The Dressmakers of London by Julia Kelly

Author:Julia Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2025-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

20 April 1942

Dear Sylvia,

Do not pretend that you know the first thing about what Mum was like.

Sincerely,

Isabelle Shelton

Chapter Twenty-Two

Sylvia lifted her head. Yes, there it was again, a rapping coming from the front of the shop.

She set her pencil down on the notebook she’d been staring at for the past ten minutes and pushed away from her mother’s desk. Then she hurried to the front door. Careful, she peeled back a bit of the blackout to peer outside. On the other side of the glass, William held up a brown paper bag.

Quickly, she let him in.

“You have perfect timing,” she said as she wrestled the blackout back in place.

“Why is that?” he asked, removing his hat.

“I was just about to force myself to start something I’ve been putting off for days.”

“And now that I’m here you can put it off a little longer?” he asked.

She grinned. “You see? The perfect excuse.”

“In that case, you might be even happier to see me.” He unrolled the scrunched-up to top of the bag to reveal a pair of parchment-wrapped sandwiches. “I thought that you might be hungry, so I brought some dinner by.”

She thought about the dish cooked by Mrs. Atkinson that was no doubt sitting in the oven at home, waiting to be heated up and eaten alone at the flat’s dining room table.

“Sandwiches sound like just the thing,” she said. “Let me give you some coupons for whatever’s in them.”

He shook his head. “There’s no need. I once did a little work for Mrs. Reynolds’s son when he had a problem with the lease on the building for his hardware shop a few roads down. She doesn’t mind adding a little extra to an order from time to time.”

She put her hand to her chest in mock horror. “Mr. Gray, are you admitting that you are dealing on the black market? And you, a solicitor.”

He shot her a smile. “I thought that the girl who used to pinch oranges from the stand outside of Mrs. Reynolds’s shop wouldn’t mind.”

“That is just one of the many grievances Mrs. Reynolds has against me,” she said.

“I remember you always used to smell like orange oil afterward,” he said.

She blushed. When she’d been younger and just learning how to primp, she used to take the peel of the stolen oranges and rub it behind her ears because she couldn’t afford scent. To think that he would have remembered a little thing like that…

“Will you come back?” she asked. “I can’t promise much in the way of dining facilities, but I can make us some tea.”

“Now that is a fair trade for sandwiches,” he said.

She led him to the office and cleared a bit of space for him before going to make tea. When she returned, she found him looking around, the unwrapped sandwiches sitting on their paper next to her notebook.

“Here you are,” she said, handing him a cup.

“Thank you,” he said. “It must have been quite the job tidying this place.”

“It was more than a tidy,” she said.

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