The Forgotten Seamstress (34 page)

The nightmare continued: they sedated me, and admitted me to Helena Hall. What terrible irony: my guilt had rendered me insane. The perfect punishment for my sins.

I was not put into the same ward as Maria, thank goodness, although for a few terrifying days I became convinced that she was by my bedside, demanding to know why I had stolen her child. They drugged me heavily for several weeks and then slowly began to reduce the dose, but the world around me remained muffled, as if a blanket of cotton wool had been thrown over it.

After a while they discharged me, with tablets to take every day. These made me feel disjointed, out of touch with reality, colours appeared faded, sounds were monotonous, food tasteless and unappetising. But they also dulled the pain of guilt. It seemed a fair deal: I had stolen a life, now my life had been stolen from me. Like a pact with the devil.

All that changed with the advent of the Second World War, dearest boy. When you joined the Navy, every waking moment was a living hell of anxiety. When the war ended, the relief of having you home safely seemed so much more important than my previous concerns, and life returned to normal. You found your niche in the academic world and married your beautiful Eleanor.

With your new job, you have now moved closer to us, which is a great solace in our fading years, and your lovely daughter Caroline has arrived, a granddaughter for me, and surely the most wonderful gift I could ever have hoped for.

We have to make the most of what life offers us, for better or worse. You could not have been a better son, and we have both loved you with all our hearts. Please do not utter a word to your father that I have told you all of this. And above all, please forgive me.

Your loving mother,

Jean.

By page three my eyes were already swimming, and I had no choice but to stop reading and fetch a roll of kitchen paper to prevent the tears cascading onto the pages and smudging my grandmother’s careful handwriting.

Finally, after reading those final, tender words, I slumped back into the sofa with my eyes closed, exhausted by the emotional rollercoaster I’d been on. It was the way Granny had described the sorrow of her childlessness – ‘invading my thoughts night and day’ – that first started me weeping. To my eyes she’d always been such a strong, positive person and to read of her suffering in silence, out of simple loyalty to her husband, was almost too hard to bear. Then, as she told of her meeting with Maria, I began to anticipate, instinctively, what she was going to say, but could scarcely bear to read on. The implications were just too much to take in.

Everything I’d discovered over the past few weeks now added up: Granny Jean was the ‘Margaret’ that Maria had talked about on the tapes. She had run away because the coincidence was just too great: my father’s birthday had always been celebrated on 12th November, but he had actually arrived in her arms the day before, 11th November 1918, Armistice Day, the day that Maria gave birth to her baby boy.

What must it have been like for my grandmother, knowing only too well the sorrow of childlessness, finding herself face to face with the woman whose child she had quite unwittingly, and at first unwillingly, taken as her own? And then enduring the pain of guilt and shame, living with it every minute of every day for most of her life, a terrible burden she had been unable to share with another soul? What a bitter irony that she too had ended up in the same hospital, having had a nervous breakdown.

I could still hear Maria’s voice describing the day she arrived at Helena Hall and the child she nearly died giving birth to with only the aid of inexperienced and probably uncaring nurses. I began to ache all over again for her too; for the baby snatched from her, for the lie she was told. And all the while she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she had heard his cry and that he might, just possibly, still be alive. I could understand why this had sent her crazy.

The labyrinth of sorrow and guilt that had bound these two strangers’ lives together was almost impossible to comprehend.

In the deluge of emotions the notebook had triggered, the most extraordinary consequence of this tangled web had, at first, passed me by. Now, it slammed me in the stomach with a sickening whack: the realisation that if a) my own father was very probably – no, almost certainly – Maria’s baby and b) the crest on the letter really did prove Maria’s claim that she’d had an affair with the prince, and if c) her child really had been his, then d) my father was the bastard son of the Prince of Wales!

For God’s sake, that was just mad, stupid, plain ridiculous. Me, a lifelong republican who didn’t care a jot for the royal family, who didn’t even watch Diana’s wedding on television or turn out to see the queen when she came to Eastchester to open a new school?

