The Queen's Dollmaker (15 page)

London, March 1786.
The crowded workroom was pulsating with activity. Claudette was supervising three workers, one a seamstress, the other two carvers. One carver, simply known as Carpenter Tom, was an ex–cabinetmaker who once swung axes and hammers equally with ease, but was now too aged and stooped for harsh carpentry work. The work of carving dolls suited him, since he could sit comfortably all day at a worktable to do so, and Claudette would let him periodically take home a finished product to a granddaughter or great-niece celebrating a natal day.

The second carver she had hired was Roger Hatfield, an enormous, barrel-chested man, whose voice could be heard resounding through the workshop even when he was whispering. He was the hairiest human being Claudette had ever seen, with not only long black hair curling down the back of his neck and a matching beard down the front, but also long tendrils of hair that dangled from his arms like a heavy growth of twining vines. Really, he seemed quite ferocious at first, with his bushy, wiggling eyebrows and massive arms, but he quickly proved to be Claudette’s and Béatrice’s fiercest protector from unruly customers. He became expert at getting the most doll limbs and parts out of a single block.

Each evening, Claudette would sort out the day’s orders, identifying hair, eye, and lip color for each doll, and sketching out the fashion to be made for it. She snipped scraps of fabric and pinned them to the order, with instructions as to what articles of clothing should be made from each fabric. She then arranged the pile of orders by importance of the customer, and left it on the carving table. Carpenter Tom or Roger, whoever arrived first to the shop, knew to begin work first on whatever order was on top.

After the carvers had spent a day or two on a doll, the carved body was wrapped in paper, along with the order, and handed over to Agnes Smoot, the seamstress, who was distantly related to Roger and whom Claudette had hired at his urging.

Agnes would also work with each doll in the order received, fingering the fabric palette that Claudette had selected and going up to the storage attic to pick out the corresponding bolts of fabric. Much to Claudette’s pleasure, Agnes would frequently add a lace trim or bow or frill to a doll’s costume that Claudette had not thought of, adding immeasurably to the creation’s aesthetic value.

Claudette’s shop hummed busily six days each week, between patrons shopping in front and workers carving, sewing, and assembling in the rear. She had even taken on a young helper, a thin, bedraggled-looking boy named Joseph Cummings who had come in begging for work.

While profits were not substantial, Claudette realized that she needed larger quarters, particularly if she wanted to begin constructing the
grandes Pandores
her father had made popular in Paris. Claudette knew that England’s elite would love the
grandes Pandores,
too; not old dour Queen Charlotte, of course, who only spent her time in bearing children and stitching embroidery, but the rest of the court, which was tired of the stilted and boring lifestyle King George and his wife had instituted.

In earlier times, the English court glittered with political intrigues, elaborate balls, and the continual jockeying for position that made being a courtier worthwhile. But in the House of Hanover, George III in particular, court had been reduced to boring games of backgammon, conversations about farming, and the attendance of endless christenings as the monarch and his wife’s only expression of zeal seemed to be in the bedroom.

Claudette’s
grandes Pandores
were what the aristocracy needed to restore enthusiasm again.

The small bedroom that she shared with Béatrice and Marguerite was now heaped with materials and supplies spilling over from the workroom. They had already blocked off a small area of the display room with a screen to hide small crates of doll parts. The attic was full of fabric bolts wrapped in tissue and corresponding laces and trims.

“I believe I’ve found the perfect place!” Béatrice was breathless from her hurried journey back to the shop. Claudette had sent her and Joseph out each day for the last two weeks on scouting missions for a new location. Until now, Béatrice had gone halfheartedly into the streets of London on these missions, returning each evening dejected.

“It’s a wonderful shop, Claudette. It has large windows at the front for display, and a huge workroom with a locking door upstairs. The shop is twice as large as this one, and very bright and cheerful. The walls have just been whitewashed and the floors polished, as well.”

