Stitched Between the Seams

The workroom had emptied by degrees as the evening settled over Edinburgh. Elizabeth had not returned from the front of the shop. Jane had departed an hour earlier, murmuring about a sick mother whose needs could not be deferred. Martha had been dismissed after completing an embroidery commission whose deadline had been rendered trivial by the Aberfoyle alterations. Only Agnes Fraser remained at the table, winding thread onto spools with the automatic precision of a woman whose hands could perform their duties without consulting her mind, and at the far end, Elspeth Stewart sat before the pressing table where her day had begun, her fingers stiff and her shoulders carrying the accumulated tension of hours spent bent over stitches so small they tested the limits of what the eye could follow.

The gown hung on its mannequin in the centre of the workroom, catching the candlelight and refusing, as always, to be a single thing. Midnight pooled in the folds of the skirt where the fabric fell into shadow. Violet surfaced along the bodice where the nearest candle reached it. The sleeves, reworked to follow the diminished line of Margaret Aberfoyle's arms, held a silver so pale it seemed less like colour than like the memory of colour — an afterimage left on the retina by something brighter that had already passed. The brocade shifted between these identities with each flicker of the flame, and the effect in the emptied workroom was of a garment that breathed, that possessed its own restless interior life independent of any wearer.

Agnes checked the clock — the Amsterdam grandfather whose chimes had startled Elspeth that morning, though that seemed to belong to a different day entirely, so much having passed between the first peal and this late-evening quiet. Martha had sent word to Moira that the alterations were complete. Moira would come when she was ready, and Moira was always ready precisely when she intended to be.

The velvet curtain stirred, and Moira entered the workroom with the contained energy she carried at all hours — the sense that her stillness was a choice rather than a default, that motion was being held in reserve the way a coiled spring holds force. She moved directly to the mannequin without greeting either woman, her attention narrowing to the gown with the diagnostic focus she applied to every garment that left the Emporium bearing her reputation. Her fingers found the bodice seams first — the points of greatest structural alteration, where Agnes's pinning and stitching had reshaped the garment to accommodate a body grief had redrawn. She traced the lines with the pad of her thumb, feeling for irregularity, testing the tension of each join, reading the work the way a physician reads a pulse.

The silence in the workroom thickened. Agnes continued winding thread, her posture betraying nothing, though she had submitted to this inspection hundreds of times and understood that Moira's silence during examination was neither approval nor censure but simply the absence of verdict — a space in which judgement was being assembled from evidence too fine for anyone else to detect.

Moira's fingers moved to the hem. She knelt — an action that would have surprised anyone who knew her only from the showroom, where she maintained a posture of such upright authority that kneeling seemed physically implausible — and examined the stitching at close range, her grey eyes tracking the thread's passage through the brocade with an attention that missed nothing. This was the section Elspeth had sewn. The stitches were small, even, consistent in their spacing, and they vanished into the weave with the self-effacing quality that the best invisible mending achieved — present but undetectable, functional but silent.

Moira rose. She looked at Elspeth across the candlelit workroom, and what passed between them was not warmth — Moira did not trade in warmth — but something more valuable: recognition. The acknowledgement that the girl possessed an instinct for the work that training could refine but could not have created, a natural sympathy between hand and fabric that either existed or did not, and that in Elspeth Stewart's case, existed with a clarity that justified the risk Moira had taken in hiring a girl with no formal training, no references, and a family name shadowed by debt.

Excellent work. Moira spoke the words with the economy of someone who understood their weight and did not intend to diminish it through elaboration. A deft hand. The instinct for invisibility. Elspeth would do well here, provided she remembered what had been said about discretion. The final clause landed with the particular emphasis that Agnes recognised — not a reminder but a preparation, the laying of groundwork for what was about to happen.

Elspeth thanked her. Moira accepted the thanks without acknowledgement, because the next sixty seconds required her full attention and she could not afford to spend any of it on social convention.

The note had been prepared in the hour between Lady Aberfoyle's departure and this inspection. Moira had written it at her desk in the private office above the showroom, using the cipher she reserved for communications that could not survive interception — a system of her own devising, built on a substitution framework that used fabric measurements as its key. The numbers on the paper would read, to anyone unfamiliar with the system, as a dressmaker's notations: bust, waist, hip, sleeve length, hem circumference, each figure corresponding to a body that did not exist. To Countess Ruthven, who possessed the only other copy of the key, the numbers would resolve into names, and the names would resolve into a truth that the Jacobite network had spent months assembling at considerable risk.

Seven members of the Scottish Parliament were accepting regular payments from the Lord Advocate's office. The payments were channelled through a solicitor in the Lawnmarket whose practice served as a clearing house for funds that could not appear in official accounts. In exchange, the seven members provided intelligence — names of suspected sympathisers, dates and locations of private gatherings, the contents of correspondence that had been intercepted by servants in the employ of families who believed their households secure. The information on the note would allow the network to identify which of its communications had been compromised, which gathering places were no longer safe, and which families needed to be warned that the walls around them had developed ears.