The idea of a royal grandfather – especially a man who had been a disgraceful philanderer in his youth and a Nazi sympathiser in middle age – was distasteful enough, but further alarming visions swam into my head: of the story leaking out, of being doorstepped by the press and papped as I went to the supermarket, followed of course by palace denials, setting me up to look like an attention-seeking idiot.

No. I would never let it happen. In that moment I vowed that this was the one proven part of Maria’s story that I’d tell no one. Not Mum, not Ben, not any friend, boyfriend or even any future husband and family I might have.

Only Ellie Bevan knew about the crest on the template. I would call her tomorrow and request her professional confidentiality. Granny’s letter and notebook made no mention of the Prince of Wales and, though Patsy Morton had of course heard the tapes, she had no reason to believe Maria’s story. Mum probably hadn’t known in the first place, and it seemed unlikely that she would tell anyone, not now. I might whisper it to Jo one day, out of friendship and loyalty, but she would entirely understand why no one else should ever know.

I determined that the secret would remain hidden in the quilt, just as it had already been for nearly a century.

I poured another glass of wine and tried to rationalise my emotions. From the moment I had pulled the quilt out of its suitcase, just a few weeks ago, and read that verse sewn into its lining, I’d known that there was something special about it. Now I understood.

I took out the photograph. There was Granny, still sitting on her sofa, with Maria behind her, her shoulder turned as if she was just leaving, or perhaps arriving. But there was something familiar about it that I hadn’t noticed before. The pattern of Maria’s dress – was it one of the cottons she’d used in the patchwork? I fetched the quilt from the boot of the car, and spread it carefully across Mum’s dining table, scanning the patches, comparing them to the dress in the photograph.

None matched. So where could I have seen this fabric before? Then I had a brainwave, went to the bookshelf, pulled out the album and turned to the back page where I’d found the photograph. There was the other snap of me, sitting on Granny’s knee. Her face is out of the picture but she is holding a book, in which I appear to be totally absorbed.

Except that Granny is wearing Maria’s dress.

It took a second to click: the knee on which I was sitting was not Granny’s, it was Maria’s. She was holding me on her knee and reading to me. I peeled back the transparent film and lifted the photo from the page. Then I turned it over: on it was pencilled:
‘Maria meets Caroline, February 1972’
.

As the memory flooded back, with almost painful clarity, the breath seemed to leave my body. That time I had stayed at Granny’s house, the night she told me about the quilt, she had mentioned an ‘important person’ coming to tea the following day. She must have been referring to Maria, my
blood
grandmother, the woman for whom her greatest luxury was a bottle of
eau de cologne
. I could almost smell the lavender-scented perfume all over again.

It was probably our very first meeting.

Tears pricked the back of my eyes once more as I imagined how Maria must have felt that day. She hadn’t found the boy she believed to be her son, but at least she discovered that he’d lived a happy life, had been much loved and cherished, become a successful academic, married and had a daughter. Tragically she never got to meet him but at least now, through the generosity of the woman who once befriended her, she was reunited with her granddaughter.

From the moment I’d heard her voice on the tapes, I had felt an unexplained affinity for her. Was it simply the timbre of her voice that I recognised, or her wicked chuckle, perhaps passed down through my genes? Certainly I admired her fierce determination to make the most of her life, to fight on undaunted, so like my grandmother, like my mother – and, I hoped, like me.

After almost a whole lifetime, Maria had completed her quilt, decorating its outermost border with grandmother’s fan designs that, I now realised, were probably intended for me, her grandchild. And then, through Granny, she had bequeathed it to me, with her life’s history and memories of the people she had loved sewn into its patchwork.

That my beloved Granny Jean was not my blood grandmother made not one iota of difference to me – she would always be the most important in my family memories and my sense of identity. Rather than losing a grandmother, it felt as though I had simply gained another one.

And, after all those years of hardship, there was a happy ending, of sorts. Maria had found the comfort of her friendship with Nora and, in her last few years, contact with her granddaughter. She had come home at last.