The proposed location did not have sleeping quarters with it, which would force the women to seek separate accommodations. However, at first glance Claudette fell in love with the property, located on fashionable Oxford Street in Mayfair proper, and decided that the extra expenses generated would be more than made up by increased sales. She and Béatrice quickly found small but clean quarters. They were adjoining flats in a nearby building, giving each woman some privacy, which Claudette relished. Béatrice was grateful that they would not truly be apart, for she still found London to be a fearful place.

But with this move, Claudette had made an irrevocable decision to take root in England. She still thought of Jean-Philippe, but it was no longer with the intense longing of the past. She relegated him and her parents to a special corner of her mind, and periodically reached in to mentally visit them, to assure herself that they would never be forgotten.

To her own personal fury, Mr. Greycliffe had crept out of the small recess in her mind when she wasn’t paying attention, and managed to lodge himself in a vacancy in her heart she didn’t want to fill. She resolved to evict him the very moment she had time from her frantically busy days. How ridiculous to maintain even a slight affection for a married gentleman! Was she a simpleton?

Their new landlady was a widow, and more than happy to keep an eye on Marguerite when necessary, plying her with sweets, toys, and cast-off clothing from her grandchildren who now lived in far-off Yorkshire. Marguerite flourished under Mrs. Jenkins’s kindness and the more spacious quarters she occupied with her mother. Perhaps England was not so bad for a young girl, after all.

Within a month of finding their new living arrangements, the lease had been signed for the new storefront, all workshop supplies had been moved, and sample dolls were set up prettily in the window. The final touch was the hanging of the new “C. Laurent Fashion Dolls” sign, made professionally by a local sign-maker in dark green with white letters and a small doll’s head painted on it.

Almost immediately, curious onlookers were crowded about the shop, always interested when a new purveyor of goods arrived. They quickly lost interest when it turned out to be a seller of inferior items, or the same bits of laces, cosmetics or quill pens that could be found anywhere.

Claudette needed to keep the interest of the passersby, and posted a notice in the window.

O
N
M
AY THE
T
WELFTH
I
N THE YEAR OF
O
UR
L
ORD
, 1786
C
OME TO SEE A MARVELOUS NEW CREATION
!
D
IRECT FROM
F
RANCE
!
U
NIQUE AND UNHEARD OF IN ALL
E
NGLAND
A
LIMITED NUMBER OF ORDERS
WILL BE ACCEPTED AT THAT TIME

Although the English detested the French, they were intoxicated by French fashion and style. Her trials as Mrs. Ashby’s lady’s maid and her initial sales to Lady Parshall were reflections of English envy of the modes set by the Parisians.

Béatrice tilted her head to one side in front of the sign, frowning. “Whatever is it that we are going to be offering?”

“I believe the time has come for England to be introduced to the
grandes Pandores
. We are going to build two of them; one for display on May twelfth, the other that we will offer to the highest bidder to take home that day. All other buyers will have to wait a month for delivery of their creations. I want these dolls to be very much in demand.”

Béatrice’s eyes grew large. “Oh, Claudette, do you really think this will work? We’ve never made them before. What if customers don’t take to the dolls? All of the money invested will—”

Claudette smiled confidently. “It will work. We are going to set London on its ear.”

Although most of Claudette’s apprenticeship had involved working with fashion dolls, her father had dabbled in the
grandes Pandores
that had become the rage of fashionable Paris. These life-sized dolls, built on metal frames, were an extremely effective method for displaying wealth, even among those who were fabulously rich and already jaded by the luxuries of grand estate homes, gardens, jewels, and liveried servants. The dolls were difficult to create, though, and her father had soon abandoned them to return to the fashion dolls that he knew so well.

Claudette set the new workshop to an even more furious level of activity. The spacious quarters meant that the workshop could be set up in a more organized fashion. A long, wide table was in the middle of the room, and the floors were required to be swept clean after each day’s work. Around the perimeter of the room, wooden crates were affixed to the walls at angles, each containing supplies in the order in which they would be worked. Candles in scones were affixed in many places to the walls to ensure the workers had as much light as possible for their detailed work. Several woven rugs were scattered about the wooden floor, to help maintain warmth during the winter.

