A Fallen Woman. Nancy Carson

so as to lay and measure a length of the pastel blue satin across the well-worn counter. ‘Mind you, he’s had lots to take his mind off it, getting our house ready.’

      ‘So you’re not going to live with his father and mother?’

      ‘Perish the thought,’ the bride-to-be answered, rolling her eyes. ‘At that surgery? Among all those poor sick folks that continually turn up for evil-smelling potions?’

      The two customers were laughing at Harriet’s derision when they heard a commotion of tin buckets clanging together from the yard at the rear of the shop; the maid was evidently on a mission of sorts from the living quarters upstairs. Eventually, the rear door of the shop opened and Priss, Harriet’s older sister, appeared.

      ‘Oh, I thought I’d seen you two heading this way when I looked out of our front room window upstairs,’ she said, making no reference to the noise outside for fear of drawing unnecessary attention to the minor calamity in the household’s censored sanitation arrangements. ‘How are you both?’

      ‘We’re well, thank you,’ Aurelia said pertly. ‘We’re after stuff for dresses for the wedding. We were just talking about the bridegroom.’

      ‘Clarence? Oh, I suspect poor Clarence is a little daunted by it all, Aurelia,’ Priss suggested. ‘I feel quite sorry for him. After all, not only will he come out of it with a mother-in-law, but six sisters-in-law as well. I think the awful truth is just dawning on him.’

      ‘I rather think you’re wasting your sympathy there, dear sister,’ Harriet pronounced.

      ‘Me? I doubt it. The poor chap won’t stand a chance.’

      ‘As long as he takes notice only of me, and not the aforementioned mother-in-law and six sisters-in-law, he’ll pass muster.’

      ‘Naturally,’ Priss said in a confiding manner, addressing the two pretty customers, ‘she’ll order the poor chap about something scandalous, and expect him to obey all her bidding.’

      ‘Which will only be to his benefit,’ Harriet replied. ‘Anyway, I shall be subtle about it, and do it in such a way as he always thinks everything is his idea.’

      ‘Which makes you too clever by half.’

      ‘Well, at least I’ve been clever enough to bag myself a husband.’

      ‘You make it sound as if he’s a pheasant that you’ve shot down.’

      ‘Oh, but that’s exactly what I have done, our Priss – with Cupid’s arrows.’

      Aurelia and Marigold chuckled at their good-natured banter, and even Priss allowed herself one of her lop-sided smiles.

      ‘Ain’t you a-courting yet, Priss,’ Marigold enquired.

      Priss opened her mouth to speak, but Harriet beat her to it. ‘Oh, she’s had her eye on the curate for too long now to give up hope of ever bagging him. She’s getting rather set in her ways as well. It’s either the curate or eternal spinsterdom, but I fancy it’ll be the latter, eh, Priss?’

      ‘Either way it could amount to the same thing in effect,’ Priss admitted with a sigh. ‘I have personal qualms that a curate might entertain notions of celibacy.’

      ‘Celibacy?’ Marigold queried with a mystified look at Aurelia for an explanation of the word’s meaning.

      ‘No hanky-panky in bed.’

      Marigold rolled her eyes in disbelief. Such a notion was alien to her. ‘What, and miss out on all the fun?’ said she earnestly. ‘You don’t want none of that celibacy, Priss.’

      ‘Thank you, Marigold,’ Harriet remarked with a twinkle in her eye, ‘for confirming that sort of thing is fun.’

      ‘Well, it is and no two ways,’ she affirmed, then turned to Priss. ‘Ain’t there nobody else you fancy, Priss, who might be less inclined to this celibacy nonsense?’

      ‘She once had a crush on the apothecary, Mr Tapper, didn’t you, dear?’ Harriet answered for her with a shrug. ‘But nothing came of that either.’

      ‘There’ll be somebody waiting just around the corner, you’ll see,’ Marigold suggested with evident sympathy.

      ‘Oh, tell me which corner and I’ll skip over there at once.’

      They all laughed.

      ‘Anyway…this pastel blue satin,’ Marigold remarked, reverting to the task in hand. ‘How much d’you reckon I’ll need, Harriet?’

      Harriet looked Marigold up and down. ‘Not that much, you’re so outrageously slender. Shall you want new underskirts as well?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ Aurelia urged with a nudge. ‘Taffeta. I’m sure Algie can afford it.’

      ‘Taffeta?’

      ‘Dear me, yes. The whispering sound it makes when you walk has such an effect on men.’

      All the girls giggled conspiratorially.

      ‘As long as it has the same effect on Algie,’ Marigold remarked.

      ‘Perhaps you should wear taffeta underskirts to encourage the curate, our Priss,’ remarked Harriet.

      ‘I suppose it’s worth a try,’ Priss agreed.

      Harriet unrolled more of the material across the counter. She measured the length she was to cut off against the brass yard-measure fastened along its edge, and began to wield her scissors.

      ‘So, Aurelia, how is Benjamin? I haven’t seen him since that cricket match he and Clarence played in, in July.’

      ‘Oh, please don’t bring Benjamin up in conversation,’ Aurelia remarked, with genuine indifference. ‘I’ve come out of the house to forget him, and I’d really rather not be reminded of him while I’m out.’

      The girls, glancing from one to the other, smiled sympathetically, Harriet and Priss half aware of the truth of it.

      ‘D’you see what you have to look forward to, our Harriet?’ Priss remarked. ‘I suppose you’ll end up completely apathetic towards your husband as well.’

      ‘At least I shall have a husband to be apathetic towards.’

      Priss turned to the other two and rolled her eyes. ‘Isn’t our Harriet a goose? I shall be so glad when the school holidays are over – I get less backchat from my pupils than I do from her.’

      ‘Oh, no, let the school holidays go on forever,’ Aurelia proclaimed. ‘You two are a regular double act, and we find you most entertaining, don’t we, Marigold?’

      ‘Better than a Punch and Judy show any day of the week.’

      * * *

      The bell of the shop doorway pinged pleasantly again as Marigold and Aurelia stepped outside into the warm sunshine. Carrying their respective parcels of silk, satin and taffeta, they made their way along Brierley Hill’s main street, towards the home of Mrs Palethorpe.

      ‘I feel so blessed, you know,’ Marigold confided. ‘When I was on the narrowboats my father could never have afforded to buy me a satin dress and have it made up by my own seamstress.’

      ‘I suppose it makes you appreciate it all the more,’ Aurelia acknowledged.

      ‘No two ways. I still can’t believe me luck. When I think back to when I had our Rose and I still didn’t know what had happened to Algie, and then I look at what I’ve got now – married to him and going to the dressmaker’s to be measured for a lovely new dress…Yet it’s something I s’pose you’ve always been used to, Aurelia?’

      A brewery dray delivering barrels of ale paused at the cobbled entrance of the Turk’s Head public house which also served as tramcar waiting rooms. Marigold and Aurelia tarried to let it pass, and its iron-tyred wheels clattered over the