‘Coming home’. The words resonated in my head. Being here, in this cottage, always felt like coming home for me. So why was I resisting it?

It made perfect financial sense: selling the flat would enable me to pay off Russell and release start-up capital to support my new venture, such as equipping the garage as an upholstery workshop. It would pay for Mum to stay at Holmfield if she wanted to, or for carers to look after her at home instead, should she prefer.

As I contemplated these possibilities I could feel a heady sense of certainty returning, and my mind began to buzz with optimism once more. In the past few weeks my life had changed so much that I barely recognised my former self: that aspirational, high-earning, eighteen-hour-a-day wage slave. Those values now appeared trivial and irrelevant, and even my visual sensibilities seemed to have been through a radical rethink. The clean, minimalist colours of my flat that I’d once loved so much had started to feel cold and characterless of late, especially in contrast to the brilliance of the fabrics for the new upholstery designs I’d been working on.

I pictured the skeletons of the chair and stool in my flat, and the mess of webbing and wadding I’d left behind. The solution was now obvious. No matter the cost, I would employ a professional upholsterer to complete the work on the chair and footstool. If Justin’s clients were, as I hoped, to fall instantly in love with them, the workmanship must be of the highest possible standard. My reputation as an up-and-coming designer depended on it.

Of course much needed to be done to turn this neglected cottage, with its chaotic, clashing colours and designs, the sagging shelves and draughty windows, into somewhere that would really feel like my own home. There were obvious priorities, new central heating for a start, and over time I would redecorate the place inside and out.

But, instead of being daunting, the idea excited me: as well as the garage/workshop, I could even use the rooms as a showcase for my interior designs. There would be no cream carpets or soft leather sofas. It would be a warm, inviting
family
home. The phrase felt so right.

And the quilt, when it was restored, would take pride of place – always there to remind me of my two remarkable grandmothers.

Just then, my phone beeped. The text read:
See you in ten. Ben x.

Q1: What was your inspiration for writing
The Forgotten Seamstress
?

I come from a silk weaving family and have always been fascinated by fabrics. One day I was visiting the famous Warner Archive, in Braintree, Essex, when I saw a case of ‘May Silks’ – beautiful cream and white damasks and brocades, some with interwoven gold and silver threads, hand-woven for the trousseau of Princess May (1867–1953), also known as Mary of Teck, for her wedding to the heir to the British throne, the Duke of Clarence.

Sadly, the Duke died just six weeks before the wedding and, with typical royal pragmatism, it was decided that she should instead marry his younger brother George, who later became King George V. Another design from the May silks was chosen for her wedding dress.

More than a century later, these silks still glimmered and shimmered in their case, and I became fascinated by the way that the designs, featuring roses, thistles and shamrocks with May blossoms and lovers’ knots, had been interpreted into the weave of the fabrics. They are truly unique, and have never been woven before or since.

Q2: Are you a quilter yourself?

I’m afraid not: I once made a very small patchwork cushion cover out of simple hexagons, but beyond that have absolutely no experience of quilting. However I have always been captivated by the way that quilters manage to juxtapose and manipulate fabrics into such extraordinary and unexpected effects.

A few years ago I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Quilt Show, of 70 quilts dating from 1700 to the present day, and this fascination was revived. Most of all, I was reminded of the many different ways in which quilts tell stories, and decided that I would write a novel one day in which a quilt would become a ‘main character’.

As I set out to write
The Forgotten Seamstress
, I was incredibly fortunate to be introduced to the internationally-acknowledged patchwork quilter, teacher and author: Lynne Edwards, who in 2008 was awarded an MBE for her services to arts and crafts. With typical enthusiasm, Lynne completely embraced the project. We met several times and, over bottles of wine and lots of laughter, ‘devised’ the quilt that Maria made, taking into account the influences and sources of inspiration that she would have had at different times of her life, and the sort of fabrics she might have had at her disposal.