by Liz Trenow
She was on it like a heat-seeking missile. ‘Ben?’
‘Sweetman. You know, the Eastchester journalist?’
‘Oh yes, that Ben?’ She gave me a sideways look. ‘And how is Ben, then?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I mumbled. ‘I think I’ve blown it.’
‘How?’
‘Long story. I’ve apologised, but he’s gone to ground.’
‘Do you care?’
‘I’m not really sure …’ I stuttered. ‘I think so. Oh God, Jo, I don’t know.’
‘I’ve got time.’ She settled herself on the sofa, patting the seat beside her. ‘Come on, tell all. I want to know everything about Ben, and all the other things that have been happening. Every detail. That’s the price of my expert opinion on your stinky quilt.’
‘Do you mind if I pour myself a glass? What about you?’
She blushed, avoiding my glance.
‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’
She nodded, coyly.
‘Ohmigod, Jo. You’re pregnant?’ I hugged her. ‘That’s amazing news! When’s it due?’
‘I’m only six weeks gone, it’s early days. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you right away. It must be hard, after …’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Really,’ I said. ‘I’ve been so bloody busy I’ve hardly given it a thought. But I am so excited for you. It’s amazing – happened so quickly! When’s it due? Boy or girl? What does Mark say?’
‘First scan next week.’ She allowed herself to smile. ‘Mark’s really chuffed but pretending not to be, of course, and underneath I think he’s terrified. Keeps worrying about having to sell his motorbike and clear all his albums out of the spare room.’
As I poured myself a glass of wine and put the kettle on for Jo’s herbal tea, she chattered on about how she hadn’t suffered much morning sickness but felt completely exhausted all the time, about the names they’d already been discussing, and the terrifying responsibility of bringing another human being into the world.
‘Enough of this baby talk, I want to hear all about Ben,’ she said. I tried to summarise the crazy events of the past ten days: Pearl’s realisation that Queenie was indeed Maria, and how I’d listened to the tapes, then stayed at Ben’s house that night and wondered whether I regretted it, the newspaper article and our argument, our visit to the night shelter and the meeting with Dennis.
‘And I suppose this paragon of virtue is astonishingly handsome and filthy rich?’
‘Not rich at all, and not even very handsome, to be honest, but sweet-looking and sort of cuddly. He’s the sort of person who needs time to grow on you. Tall, lots of hair. Hazel eyes, the longest eyelashes you’ve ever seen.’
‘Sounds perfect.’
‘Oh, and he likes Howard Hodgkin.’
‘Better and better. But you haven’t heard from him since the row?’
I shook my head. ‘Two whole days. I wish he’d text or something, if only to say he’s forgiven me.’
‘Give him time, he’ll come round,’ she said. ‘How could he possibly resist the gorgeous, talented Caroline Meadows? And if not, you should just text him again. But give it a bit longer, don’t let him think you’re desperate.’
She was right, perhaps it just needed time to heal.
‘Tell me about these people in Bethnal Green,’ she said, wisely changing the subject. I described how we had traced the Kowalskis and their confirmation that Maria and Nora actually had both worked at the palace.
‘You know what this all means? It solves the mystery of where she got the May Silks. Do you suppose she stole them?’
‘I don’t think she was a thief. On the tape she talked about finding a bundle of scraps that her predecessor had left in a cupboard, and used them for the first panel of the quilt. But I don’t think she ever knew how precious they were.’
‘All the same, it’s brilliant to confirm where she got hold of them. I love it when history proves you right,’ she smirked. ‘I can’t wait to tell Annabel. She’ll probably try to claim all the glory for herself, but she’ll know it was me who first noticed them.’
Jo sighed a lot as we unravelled the quilt across the table. ‘Jeez, this is a mess. It’s certainly going to need professional cleaning and repair.’
‘Don’t I know it? But take a look at this.’ I showed her the rip in the edge of the hexagon, where I’d seen the paper inside.