She stopped all other projects in the shop to have her workers learn how to build
grandes Pandores.
She first sketched out a few simple designs for this new doll, and then hired a blacksmith to build the doll’s frame. The metal grid frame was shaped like a bell to represent a woman’s flared skirt and forged onto a center pole. Another smaller bell shape was inverted and placed on top of the “skirt” to represent the torso. Now nearly five feet tall, the doll frame balanced itself on the ground. From there, the shop employees padded the frame, then went to work making stuffed arms and large wax molds for the head.

Creating these molds was the most painstaking part of the creation, and utterly unlike the woodcarving to which her employees had become expert. Claudette was surprised when Roger Hatfield quickly became most adept at knowing how hot to make the wax, and exactly how long to let it cool in the wooden mold before breaking the two halves of it apart and letting the doll head drop gently into his lap. The enormous man would coddle the mold in his hands as though it were a puppy, talking to it and coaxing it apart. His expertise came at a price, as he frequently spattered the hot, melted liquid on himself and the worktable, and Claudette and Béatrice could hear him swearing and muttering under his breath. After removing the mold from the cooled wax and smoothing down any rough parts of the head, he would gently pass it on to someone else to paint on facial features.

The final step to affix the wax heads required several tries, as they had difficulty securing them onto the enormous frames. Either Roger or Claudette would arrive at the shop in the morning to find a wax head split apart on the floor next to the frame. Eventually they hit upon pouring hot wax into a mold with two pieces of three-foot-long twine in it. When the mold was removed and the head painted and bewigged, they would place the wax head on the frame, and run the twine through the middle of the frame, securing it on opposite sides of the lower metal skirt.

While Roger and the other workers finished up the actual doll construction, Claudette took measurements for the doll’s trousseau. She designed the clothing and gave it to Agnes for sewing. Béatrice assisted Agnes later with the detail work of sewing on lace and embroidering designs on it. They gave the doll a
robe à la française
, a popular style characterized by a skirt completely open in front and draped on both sides, under which a woman wore a petticoat and other complementary garments. Agnes and Béatrice embroidered a pattern of bright butterflies in reds and oranges and pinks running down either side of the pale blue robe’s opening. They embroidered one small butterfly on the cream petticoat peeping out from underneath, to look as though the insect had somehow jumped from the robe to the undergarment.

Even young Joseph, whose work consisted mostly of cleaning and sorting supplies, understood and appreciated the magnificence of the embroidery work, and came in eagerly each morning to view the previous day’s progress before tending to his own tasks.

The two women created a very small headdress of feathers attached to a dark blue muslin cap and perched it on the side of the doll’s head, enough to complete the outfit but not enough to distract from the artistic work of the doll’s head and wig, which was pulled up high off the forehead and swept into a large pouf on top of the head, with tendrils hanging down the sides.

When the doll was completely finished, all of the shop workers stood admiring it. This was truly a new facet in their dollmaking business, one they knew would bring in yet more customers and make the shop famous. Béatrice hugged Claudette close.

“
Mon amie
, look at what you have done for us. For all of us.”

All of this work kept Claudette and her employees busy for weeks. As she saw all of the dolls take shape and become more and more human-sized, especially as their wax heads and limbs were removed from molds and set in place, she nearly clapped with happiness. What would Papa say if he were here now? She sighed. He would be proud of her. He would laugh at her boldness. And perhaps he would tell her that the eyes on one of the dolls were not evenly spaced. Hmm, that would have to be fixed.

Claudette was gratified to see a small band of onlookers already crowding the window of the shop when she arrived the morning of the presentation. The previous evening she had covered the windows with curtains, to heighten curiosity and prevent anyone having an advance look at the
grandes Pandores
. She greeted the small throng, and asked them to be patient just a few more moments while she prepared.