Maddie Hatter and the Timely Taffeta Read online

  “Come on,” said Maddie, following a chattering cluster of seamstresses. “Let’s get this crazy scheme under way.”

  They joined women young and old, fresh and worn, in cheery colours and funereal black, who crowded through the narrow alley door to Madame Frangetti’s French-Italian fashion house. The door porter checked off names as they passed until he got to Serephene. He frowned at her and said something in Italian, which Maddie loosely translated as, “The boss wants to see you right away, and who is this? She’s not on my list.”

  “La signora lei si aspetta. Lei é la mia accompagnatrice.” Madame is expecting her. She is my chaperone.

  Which was nothing more than the truth—and possibly the only truth in Serephene’s outrageous plot—even though Maddie wasn’t really a widowed signora. Not that Madame would care as long as she could point to a chaperone if Serephene’s undercover apprenticeship were discovered. Well, and as long as she was paid for the Carnevale gowns Serephene would be designing and cutting for herself. Maddie yawned behind her veil and reminded herself that soon she’d be seeing fabulous fabrics such as only Venetians could weave, made into fantastical costumes only Carnevale could showcase. No English fashion reporter had ever achieved such inside access.

  Indoors, the workers split off, laundresses and dyers to the pavement level, seamstresses up a narrow back stair. The majority went straight up to the workrooms on the upper floors, but Maddie and Serephene stepped off at the piano nobile, crossing the vast marble-and-gilt salon where clients would later sit to view the costumes. On reaching Madame’s office, an austere room at the back, Maddie watched Serephene sign the papers committing herself to two weeks’ training conditions, and Maddie to two weeks under Madame’s suspicious glare.

  And suspicious the Frenchwoman was. Twice she cautioned Serephene against talking to anyone about the costumes she would be seeing. A third time she reiterated that the supposed chaperone must not dare to gossip either, until after the costumes were seen at the various Carnevale balls. Then she called her assistant in.

  “You go with this woman,” she told Maddie. “Stay where she puts you until the Lady Serephene is ready to go home. And no talking.”

  Not daring to object if it might sabotage the whole scheme right at the start, Maddie nodded to Serephene and went. Chaperones, apparently, were required only on the streets and canals. Indoors, the noble granddaughter would be under the personal care of Madame and her chosen assistants.

  Left in a tiny, stuffy room that was obviously used for staff breaks, Maddie lifted her veil and took in the surroundings where she was expected to sit out two weeks of useless mornings. They were dismal, to put it kindly. The cubby’s rickety chairs looked extremely uncomfortable and the lone window, octagonal and deep-set into the plastered wall, was smeared with dust inside and out. She would learn nothing, see no costumes, if she stayed in here all morning. As long as Madame or the assistant didn’t see her wandering, she could tell anyone else she was looking for the powder room.

  Waiting only until the assistant’s footsteps faded down the stairs, she poked her black hat cautiously into the room across the narrow landing. Blessed with a bank of large, sparkling-clean windows, it ran the width of the building and was crowded with tables where women bent over their fabrics and needles.

  “Permesso?” she asked the nearest seamstress, a thin woman with deep squint-lines around her eyes. “May I?”

  The woman tilted her blue kerchief back, eying Maddie while her needle flew steadily along a seam of fine-weave black gauze. “Assi.” She added in English, “When la Frangetti is not here. You are the English lady, la zia of Sera?”

  “Serephene’s aunt, yes. Your English is very good.”

  “I work for English lady three years,” said the seamstress. “E’bene to practice when I can.”

  “I am happy to speak English with you whenever you wish. My name is Maddie. And yours?”

  “Zaneta,” said the other. She poked a finger at Maddie’s widow dress, a hasty refit of one Serephene had found in her attic back in London. “Maybe you wish someone to make you better clothes? I know the best cloth and lace in Venetia. Less money than Frangetti asks.”

  Maddie smiled at the blunt offer. “I can’t afford new clothes right now, but I’ll mention you to Serephene. She’ll be looking for a seamstress eventually.” Meanwhile, the woman was willing to talk to her, so she could start gathering column material after all. She gazed at the dainty fabric in Zaneta’s work-worn fingers. “That is a lovely weight of material. What is it for?”