She took out her magnifying glass and gently lifted the edge of the stitching. ‘You’re right, there is something odd in there,’ she said. ‘It looks like a template that’s been left inside for some reason. It’s unusual to find that in a finished quilt.’
‘What can we do to find out?’
‘We’d be in danger of ripping the fabric even more if we try to look from this side. What we need to do is take off this lining, and unpick whatever’s been used for the wadding, so that we can get to the back of this section.’ She rummaged in her handbag and pulled out a pair of the finest scissors I’d ever seen. ‘I’ll use these. Have you got a pair of unpicking scissors so that we can tackle it from both sides?’
‘We’re going to do this now?’ I was astonished. ‘Won’t it be a bit risky?’
‘Trust me, I’m a professional,’ she laughed. ‘It’ll have to be done some time and if you took it to a studio for repairs they would remove it anyway to fix mending mesh on the reverse. They’d put the lining back afterwards. Besides, I’m mighty curious about this template paper, aren’t you?’
‘Seems a bit drastic. And won’t it damage the cross-stitching, the poem on the lining?’
She examined it. ‘It’s not sewn through, so no problem.’
‘Then let’s go for it,’ I replied, suddenly certain. ‘It might be royal silk, but we’re not exactly endangering the Crown Jewels.’
I set up two reading lamps for extra light, and we joked about feeling like students again, working on our final projects together, as we started at opposite sides of the table, working along the edges of the quilt, carefully unpicking the sheet lining from the edges of the patchwork. It came away quite easily but revealed a more daunting task beneath. Maria had used a light woollen blanket as wadding between the quilt and the inner lining, and this was quilted to the patchwork with the finest of running stitches along the seams of each concentric frame and its borders. It must have taken her hours, and unpicking it was slow and painstaking. Her stitching was so meticulous that slipping a scissor blade beneath each tiny little loop required a steady hand to avoid piercing or pulling the delicate fabric.
As we worked, I described in more detail my meeting with Professor Morton and that extraordinary day of listening to Maria’s tapes. As I talked, snipping and releasing the stitches the seamstress had made with her own hand, I began to experience again the curious sensation that she was close by, listening to us, watching us to make sure we treated her cherished creation, the work of almost her whole lifetime, with respect.
We made more drinks and started back at our task, snipping and parting the woollen blanket from the quilt beneath as we chatted about Jo’s holiday, and her hilarious but rather terrifying camel trek. I told her about our encounter with Dennis and the way he’d stripped off his Father Christmas dressing gown in front of the assembled company without a moment’s hesitation. We discussed my struggles with the chair and footstool, and what I should do to get them completed in time.
After an hour or so we’d reached the border of elongated hexagons – which Jo called ‘lozenges’ – surrounding the inner square, where I’d found the template.
‘Come and look at this,’ she whispered.
‘What is it?’ I hurried to her side of the table.
‘Just a sec, I’ll clear it properly,’ she said, as I peered impatiently over her shoulder.
Three more snips, and the blanket pulled away. Beneath it was the back of a lozenge with the hem of the fabric tacked carefully around a piece of yellowing paper. Jo delicately lifted the hem until
we could just make out what appeared to be old-fashioned copper-plate handwriting in faded blue ink.
‘She’s used the paper for a template. See if it’s the same on your side.’ Her voice was squeaky with excitement. ‘This is extraordinary. I saw something like this in a book some years ago, about a quilt that was unfinished. But the way these papers are tacked looks as though they’ve been left in deliberately.’
I took up the scissors again, with unsteady fingers, and unpicked a few further stitches to reveal the lozenge shapes on my side of the square. Just as on the other side, the fabric had been folded over the paper templates and fixed with wide, even tacking stitches and extra back-stitches to secure the folds. Beneath the folds I could see more scraps of paper, with more handwriting. It was like excavating long-buried treasure.
‘I’ve got more words here, but I can’t really see them because of the tacking,’ I said.
‘It won’t do any harm to snip the tacking,’ Jo said. ‘Look, like this.’