The note was small — a single sheet folded twice, sealed with a blob of unmarked wax. Moira reached into the folds of the gown's skirt with the practised ease of someone who had performed this action many times before, her hand finding the concealed pocket sewn into the bodice lining without hesitation. The pocket was Agnes's work — stitched into every garment destined for the Ruthven evenings, positioned where the natural drape of the fabric disguised its presence, accessible only to someone who knew exactly where to reach. Moira slipped the note into the pocket and withdrew her hand in a single fluid motion that occupied no more than three heartbeats from start to finish.

Three heartbeats. Long enough for a woman standing at the pressing table to see the paper, to catch a glimpse of the numbers inked in an urgent hand, to register the existence of a concealed pocket she had spent hours sewing around without ever knowing it was there. Long enough for an apprentice whose first day had begun with trembling hands and a twice-turned dress to understand, with the sudden and irreversible clarity of a door opening onto a room that had always existed behind a familiar wall, that the Emporium dealt in a currency far more dangerous than silk.

Elspeth's face did not change. This was the detail that Agnes registered from across the workroom — not that the girl had seen, because Agnes had been watching for that and had expected it, but that the girl's expression remained absolutely, perfectly, unnervingly still. No widening of the eyes. No sharp intake of breath. No involuntary glance toward the pocket where the note had disappeared. Elspeth Stewart stood at the pressing table with the composed blankness of someone who had understood instantaneously that what she had witnessed required not reaction but its opposite — the complete suppression of visible response, the discipline of a face that gave nothing away. It was the expression of a girl who had spent months concealing the true depth of her family's ruin from neighbours and creditors, who had learned to wear composure the way other women wore cosmetics — applied deliberately, maintained through effort, serving as armour against the scrutiny of a world that punished visible weakness.

Moira concluded the inspection as though the preceding moment had not occurred. The gown would be delivered to Lady Aberfoyle's residence first thing in the morning. Agnes would see to the wrapping. Miss Stewart had earned her wages and should go home to rest, because tomorrow would bring new challenges. The words were ordinary, the tone unremarkable, and the dismissal carried no more weight than any employer sending a tired worker home at the end of a long day.

Moira departed. The velvet curtain swayed and settled. The workroom held its breath.

Agnes moved first. She crossed to the mannequin and began the careful work of preparing the gown for transport — folding the silk with the reverence it demanded, layering tissue between the folds to prevent creasing, arranging the whole in the delivery box that bore the Emporium's gilded crest. Her movements were practised and unhurried. But as she lifted the skirt to fold it, her eyes met Elspeth's across the shimmering fabric.

The look lasted less than a second. It contained no instruction, no warning, no reassurance. It was simply an acknowledgement — one woman confirming to another that a threshold had been crossed, that knowledge had been acquired which could not be returned, and that the terms of Elspeth Stewart's employment at the Emporium had changed in ways that would never be discussed aloud. Agnes knew. Elspeth knew. The silk between them shifted from midnight to silver and back again, indifferent to the human compact being sealed across its folds.

Elspeth collected her shawl from its peg — the third from the left, between Martha's and Jane's, the peg she had been assigned that morning in what now felt like a previous lifetime. Her fingers fumbled with the clasp, the first loss of composure she had permitted herself since the note had appeared and vanished in its three-heartbeat transit. She paused at the curtain.

Goodnight, Agnes.

Goodnight, Elspeth. Sleep well, if you can.

The addendum carried the weight of everything it did not say. Elspeth passed through the darkened showroom, past the mannequins who guarded their posts in the after-hours gloom, and out into the Edinburgh evening where the wind had finally relented and the cobblestones gleamed with the residue of a day that had begun with rain and ended with revelation. The door closed behind her. The bell did not chime — it had been silenced for the night, its small voice unnecessary in a building whose largest secrets had never made any sound at all.

Inside the workroom, Agnes finished wrapping the gown. She checked the concealed pocket once — not to verify the note's presence, which she had no reason to doubt, but from the habit of thoroughness that had governed her working life since before the girl who had just left the building had been born. The paper sat snugly within the lining, invisible beneath the brocade's shifting surface, waiting for the moment when Margaret Aberfoyle would carry it unknowingly into Countess Ruthven's drawing room, where it would be retrieved by hands that understood its contents and acted upon by minds that understood their implications.

Agnes closed the delivery box, secured the clasp, and extinguished the candles one by one. The workroom sank into darkness. The Amsterdam clock ticked in the silence, measuring out the hours that remained before morning brought the gown to Lady Aberfoyle's door and the evening brought Lady Aberfoyle to Countess Ruthven's threshold and the network received the intelligence it needed to protect itself against the men whose names were written in numbers on a paper the size of a woman's palm, concealed in a pocket stitched by hands that had not known what they were building.

The last candle went out. The Emporium settled into the darkness of a building that kept its own counsel, and the silk brocade, locked inside its box, continued its quiet transformations — midnight, violet, silver — seen by no one, performing for no audience, shifting between identities in the absolute dark.