Emma’s Secret. Barbara Taylor Bradford
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who was the middle child, was an artist and painted very well, Evan thought, and she had a small studio near the family home in Kent. Her paintings were shown in a gallery their father had created within his New Milford shop, and sold very well. People liked her evocative landscapes and sun-filled beach scenes, most especially her mother-and-child studies, which touched a chord in everyone.
In a certain way Evan had thought Glynnis was her best friend when she was growing up, and especially when she was in her late teens. She had gone to live with her grandparents in Manhattan at the age of seventeen, and after six months, when she became eighteen, she had enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Technology on West 27th Street, where she had studied fashion design, her true vocation.
Now, suddenly, her thoughts went to her grandmother’s will. She and her father had been taken aback by it. Glynnis had left almost four hundred thousand dollars, and the amount had taken their breath away momentarily.
‘Where did it all come from?’ Evan had asked her father, once they had left the lawyer’s office a few days after Glynnis’s funeral.
Owen had shrugged, looking nonplussed. ‘Damned if I know, honey, but my mother was always frugal, and also a good businesswoman. She kept my father’s books at the shop for years and she had a good head for figures, he told me. I know she liked to dabble in the stock market a bit. Over the years she did quite well, but your gran was prudent, cautious, and she also tended to scrimp and scrape. I guess that’s where her money came from – her own thrift and prudence.’
Her father had received the bulk of the money and his mother’s apartment, which Glynnis had inherited from Richard after his death several years earlier. There had been nice bequests to Elayne and Angharad, and she herself had received the sum of thirty thousand dollars, much more than the other two girls. But she was the eldest grandchild, and they had understood. Their grandmother’s few pieces of jewellery and small trinkets had been left to her sisters and herself. Very generously, Glynnis had passed on several of the really good pieces to their mother, obviously not wanting to leave Marietta out, or slight her daughter-in-law.
Follow your dreams, Owen had said to Evan. She would try. Certainly her grandmother had made that possible. Evan had been able to come to London under her own steam, without asking her father for money, and for this she was grateful.
Her grandmother’s dying words again reverberated in her head, and she couldn’t help wondering why Emma Harte was her future. What had Glynnis meant by that? Evan had no idea. And she wouldn’t know until next week, when she was well enough to go out.
Rousing herself, Evan got up, went over to the chest of drawers near the fireplace. On top of it she had arranged a selection of family photographs. She picked up the one of her grandparents and herself when she was twelve, taken here in London on the famous trip.
She stared at the photograph for a few moments, studying it. In the background were the gates of Buckingham Palace. It had been a sunny day and she was squinting into the sun, and looked sedate in a plaid skirt, a white blouse, white ankle socks and patent-leather shoes gleaming in the sunlight, their shine very visible in the picture.
She half smiled at the youthful image of herself, thinking she looked so gangly and awkward with her long legs and skinny shoulders. Her hair had been cut in bangs, a straight dark line across her forehead, and the hairstyle did not suit her. She recognized that now, but she had known it then as well.
Her grandfather, tall, straight backed, almost military in his bearing, was wearing a dark blazer and grey trousers, and looked very smart with his pale blue shirt and navy tie. His hair was pepper-and-salt, and his light grey eyes twinkled in his lean, craggy face. Still a handsome man, just as he had been in his younger days.
Her grandmother was quite amazing looking in the photograph. She had been sixty-five at the time, and she had stopped tinting her hair long before. It was a cloud of silver around her still-youthful face, and the blueness of her eyes appeared very sharp in the picture. That wide smile Evan had known and loved all of her life was in place on Glynnis’s face, which as usual reflected her loving nature.
Grandparents were important, she was fully aware of that. It was only through them that you really knew who you were, where you came from, what you were all about. In a sense, great-grandparents were of even more importance, for what you gleaned about them gave you considerably more insight into your grandparents, your parents, and yourself. You carried their genes, their blood, and also their hopes and dreams and aspirations. All of these elements were there in you, inherited, flowing down through the bloodlines over several generations. Knowing about your family background gave you a sense of direction, and of purpose, she thought, and told you so much about who and what you could become. It gave you and your life meaning.
It was because of her grandmother that she was here in London. And next week she would come face to face with her future on the day she went to Harte’s in Knightsbridge. If her grandmother was to be believed … She had faith in Glynnis; she had always had faith in her.
Once lunch with her grandfather was over, Linnet made her way to the attics in the East Wing of Pennistone Royal. She had been working up there at weekends for several months, and had almost finished cataloguing Emma’s couture clothes.
After opening the door with her key, she stepped inside and switched on the light, then stood for a moment, glancing around, a smile of pleasure flitting across her face.
These attics were special to her, more than ever since she had arranged everything the way she wanted. What made them unique was their size; they were not at all like the small, low-ceilinged rooms usually found under the eaves of most houses.
Spacious, with fairly high ceilings, they had been remodelled by her great-grandmother many, many years before. Emma had had the walls lined with cedar, the floors covered with carpeting stretching wall to wall, and she had installed excellent lighting, comparable to that used in the Harte stores. Cupboards with deep shelves had been specifically designed to hold boxes of varying sizes, where all manner of things could be safely kept free of dust. Emma had created a series of splendid storage rooms for all of her clothes, and for fashion accessories such as shoes, hats and handbags, and costume jewellery as well.
As she moved forward, Linnet couldn’t help congratulating herself on the reorganization she and her cousin India Standish had done in the last few months. When her mother had asked her to sort out the muddle in the attics, it had not taken her very long to realize there was no real muddle. The basic problem was that many racks had been pushed close together and filled with innumerable dresses, gowns, and all kinds of outfits and ensembles.
She and India had decided there was only one way to organize the clothes, once the racks had been properly spaced out. They did it by designer name rather than by category of clothing, as her mother and Aunt Emily had done some years before. Designers now had a rack, or racks, with his or her name posted in bold letters.
It had always been something of a wonder to Linnet that so much had been kept. Even as a child she had liked to roam amongst the racks of clothes, admiring the beading and the embroidery, touching the beautiful fabrics – the chiffons, satins, silks and velvets.
Her great-grandmother had had perfect taste, and everything had been kept in excellent condition by her, and later by Paula and Emily. Some years earlier her mother had installed air-conditioning, which was kept on low the whole year round, so that there was total climate control to preserve the clothing.
Normally the ensembles were kept in dust-proof, zip-up garment bags made of cotton, but she and India had taken many of the outfits out of the bags in order to make decisions about them. She glanced at them now as she walked along an aisle in between the racks; it struck her that she could use almost all of her great-grandmother’s clothes in her retrospective, especially since she was covering eighty years of fashion.
Emma’s ensembles dated back to the 1920s and featured many great designers. In particular she had favoured three French