The Forgotten Seamstress

by Liz Trenow

  ‘What a tragic story,’ I said. ‘But a triumph of royal pragmatism.’

  She pointed to the triangular sections at each corner of the central panel. ‘This one is a different fabric. I haven’t got a photograph but I’m pretty sure it’s another May Silk.’ She read again from the booklet: ‘Other designs by Arthur Silver, many of which featured a lily-of-the-valley design, were woven for use in the wedding trousseau.’

  She gave an appreciative sigh. ‘The fact that you have two designs here makes it even more likely. This has made my day! It’s certainly a first for me in thirty years of textile conservation.’

  ‘Does it need further authentication?’ I asked. ‘Miss Smythe-Dalziel talked about the need to study the weave structure, and strand testing.’

  ‘She’s right, of course. And we can certainly do that for you. I’d also like to trace the designs and match them against the whole repeat of the pattern, which is about this long’ – she held her hands about half a metre apart – ‘but I can tell immediately from what I can see from the weave, the pattern, and the fact that it’s obviously silk with silver threads, a bit tarnished now, of course, but obviously silver, and those three things are enough to convince me.’ She seemed transfixed, barely able to take her eyes from the fabric.

  After a few long moments she turned to me: ‘Now, let me make you a coffee or tea and you can tell me where you found this extraordinary piece.’

  As the kettle boiled in a small side kitchen, I tried to explain, in as few words as possible. ‘I inherited it from my granny but she was given it by someone called Maria who, we now know, worked as a seamstress at Buckingham Palace. She was later locked up in a mental asylum – Helena Hall, you’ve probably heard of it – and she was only released in the late fifties.’

  Ellie looked doubtful. ‘The May Silks were woven long before, in the eighteen nineties. When did this woman work at the palace?’

  ‘She joined the staff when she was about fourteen, which would have been around nineteen ten,’ I said, making a quick calculation. ‘Shortly after that, the chief needlewoman went off sick and Maria was promoted. She talked about finding the fabrics in a basket in the needlework room, so they could have been collected and hidden away by her predecessor, some years before.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘We discovered that Maria was interviewed by a sociology student at the University of Essex for a research project in the seventies, and I was lucky enough to have an afternoon listening to the tapes. She pretty much poured out her whole life story, but no one believed her. The hospital records have her as a delusional fantasist.’

  ‘How extraordinary. Was she really insane, do you think?’

  ‘On the tapes she sounds completely sane. And we traced the grandson of the friend who looked after her when she was released from hospital and he confirmed that at least part of the story was true. Maria and his grandmother both worked at Buckingham Palace together. But there are some parts of her story that we haven’t been able to prove yet.’

  ‘Such as?’ she prompted, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Maria claimed she was locked up because she’d got pregnant with the Prince of Wales’s child. I know that really does sound like the fantasy of a madwoman, but take a look at this.’

  We flipped the quilt over and I lifted the hemmed fabric at the back of one of the hexagons. ‘We found twenty of these and, rather than lift them out, we took photographs.’ I gave her the printout of the ‘letter’ that we had created. ‘We think it was sent from France during the First World War and was deliberately sewn into the quilt, to hide it.’

  Ellie read it carefully. ‘Phew. I suppose you’re wondering whether it’s from the prince?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Shame there’s no signature.’

  ‘I know. It’s so tantalising. We think she might have removed it on purpose, to conceal his identity.’

  ‘You photographed all of the templates?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘All those with writing on.’

  ‘And the ones without?’

  What an odd question. ‘No, we didn’t bother with the blank ones.’

  Ellie went to her desk again, and from a drawer she took a flat-ended smooth metal blade and a small torch. Examining each hexagon in turn, she carefully lifted the hems with the metal blade to reveal the template beneath and then placed her magnifying frame over the paper and shone her torch onto it from different angles. Five minutes passed, then seven, then ten, as she worked her way all around the border as I waited, wondering what she could be searching for.

  Suddenly she shouted so loudly that it made me jump: ‘Eureka! Look at this.’

  She took a couple of very long, fine pins, to fasten the fabric back so we could more easily examine the template beneath. At first all I could see was a blank piece of cream paper, but then, as she swivelled the beam of the torch from different angles, it became clear what she had discovered: an embossed mark, so flattened by wear and damp that it had become almost invisible, until highlighted by the bright, precise ray.

  ‘It’s a crest,’ she said simply.

  ‘The Prince of Wales’s feathers! Oh my God, Maria was telling the truth. It is a love letter from the Prince of Wales. However did you know what to look for?’

  ‘It’s an old trick I use for examining the three-dimensional weave of a fabric. That can reveal secrets, and for some reason I wondered whether it might do the same for paper. Call it a sixth sense,’ she said, laughing.

  As the full implication hit me, I felt light-headed and had to sit on the stool again, repeating the lines of the verse in my head: I stitched my love into this quilt, sewn it neatly, proud and true. Maria had, literally, sewn his letter into the quilt so that she could keep his love close to her for ever.