I watched, in awe of her dexterity, as she carefully released the stitches and delicately folded back the wide hem of the fabric to reveal the full width of the paper template below. It was just possible to make out the words ‘My dear …’.
‘It’s a letter,’ we chorused.
‘Oh … my … God,’ I whispered. ‘Is it from her lover? The prince? Just imagine …’
‘We’ll soon find out.’
Because the paper had been cut up into shapes, the words and sentences were chopped up too and, frustratingly, some of the templates were blank. As we snipped away the tacking stitches on each side of the square, we shouted the words and syllables they revealed:
‘… and that the …’
‘… se arrangem …’
‘… my contro …’
‘… is war is mo …’
‘ … nce, May 1915 …’
‘Nineteen fifteen: it must be the Great War. And that word’s probably France. You know what this is?’ Jo looked across the quilt at me, grinning from ear to ear. ‘It’s a letter from the front,’ we said, almost in unison.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said, trying to control my excitement as I snipped around the next hexagon.
‘… that I go to …’ Jo read.
‘… eep every night dr …’
‘Keep s …’
‘It is to Maria,’ I shouted, reading out the next one. ‘Listen, it says, “… eet smile … aria.”’
Then Jo yelped, ‘It’s a love letter to Maria. Come and look at this.’
The ink was smudged and stained, but the words were clear to see: ‘… afe. I love yo …’
The four little syllables stunned us into silence. Finally I managed to gasp, ‘My God, do you realise, Jo, if this letter really is from the Prince of Wales, it proves that her story was true? She said the prince wrote to her, but I never imagined for one second that she would hide his letter inside the quilt.’
‘Steady on. We haven’t got any proof yet of who it’s from.’
‘There must be other clues. Let’s take all the pieces out so we see what the letter really says.’
She hesitated. ‘I’d be reluctant to do that right now. This is like an archaeological excavation, and we need to be careful not to destroy any evidence by mistake.’
I sat down again, struggling to curb my impatience. At last she said, ‘I’ve got an idea. We can avoid taking them out by photographing each template. Then we can assemble all the photographs on the screen and figure out what the letter says that way. What do you think?’
It was a brilliant plan. A couple of hours later, after revealing all of the templates with writing on them – twenty in all – and carefully photographing each one, we transferred the photos to my laptop and moved them around the screen like an old-fashioned computer game. When we finally got them into what seemed like the right order, they read:
… nce, May 1915 … My dear … to think … you witho … know yo … and that the … se arrangeme … beyond … my contro … his war is mo … rrible, and I may … ot retur … for ma … nths … But I wa … ou to know, a … aria,… that I go to … ep every night dr … aming of your sweet smile … and … of you … Keep safe. I love you …
‘But no signature,’ I said. ‘How frustrating. Do you think we’ve missed anything?’
Jo shook her head. ‘Only blank templates, none with writing on.’
‘It’s a beautiful letter,’ I said, reading the screen again, trying to elicit more clues. ‘A very educated hand, wouldn’t you say, hardly written by your average soldier?’
‘Even so, you can’t assume it was written by a prince,’ Jo said, stretching her shoulders with hands behind her neck. ‘Besides, he wasn’t allowed to go and fight, was he?’
‘He did go to France, just not to the front line.’ I sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. She’s such a mystery, this woman. We know she worked at Buckingham Palace. In my heart I’m sure the story about the baby is also true. Why would they have locked her away unless there was a secret they wanted to protect?’
Jo leaned back in her chair. ‘You know, what we’ve discovered this evening is extraordinary. Even if the letter is not from the Prince of Wales, it’s still a remarkable document. And what with those silks …’ she tailed off.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s even more important to get this thing properly cleaned and conserved, and to verify that these silks really are what we think they are. I know just the person. She’s a conservator and silk specialist. Used to work at the Warner Archive, and I seem to remember she wrote a thesis about the May Silks a while back.’
‘Sounds perfect. Is she in London?’
‘Tucked away in some village in Essex, I think. I can look her up.’
