most of it. Also, it was drafty in there, so I kept on my shawl.”

That’s right — she had been wearing a flowered shawl of fine wool challis, one colorful enough that it probably would have distracted a casual observer from paying much attention to the gown underneath.

But when they went to dinner, she wouldn’t be hiding behind a table…at least, not at first. Seth still wasn’t clear on exactly how much time her mother had spent around the women of the Wilcox clan, and yet he could tell Devynn was worried.

Which meant he should be concerned as well.

“All right,” he said cheerfully. “It looks like it’s time to go shopping.”

14

MOVING THE CLOCK AHEAD

I knewit had been something of a long shot to go to Mrs. Adams’ shop to see if she had anything that might work for me…but as any longtime fan of horse racing could tell you, sometimes long shots paid off.

“As it turns out, I do have something that might work,” she told me after I explained that we had an unexpected dinner engagement and that I wasn’t sure whether anything I had with me would be appropriate. “Lily Martin commissioned it from me, but then her mother passed and she had to wear mourning and couldn’t take the gown after all. I told her not to worry about paying me, given the circumstances, but I can tell you that it would be good to get it off my hands. Just a moment.”

She headed into a small room at the back of her shop, presumably the place where she hung the finished garments that needed to be picked up. Because Mrs. Adams had already asked Seth and me to sit down, there wasn’t much to do except wait and hope the dress she had in mind would be even remotely suitable.

A moment later, she returned, a gorgeous confection in a deep sapphire blue draped across her arms. “I think the colorwill suit you very well,” she said. “But it’s probably better if you tried it on. While Miss Martin is close to you in size, it might still need a few adjustments.”

“Would you be able to get the alterations done in time?” I asked, knowing I probably sounded a little too anxious over something that in the grand scheme of things really wasn’t terribly consequential.

Mrs. Adams, to my relief, didn’t look concerned. She seemed to be somewhere in her fifties, with threads of gray in her light brown hair and sharp blue eyes with laugh lines around them. “Oh, it’s the sort of thing that will only take me a few hours at the most. But we won’t know until you try it on — go ahead and step behind the screen and see. Will you need any help?”

Because the new dress also had a bodice that buttoned up the front, I thought I’d probably be able to manage on my own. I reassured the dressmaker that I would be fine, then took the gown from her and went behind the folding Japanese screen she’d indicated. Through all this, Seth had remained silent, as if he knew he was mostly there for moral support and didn’t have all that much to contribute to the conversation.

A rack outfitted with several wooden hangers waited behind the screen, obviously placed there so clients could hang up their clothes while trying on a new commission. My fingers raced down the velvet-covered buttons of my dress, and I hung up the bodice and the overskirt and underskirt before turning to the gown Mrs. Adams had given me.

As much as I might have liked to put the bodice on first to test the fit, I knew there was an order to this sort of thing. First the underskirt, and then the apron-style overskirt with its carefully gathered bustle, and then finally the bodice, which had filmy silk lace around the neckline and fastened with a series of hooks and eyes cleverly hidden by pleated and ruched decorations made ofthe same fine wool challis as the rest of the gown, with two rows of faux buttons in warm burnished brass as an extra accent.

The whole ensemble was just gorgeous — and also just a bit too big. I moved out from behind the screen, and immediately, Mrs. Adams came over to me, a pincushion strapped around one wrist.

“Yes, I thought it might be a little too large. Still” — she paused there and plucked a few pins from their little velvet cushion, expertly pulling on the seams that needed to be taken in — “not by too much. A little tuck here and there, and this dress will look like it was made for you.”

“I really appreciate it,” I told her, then hesitated. While it always felt weird to ask about money in a society so much more polite than the one I’d come from, this was a business transaction, after all. It wasn’t as though I could expect the dressmaker to give me an obviously expensive gown out of the goodness of her heart. “How much do I owe you?”

“Twenty dollars,” Mrs. Adams said without missing a beat.

Which I knew was a lot…the equivalent of hundreds of dollars in modern money. However, the gown was a work of art, and it wasn’t as though we didn’t have the cash, thanks to Jeremiah Wilcox’s largesse.

In fact, Seth stood up immediately, reaching in his pocket for several of the gold coins Jeremiah had given him. “Here you are, Mrs. Adams,” he said. “We’re very grateful that you were able to find something for our dinner tomorrow night.”

She smiled. “And I’m grateful that I was able to find a home for that dress, since I couldn’t think of who else might want it. The only person with the budget for such things and whose coloring would suit might have been Mrs. Samuel Wilcox, but since she just ordered three gowns from me at the beginning of October, I doubt she would have wanted something else new so soon.”

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