  More than that: absolutely everything she had told Patsy Morton, the story that the psychiatrists and nurses dismissed as delusions, was all correct. Hidden in the quilt was the complete vindication of a woman who had been disbelieved and dismissed as a fantasist for most of her life. She had been locked away to avoid a royal scandal and the staff bribed to keep silent. Anyone else who heard the story thought it so ridiculous that they simply could not believe it.

  Yet she was telling the truth, all along.

  ‘You were right to leave the templates in situ,’ Ellie was saying, interrupting my thoughts. ‘This letter makes the quilt even more historically interesting and potentially valuable. Any conservation plan will need to take this into consideration.’

  Gathering my senses, I managed to explain that right now I couldn’t afford anything too expensive.

  ‘So, how would you like to proceed?’ she asked. ‘How’s about I work out some costings and we can agree then the level of work you want me to undertake?’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’ She could not start on it for several months, though, and suggested that I look after the quilt until then. This suited me. Having only just got it back in my possession I was reluctant to let it go again so soon. Besides, discovering the prince’s crest on the template had made it feel even more precious, and I was dying to show it to Jo.

  We folded the quilt carefully back into its case, I bid Ellie farewell and left with my head reeling from the latest revelations. As I drove away in the direction of Holmfield, I found myself thinking about Maria, determined to make it up to her. If I had the quilt restored and displayed, future generations would have no choice but to hear and believe her story.

  Then the sad realisation struck me: as far as we knew, she had no heirs; there were no future generations to hear her story. We had failed to find any mention of any Romano through the adoption agencies, and no one had responded to Ben’s newspaper plea. Even if he were alive, Maria’s son would be a very old man by now and, in any case, he’d disappeared without trace.

  Arriving at Holmfield, I was overjoyed to find that Mum recognised me immediately. She had obviously recovered fully from the shock of her fall, and we s
pent a happy hour or two chatting away in a series of non-sequiturs. I asked if she knew whether Maria had had a son, but she couldn’t remember who Maria was. I had to accept that the trail had gone cold.

  As I left, seeing the newspapers on the hall table at Holmfield was an unpleasant reminder of my embarrassing behaviour towards Ben. He still hadn’t texted back, and my hand had hovered over the phone many times, on the point of calling him. But I’d managed to curb my impatience, telling myself that it was best to let him decide in his own time whether he felt our relationship was important enough to forgive me. If all else failed, I would send him a handwritten ‘sorry’ card. Somehow, words on paper seem to mean much more than emails and texts.

  Back at the cottage I laid a fire and went up to my old bedroom to tackle the rest of the boxes from the loft. But I had all evening ahead of me, and there was still no news from Ben, so I started opening and sorting through them, then resealing and assigning them to separate piles, old clothes, crockery, books and the old ice-skates for ‘charity’, old shoes, linen and carpet off-cuts marked ‘tip’. The wallpaper and broken chairs would do for lighting fires. I sorted through a suitcase of toys and games – setting aside only a threadbare and once much-loved fluffy rabbit to keep – and marked it for charity.

  Finally, I opened a heavy box which appeared to contain my father’s academic papers, dating back to the 1960s. Would they be of any interest to Patsy Morton or her department, I wondered?

  Downstairs again, I lit the fire, opened a bottle of wine and settled down on the hearthrug to sort through the papers. Most seemed to be typed notes, essays and dry academic treatises that I returned to the box for taking to the university next time I was passing. Among them were also some personal letters and notes in my father’s handwriting, which I set aside on a separate pile for reading later.

  At the bottom of the box was an A4 envelope. Without thinking, I ripped it open and pulled out an old red accounts book with a well-worn cardboard cover – probably my father’s household finances, or perhaps something to do with budgeting for his department at the university. I was about to replace it in the box when I noticed a yellowing label on the front: FOR MY DEAREST RICHARD.

  I flicked through the pages, slowly coming to understand, with butterflies in my stomach, that every sheet, from cover to cover, was filled with Granny Jean’s neat, careful handwriting. At the beginning, on the first page, were four lines set out like a poem.

  Eastchester, June 1970

  The days of our years are threescore years and ten;

  and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,

  yet is their strength labour and sorrow;

  for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

  Psalm 90

  My dearest Richard

  Yesterday was my seventieth birthday picnic and, as Arthur and I sat in the sunshine with you and Eleanor, watching our precious new granddaughter sleeping contentedly in her pram, the realisation came to me. I may indeed ‘fly away’ before long but, before I go, there is something that you have to know, which must not fly with me, and which you may wish to pass on to your daughter if, and when, you see fit.

  It pains me greatly that we cannot have this conversation in person, but your father forbids it, and I must respect his wishes. He gave so much to help save our country in the Great War, and is a wonderfully loving and supportive husband and father. This is the one thing he is utterly adamant about, so I cannot deny him. You must never let him know that I have told you.

  But I happen to believe that children have a right to know about their origins, and especially as they are discovering so much about genetics these days, so cannot go to my grave in peace without telling you the truth. I pray it is not too much of a shock, and that you will forgive us both for withholding this information from you until now.

