Odora had never asked how Rosamund had gotten it. She suspected some transaction involving many months of careful management that her aunt had simply never mentioned, because Rosamund was not a woman who made pronouncements about her generosity. She simply did things, and when you thanked her, she said something dry about practicality, and that was as close as she got to sentiment. Odora opened the trunk. The smell hit her first seedar and something else, the particular scent of the wool, familiar as her own hands.
She pushed back the few garments folded inside and pressed her palm flat against the lining of the bottom panel. The wool was thick and warm, even in the cold room. She could feel the slight ridge of each tack beneath the fabric. She thought about three pale hemlines on a dark wool skirt. She thought about Bess's feet adjusting in two small stockings.
She thought about Marin's face when she realized Odora had already started breakfast. That particular expression, not quite anger, not quite grief, just a girl recalculating what was available to protect her. Odora sat back on her heels and looked at the trunk lining for a long time. Then she went to her sewing crate on the shelf and found her smallest flathead instrument, a bone seam ripper with a handle worn smooth from years of use. She brought it back to the trunk and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it and put the candle where she could see.
She found the first tack along the bottom edge of the side panel and began working it loose. She could have cut the lining out. It would have taken 12 minutes. She would have lost an inch of wool on each edge where the tacks held, but the bulk of it would have been salvageable in less the time it would take to do this the way she was doing it. But Rosamund had put these tacks in one at a time by hand with a wooden mallet she'd kept in her sewing basket.
Odora worked the first tack loose with the seam ripper and set it on the floor beside her knee. Then the second, then the third. The wool would need every inch. She didn't sleep that night. She sat on the floor of her pantry room with the candle shortening beside her and worked tacks loose from 10 p.m.
Until the sky outside her small window began to show the particular lightless gray that comes before any color. And by then she had the lining out of the trunk in five separate panels, each one laid flat on the floor in sequence bottom. Two long sides, two short sides, and she had found in the process a sixth piece she hadn't known was there, a narrow strip had sewn in along the upper edge of the lid, just enough to soften the rim. She hadn't counted that one. It brought the tack total to 127.
She folded the panels with the precision of a woman who understood that fabric had memory and would crease where you made it. Crease and resist where you didn't. And she laid them carefully on top of her other garments inside the now-bare trunk and closed the lid. Then she went to start breakfast because it was nearly 5:00 and Garrick would be out of the house by 6. She was measuring in her head all day.
This was a skill she had developed over 20 years of dressmaking. The ability to carry dimensions in her mind and rotate them, overlay them, subtract one shape from another while doing something else entirely. She did it while she made biscuits. She did it while she went over the household accounts at the kitchen table. She did it in the hour between supper and the girls's bedtimes, when she sat at one end of the table with her mending, and the house moved around her with the sounds of children preparing for tomorrow.
Three dresses, different sizes, substantially different. Bess was small for six. Tilda was average for nine, and Marin was tall, already close to Odora's own height, which would require more fabric than either of her sisters. Odora had no dress forms for the girls' proportions. She would have to measure them or estimate from what they currently wore, and she was not willing to measure them because measuring them would require explaining what for, and she was not ready to explain.