  The seamstress held up the panels she was joining and explained the further construction of what would become a floating overskirt to a French Renaissance gown of crimson damask. Then she pointed out the work of other seamstresses: taffeta wings for a fairy costume, beading on a golden bodice, silk orchids twining over a meadow-green skirt. Soon Maddie had mentally written a whole column on construction techniques. “You know very much about the clothing,” said Zaneta, with obvious approval. “You sit by me more and talk English?”

  When the breakfast break was called, Zaneta offered an option: take a cappuccino and pastry with the other women or come to the laboratorio to see Carnevale costumes ready for their finishing touches. Ignoring her empty stomach, Maddie chose the latter.

  What richness waited on the topmost floor! All the textiles for which Venice was famous: velvets, damasks, brocades, fabulous flocked fabrics shot through with gold and silver threads. Rack on rack of costumes lined the room, from which her guide was pulling out one at a time to show her. She touched her hat, signalling TD to collect images of silken taffetas, sparkling beads, towering plumes and exorbitantly elongated sleeves. Here were the usual figures from the Comedia del’Arte: gaudy Harlequins and dainty Columbines, hook-nosed Pulcinello—or, as Maddie knew him, Punch from the Punch-and-Judy puppet show. His papier-mâché face looked just like the one in the park near her family’s London house, but life-sized. There were three copies of white-faced Bauta in his black cloak and, next to him, a host of humble servitors’ outfits dripping artfully slashed rags. Long coats and burnished beaks for a half-dozen plague-doctors. Malevolent, whiskered rat heads. Her guide pointed out a lining here, a bodice there, a scattering of seed pearls over the pink nose of a pig, all pieces she had sewn.

  “Why so many the same?” Maddie asked, pointing to the plague doctors.

  “For consulates,” Zaneta explained. “Each year new people from England and Russia and France.” She made a face over France, as if she wanted to spit on the floor but thought better of it. “Costumes saved of other years, other workers, fit not always the new. Madame supplies choices to consulates. They pay on time, not like Venetians. Always the waiting for those. In Venetia, since the Republic, all the money comes from outside. Even French money is good here.” Her mouth puckered, as if everything French tasted bitter, “Consuls, they order special to make the big show for themselves. Those costumes are in Madame’s private storage. Ma qui . . .” She drew back a high curtain with a flourish of her arm. “Carnevale theme for new century: Pinocchio.”

  Pinocchio! That classic story Maddie had so often been told in her nursery, in which the puppet Pinocchio throws away all his chances to behave well and become a real boy, until he reunites with the elderly woodcarver Geppetto in the belly of a whale. Character garb from the popular children’s tale stood everywhere: a dozen variants of the puppet Pinocchio, some of old Geppetto, foxes and cats recognizable by the tails dangling from their long waistcoats, owls with large wings thoroughly feathered, and a single, angular Cricket. Donkey heads in a range—from mostly-human to full donkey—were stacked in a corner, their taupe cloaks hanging from pegs above them. She pictured a Consulate’s footmen and maids all dressed like the half-converted boys from the story.

  “Gracious! All these for consular staff?”

  “Not all. These for English lord who comes soon, those over there for Russian merchants. Many people buy from Frangetti.”


  Maddie tilted her head to let TD snap the Owl. “These costumes must be worth a lot. Anyone could steal them to sell to unsuspecting tourists.”

  “The most rich are kept in Madame’s private room, by her office. For the rest,” Zaneta shrugged, “those lazy door porters are supposed to stay awake all night.”

  Maddie was scribbling notes on a gauzy fairy costume in blue and teal, with sequined tulle wings and silver-gilt trimmings, when another seamstress peered in to frantically wave a warning. Zaneta hustled Maddie out a back corner onto a narrow landing. “Madame, she comes. You go back. Quick.”

  As the old wooden door closed on her, Madame’s voice came through the brown, peeling paint, discussing—as best Maddie could make out—a change to the fairy’s wings. Rather than hang around a dusty, windowless landing, Maddie hurried down a claustrophobic stair. It ended in a tiny alcove beyond curtained fitting rooms. The high voices of young clients mingled with sharp questions from suspicious matrons and oozing compliments by staff. A similar stair at the other end led her back to the break room just as the seamstresses crowded out of it, and there she remained.

