A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [54]
“You like it, then. Good. Good. M’sister does ’em. Asked me what kind of flower you liked. Told her those what d’you call ’em, pansy things. Did I get it right?”
“Completely. I shall take it out and wave it in front of people all day and touch it delicately to the tip of my nose, and all of London will admire it. It’s the nicest birthday present I’ve had.”
“Get many, did you?”
“Er, no.” Excluding the pounds, dollars, and francs, three houses, two factories, and a ranch in California, but those did not count as presents. “But I’m sure Mrs Hudson will have something for me when I see her.”
“Mr Holmes not bein’ one for gifts and all.”
“The last present he gave me was a set of picklocks. This is immeasurably nicer,” I said, waving it about. I leant over and kissed him on his bristly cheek, ignoring the furious blush this brought on, and dashed for my train.
I was outside the elves’ shop when they put up the shutters, and I spent several hours there—expense I had expected, but I’d never have believed that clothing one’s self could be so time-consuming! The two of them seemed oddly apprehensive when they ushered me into the room used for displaying the finished product (they used no live mannequins—in fact, the only people they seemed able to put up with having under foot were the two grandsons who tidied up after them, refolding the patterns, rerolling the strewn bolts of fabric, and sweeping up the pins and snippets). One glance explained their apprehension—the elves, confronted with a rail-thin woman nearly six feet tall in her stockinged feet who walked like a woodsman and hated frips and frills, had opted for drama, plain and simple.
The first piece, the only finished one, was not too bad, a suit of soft grey-blue wool with a wide band of Kashmiri-style embroidery, white and a darker blue, set into the jacket and the skirt. The fit was nearly as comfortable as my father’s old linen shirt, for which I was grateful.
Then I caught sight of their idea of an evening gown suited to me.
One of the problems I have in clothing myself is a concern that never would have come up in my mother’s day, but since the war, with dresses becoming ever more skimpy, evening wear was nearly impossible, and I had tended simply to avoid those few formal affairs I might have been tempted by. On Thursday, I had been forced to strip to the skin before Mrs Elf to demonstrate just why low necklines are not suitable: I do not care to have my fellows at table or on the dance floor offended by, or speculating on, my scar tissue. The automobile accident that killed my family when I was fourteen had left me just able to wear a cautious degree of décolleté, but five years later the bullet through my right shoulder put an end to any thoughts of bare flesh below the neck.
This dress, though—as a piece of pure engineering, it was fascinating; as a piece of evening wear, even in its present incomplete state, it transformed the padded torso on which it hung. High on the right shoulder, it dropped down to expose the left and continued down and yet farther down, the fabric barely meeting at the waist before it began a slit up the left side, where the hem angled down in a mirror image of the bodice line. The ice blue silk made it aloof—in any warmer colour, it would have been an incitement to riot.
I gulped, smiled feebly at Mrs Elf, declined her eager invitation for me to try it on, and turned to the other two half-formed outfits. One was a rich brown with slashes of crimson that looked as if they would appear and disappear with movement; the other was an intense eau-de-nil sheath with lots of little tucks and ruches that made the dressmaker’s dummy look like the representation of a woman considerably more voluptuous than I. I clutched the