She spent the second day taking inventory of their existing clothing with the careful inattention of a woman who was very good at looking at things without appearing to. She noted Marin's shoulder width from behind while the girl was at the stove. She watched Bess get into her coat on a cold morning and noted the sleeve length against the girl's wrist. She sat beside Tilda one evening while the girl did arithmetic and counted the spacing of her buttons. The wool was enough, barely, but enough if she was careful about what she cut where.
She would use the largest panel for Marin's skirt and take the bodice from one of the long side pieces. She would use the bottom panel for Tilda's dress. It was the straightest and most even. For best, she could piece together from what remained, and the piecing wouldn't show if she placed the seams deliberately. She would need white cotton for collars.
She had some in her sewing crate, not much, but a ribbon of it she'd been keeping for her own repairs. She would use it all. The problem she had not solved was the sewing machine. Elizabeth Foss's treadle machine was behind the locked door at the end of the hall. Odora knew this because she had walked past that door a dozen times and had noted the way she noted everything that the keyhole showed no rust that the wood at the threshold was undisturbed by foot traffic and that Garrick's expression changed in a specific way whenever his path brought him within 5 ft of it a slight forward tipping of the head like a man walking into wind.
He never looked at the door directly. He navigated around it with the practiced unconscious avoidance of someone who has learned to treat a certain piece of geography as simply not there. She did not have a key. She was not going to ask for one, which meant she was going to sew three winter dresses by hand in the evenings after the house was quiet using candle and lamplight without a thimble because she had broken her last one in September and not yet replaced it. She began on the 3rd of December.
The cutting took most of the first night. She laid the panels on the floor of her room, the candle as close as she dared, and cut by eye in memory with her shears. The good ones, the solingen steel her aunt had bought her when Odora turned 25, because Rosamund had understood that tools mattered, and a seamstress with bad shears was like a carpenter with a warped level, working against herself and blaming the wall. The shears went through the wool cleanly. Each cut was almost silent.
Odora worked slowly, checking each line twice before committing, because there was no margin for error. The wool had warmed somewhat from being folded against her other garments, and it moved well. She saved every scrap larger than a man's palm for seam allowances and corrections. By midnight, she had the pieces for all three bodices and the panel for Marin's skirt. Her back ached from crouching.
Her hands were cold because she couldn't light the small room stove without the smoke being noticed. She wrapped her shawl tighter and kept working. The first needle broke on the fourth evening. She was working on Marin's skirt, the longest seam, a side seam that wanted to pucker at the top, because the wool had a slight bias she hadn't caught when she cut it, and she was reworking it with a tighter tension when the needle snapped clean across the eye. The broken end skittered across the floorboards and disappeared under the bed.
Odora sat with the half needle in her fingers for a moment. She had four needles left. She was not sure that was enough. She threaded the next one and kept going. By the fifth night, her right index finger had split along the inside knuckle from the repeated push against blunt metal without a thimble.
It didn't bleed. Not exactly. It wept the way dry skin does when it finally gives up. She wrapped it with a thin strip of cotton from her repair bag and continued. The seventh night it was the middle finger, too.