  Before I go any further I want to reiterate, once and for all, that you are everything we could ever have wanted in a son, we love you more than you can ever imagine, and you have made us very proud with your career, your lovely young wife and beautiful baby.

  Forgive me for the length of this missive, but I think it needs to be told carefully, so that you understand.

  To begin at the beginning. Your father and I fell in love at first sight. He was the most handsome, funny and kind man I had ever met. There was and never will be anyone else for me, and I am confident that the same applies to him. None of us knew what horrors the war would bring and when it came he signed up, keen to protect his country. Even though we had only known each other for a few months, I supported him. We married in October 1914, just a few weeks before he left for France.

  Your father fought bravely before being seriously wounded and was invalided home. At the time we praised God that he was returned to us alive when so many were not, but the more serious consequences of his injury only became apparent once he was discharged from hospital. There is no pleasant way to tell this but, to put it bluntly my dearest Richard, he was no longer able to participate fully in the intimate side of our married life.

  At first he told me it would soon come back and I endeavoured to be the most loving and attractive wife in the world in hopes that all would return to normal. He struggled so much to satisfy me, but nothing seemed to help. After a year passed he ordered me to divorce him and find instead, as he put it, a ‘whole’ man. I managed to persuade him that I had never felt the slightest doubt that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, and that doing without the physical side of marriage was a sacrifice I was quite prepared to make.

  But what I did not expect was that, no matter what your rational mind tells you, a woman’s desire to bear children can become utterly overwhelming. It began to affect my whole life, invading my thoughts night and day, and became an obsession, almost a mania, that I could not control. I would cross the road to avoid other people’s prams and stopped going to our local park because I could not bear to hear the children’s happy voices. When my two closest girlfriends had babies I could no longer endure spending time with them, seeing their lives so happy and fulfilled. The envy in my heart made me spiteful and mean, and our friendships withered.

  At night I dreamed about holding a warm, sweet-smelling bundle in my arms, and would weep silently into my pillow when I woke to find it wasn’t true. Arthur knew what was happening, but he would not talk about it. When I suggested, tentatively, that we might consider adoption, he became angrier than I had ever seen him before, and shouted at me: ‘I may be only half a man but if you think I’m going to admit that to some bleeding heart social worker, you’ve got another think coming. If you can’t bear the thought of spending the future with me, then you can pack your bags.’

  He grabbed his coat and left without a further word, returning after several hours slurring his words and bumping into the furniture. He was more intoxicated than I had ever witnessed before and has never been much of a drinker, so I chided myself even more for driving him to such extremes. I never dared raise the subject again, but it began to affect our marriage. We started to argue and each time he clammed up further.

  One day when I could bear it no longer I went home to my mother. But she went on asking when they were going to hear ‘the patter of little feet’, and I missed Arthur so much that after one night I went back again. He just hugged me and said ‘Welcome home’, and never said a further word about it.

  It was around this time that Arthur began attending what he called his ‘meetings’ and, though he was very secretive about it, I discovered that a friend had told him that he would never progress through the police ranks unless he joined the Masons. A few months after I returned from Mother’s, Arthur returned from one of these meetings and said he had heard of a baby that was going to be put up for adoption. I didn’t question what had taken place to change his mind, but asked him, ‘Don’t we have to be vetted first?’

  He just said, ‘Don’t you worry, love, it is all arranged. But you mustn’t say a word to anyone.’

  It w
as a few days later, on Armistice Day, he turned up with a little wriggling bundle wrapped in a hospital blanket. A new-born baby, wrinkled like an old man. As he passed you into my arms, I fell instantly in love; there is no other way of putting it. You were perfect, with plenty of blond hair and your black eyes – they had not yet turned blue – gazing intently back into mine, as if trying to puzzle out who I was.

  ‘Where did you get him?’ I asked, with my heart banging in my chest so hard I could barely breathe, but Arthur just shook his head and put his finger to his lips.

  ‘But if you haven’t signed anything, he’s not ours to have.’ The panic was threatening to stifle me. ‘It’s stealing. For goodness sake, Arthur, you could be risking your job. Take him back,’ I shouted, trying to push the little bundle back into his arms.

  In the hullabaloo you started to howl, and I was weeping too, seared with a terrible pain because I knew you were not really mine, and could be taken away at any moment.

  ‘Sit down and I’ll make us both a nice cup of tea,’ he ordered, and that is what I did, rocking you in my arms and giving you the tip of my little finger to suck on until you stopped crying and your eyes closed with weariness. Arthur came back with tea and talked in that same calm voice, lulling me into accepting that everything would be all right and that we could, in fact, keep you as our own. He produced some baby clothes, nappies and pins, as well as two glass bottles with rubber teats, and a packet of baby milk powder.

  He would not tell me where you had come from, but he promised that it was all above board. May God forgive me, but in that moment, because I so wanted to believe him, I stopped protesting and did not ask any more. If we needed to explain, he told me, we would say that you were the son of a relative who had died – as so many did in those terrible years of war – and who had entrusted us with your care. I agreed to the deceit. Even after holding you in my arms for that short time, the thought of losing you was too great an agony to contemplate.