  After that Madame was in and out of the workrooms all morning. Maddie sat in the stuffy cubicle alone, eying the crumbs of the other women’s breakfast and jotting notes in her Kettle Conglomerates notebook. Thankfully, with her promotion to sometimes-investigative-reporter, she was freed from the pink sequins and sunshine yellows of her first labelled notebooks. This batch had reliable black covers that vanished against her widow’s gown, discretion itself whenever note-taking might arouse suspicion. Between these notes and the sketches she would draw from TD’s illicit images, she’d be sending in lovely columns to justify CJ Kettle’s decision to send her to Carnevale at the newspaper’s expense.

  The airless room grew ever warmer as the day progressed. The window-catch had rusted closed. Blotting the perspiration from under her veil with a black lawn handkerchief and ignoring the gurgle in her empty stomach, she scribbled the morning away, constructing the outlines for three new fashion columns by the time Serephene beckoned her from the doorway.

  “Please tell me we can eat lunch before going home,” Maddie whispered. “I missed the breakfast break.”

  “Soon,” said Serephene, “but first I want you to see the laboratorio.”

  “I’ve seen it. Lovely costumes on display.”

  “Not that laboratorio.” Serephene towed her by the wrist toward a flight of upward stairs. “There’s one on the roof. And someone I want you to meet. This is the real fashion bombshell I promised you. But you can’t write anything about it yet. Just like with the costumes downstairs, it’s got to be an absolute secret until it’s been revealed to the public by Madame F.”

  Intrigued, Maddie followed, her black veil floating around her shoulders as she stepped out into the gusty morning. Four floors above the canals, the sun shone full above the sea-fog that swirled over the nearby lagoon. The top-masts of sailing ships poked up through soft, white pockets of mist. The throb of diesel engines and the whistles of steam-vaporetti said there were other vessels moving unseen down there; how did they avoid collisions?

  “Never mind them. Look up here.” Serephene pointed.

  A few feet above the faded-orange roof tiles floated a weather-beaten airship half as long as the building. The craft was tied fore and aft to iron mooring loops embedded in the parapets. Hanging from its stern was a limp blue flag; an eddy in the air showed a white cross. The Scottish flag on an airship over a Venetian atelier run by a Frenchwoman? Was this any stranger than an English Consular official cavorting through Carnevale dressed as Pinocchio?

  Serephene sped across the tiles to yank down a set of folding stairs. “Come on, Maddie,” she called, reaching for a worn metal door-latch. “You won’t believe this place.”

  Gathering her widow’s skirts in one hand, Maddie followed. Stepping inside the airship, she threw up her hand against a thousand glints of light from a welter of glass tubes and brass pipes. A hum of machinery replaced the sounds of breezes and sea-birds. Huge mirrors, mounted below portholes, bounced the outdoor light to more mirrors on the ceiling struts above the long work-tables.

  Behind her someone said, “Out of my way, woman.”

  Chapter Three

  MADDIE STEPPED ASIDE. Her skirt swung against something that tinkled ominously

  “Have a care, there. This is no’ a tea shop. And mind that hat. Yon brim could take out the pneumatics if ye sneezed.”

  As she turned for a glimpse of the newcomer, Maddie caught Serephene in the midst of a transformation. Beneath the workaday blue kerchief her huge, tired eyes lit up. Her long, dark lashes descended in a manner decidedly flirtatious. A faint blush rose on her smooth cheek.

  “Buongiorno, Scottie,” Serephene said. The most perfect lips in England, their colour restored by a quick swipe with a handkerchief, curved up in a dainty cupid’s bow.

  “Och, and good morning to yourself.” The man set down a half-eaten pastry and strode toward her. His broad shoulders filled the aisle between the worktables. He was more than a head taller than Serephene even in her heeled boots, and he wore, with casual grace, a loose, full-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows. It was loosely tucked into a kilt of green-blue tartan crossed with heather-purple lines. Almost the McHugh tartan, Maddie thought, admiring the swing of the heavy woollen weave. He kissed the hand Serephene held up and turned to cast mild blue-green eyes over Maddie. “Will ye be naming this lady, then?”