Chapter Eighteen
Ellie Bevan’s enthusiasm came bubbling down the telephone.
‘Wow. Double wow. If Annabel and Jo think they’re May Silks, they are probably right,’ she said, in a sing-song Welsh accent. ‘That’s extraordinary. If you can bring your quilt to me I can certainly try to verify them for you and at the same time see what we can do to clean and conserve it.’
‘When would be convenient?’
‘Next week?’ I could hear the pages of a diary being flipped. ‘Ah, I have a couple of hours free tomorrow morning, if that’s not too soon?’
‘Perfect.’ Her workshop wasn’t far from Holmfield so I could see Mum afterwards, and then go on to the cottage to finish sorting out the boxes.
There was still no news from Ben and, by now, after a few days of thinking about him and missing him, I was quite certain that I wanted to see him. Something felt unfinished: I needed to apologise properly and, hopefully, start again.
I texted: I’ll be at the cottage this evening – are you free? I can promise log fire and a good bottle of wine! Cx
Ellie Bevan’s workshop was tucked away on the edge of an insignificant Essex town in a small industrial estate, a bleak place which appeared to be only part-occupied, judging by the boarded-up windows. Her premises were unidentified – a deliberate policy to avoid drawing attention to the valuable fabrics she housed. As instructed, I parked in the bay beside the funeral mason, and telephoned her. Soon afterwards, a short, dark-haired, blue-jean-clad woman in her middle years opened the door, welcoming me with a cheery smile.
The workshop, with its white walls, ceiling and floor, and brilliant overhead lights, had the intense, hushed atmosphere of an operating theatre. An enormous table dominated the centre of the room, covered with three long sections of faded pink damask on which two young women conservators were working, wielding their delicate instruments with surgical precision. Ellie explained that they were re-arranging the threads of the light-damaged silk in readiness for attaching a fine net backing to hold the delicate tissue in place. Much of her work was for public organisations like English Heritage and the National Trust, she told me, but they did get the occasional private customer.
She led me through to a room next door
with another large table. ‘Now, let’s see what you’ve got,’ she said, pushing aside rolls of textile and piles of paper.
As we unfolded it out across the table, the quilt felt flimsy and fragile without its sheet backing and heavy wadding. Despite my attempts at cleaning, it still looked grubby and faded, but Ellie’s expert eyes were not deceived.
‘Well, that’s in a mess, but I can see it’s a very fine piece of work,’ she said approvingly, standing back and surveying it.
‘It’s the silks in the centre panels that Jo and Annabel were so excited about.’
‘Let’s make a start, then.’ She put on white gloves and trained her magnifying glass on the cream damask, exclaiming to herself: ‘Mmm … my goodness … how wonderful … quite extraordinary.’ After a few moments she said, ‘They were quite right, you know, this really does look like one of the May Silks.’
She wandered over to an untidy desk in the corner of the room, returning with a handful of loose sheets of paper, and a small booklet. ‘This is the brochure for a Warner Archive exhibition back in the nineteen eighties that I helped prepare,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Unfortunately, the photos in the brochure are all in black and white, so to revive my memory I also checked online and printed these off.’
As she laid one of the photographs onto the quilt beside the central panel, I recognised it at once. ‘There it is! The very same pattern.’ It was a perfect match to the silk with its rose, shamrock and thistle design, and the garland of ribbons.
‘I think that’s pretty convincing, don’t you?’
She opened the booklet at the front page and read out loud:
In 1891 the Duchess of Teck announced that for the wedding of her daughter, Princess May, the dresses of the bride and bridesmaids would be of British silks, which were duly commissioned from the Silver Studio and woven by Warner Brothers. Sadly, the bridegroom, the Duke of Clarence, died only two weeks before the wedding. However, Princess May later became engaged to George, the Duke’s younger brother, and it was decided to use the so-called ‘May Silks’ for their marriage on July 6th 1893, instead. Her wedding dress was made from the finest white silk and silver thread with a rose, shamrock and thistle design, including May blossoms and true lover’s knots.