  “She’s my chaperone,” said Serephene. “Maddie, may I introduce you to Doctor WaynScot McHoughty? Scottie, this is Ma—Mrs. Hatter.”

  Scottie McHoughty had a charming smile, but he didn’t try to kiss Maddie’s hand. Instead, he turned Serephene’s attention to a tiny strip of fabric pinned to a board. While they examined it, Maddie looked around the airship laboratory, trying to fathom what wondrous fashion breakthrough he might be working on. Beakers bubbled on tables. Green flares popped up, briefly hiding a well-worn guitar on the far wall, only to vanish with a foul-smelling poof. A slender metallic framework, rather like a spinning wheel, was winding up a fine thread that spooled slowly out of a black-shrouded box affixed to the far end wall. The thread seemed by turns white, mauve, blue, and then green. More tiny strips of fabric hung from a line that ran across one corner. Transparent tubing, hardly wider than her fist, circled the whole laboratory. Its top was punctuated by access ports sealed with leather gaskets. Near one gasket hung an old violin, its varnish down to nothing and only one string remaining. Peering from its sound-hole was a rat, watching the visitors through leather-strapped goggles that magnified its beady eyes. It put its nose up to Serephene’s extended hand.

  “Buongiorno, Gus,” she said, and ran her fingertips lightly over the pointed head. The rat’s ear twitched. It scampered along the tubing and stopped, chittering, where a hose rose to a connector in the airship’s balloon. In the moment of relative silence before Serephene spoke, Maddie heard a faint hissing. “Scottie,” Serephene demanded. “Did you spring another leak? What happened this time?”

  Dr. McHoughty didn’t look up from his work. “Aye, aft port quarter, don’t know. Hull was a scant foot above the roof this morning.”

  “Well, what caused it? Is the balloon’s fabric falling apart from the salt air?”

  “Could be so indeed.” He took up a slender implement and gently prodded the fabric’s threads apart with the sharp tip.

  Serephene huffed in exasperation. “You’re a fabric expert. Get it fixed before the workshop crashes onto the roof and destroys all your experiments.”

  “Aye, and I will. But no’ today, my lassie. Impossible this week to get a Venetian workman for any repair not related to Carnevale. Off you go now. I’ve the work to be at.”

  Serephene’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll be downstairs tomorrow morning. You’ll have to come down if you wish to see me.”

  He straightened, filling the narrow aisle with his shoulders once more, and took up
her hand as she attempted to pass. “I’ll e’er wish it,” he said, gazing down at her with eyes the serene hue of a Scottish loch at dawn. He kissed her hand and let it go, and was bent back over his work before she reached the door.

  Maddie maintained silence while they hurried down all the flights of stairs to insulate Serephene’s unexpected flirtation from the gossiping seamstresses. Outside the staff door at last, she fanned herself with one hand, grinning. “Scottie McHottie? He could inflate that balloon by smiling at it.”

  “Mc-Hoch-tee,” Serephene corrected, a smile still playing about her bowed lips. “We met in Edinburgh last fall, when Mother dragged me up there to hunt for Scottish husbands.” She fell silent, leading the way to the canal-side calle.

  They’d met last fall, had they? And Serephene had started planning this Venice project last fall. She hadn’t come all this way simply to make dresses. What Maddie wanted to say was, “You set all this up to chase your Scotsman, didn’t you? The apprenticeship was just a pretext.” Instead, she looked along the pier for Fanto’s gondola and asked, in a casual tone, “McHoughty’s a potential husband then? I thought they wanted you to marry a lord.”

  “They do.” Serephene frowned out over the busy canal. “Nobody who still works for his living will be good enough for my father. One generation from earning our own bread together as an Artificer family and now we’re expected to idle about all day with other idlers, for the rest of our very dull lives. And raise our children to do the same. Well, I won’t. I’ll earn my own living first, and marry where I choose.”

  Maddie spotted their gondolier and lifted her hand. Fanto’s thick arms steered his craft away from a cluster of gondoliers. His black metal tripod rose darkly through the surface mist, catching the watery sunlight as his torso twisted with each push on the oar. He collected them at the public landing stage and shot out to mid-canal, weaving expertly past gondolas, steam-launches, and the rowboats of vegetable vendors.