Read The Forgotten Seamstress for Free Online

and valets with emergency repairs to ballgowns and penguin suits.
    The following day the fuss and bother continued, what with all the visiting royalty, and our meals were weird and wonderful left-overs from the banquets: I had never eaten venison before and I was enjoying it till they told me it was deer, them pretty little animals we used to spy in the parks in the early mornings, and then I lost my appetite for it.
    That day we overheard conversations in the staff quarters about the prince’s birthday celebrations, and how because he was next in line to the throne he would become king when his father died. There was a deal of discussion about who he would marry – German royalty or Russian? I remember feeling sorry for him, thinking how strange it must be to have your life all mapped out for you. Of course I never understood that I had precious little control over what happened to me, neither. Like all young girls I believed I would fall in love and marry who I liked, and if they had enough money we could have our own little place and not live in servants’ quarters for the rest of my life. If only I’d known what life had in store – what a joke fate would play on me.
    A couple of days later after the Coronation, Mrs Hardy calls us servants together after breakfast and tells us to make sure we’re dressed extra-smart, polished shoes and the rest because we had been summoned. We hadn’t a clue what this meant, but there was such an air of excitement it felt a bit like a holiday. We were gathered in the main hall at eleven o’clock sharp and it took a while for all two hundred of us to traipse up the stairs. At the top we went through a door into another world, a world of thick carpets and high ceilings, tall windows and larger-than-life paintings of grand people from history. Imagine two hundred people all walking in silence, and no footsteps to be heard because the carpets are that deep they swallow all the sound. I got ticked off for gawping with my mouth open at the mountains of glittering glass hung in the ceiling what I later found out were called chandeliers, not to mention the dazzling redness of the wallpaper and the glowing gold of flowery carvings where the ceilings met the walls. It was like what I imagined heaven to look like, not just someone’s home – hard to get your head around for an orphan girl like me.
    Then we arrived in a room the size of a football pitch and got ourselves arranged in rows. I was at the front because I was so short, and Nora was right behind me. After a bit, in came Miss Hardy the head housekeeper, followed by the new king and queen and their children herded by a nanny. I couldn’t stop goggling at the lot of them, but it was the eldest boy who really caught my eye. He would have been about sixteen then, not tall but fair like a Greek god, and with a mischievous look on him.
    They stopped in front of us and we all bowed or curtseyed like we was taught, only I put the wrong foot behind and realised too late and stumbled a bit as I tried to change it, and Nora caught me from behind to stop me falling over. When I dared to look up again my cheeks were burning but the golden-haired boy was smiling at me with a face like an angel giving me a blessing, and I couldn’t help but smile back till I caught the nanny glaring at me, and had to study my shoes again.
    The king made a speech with that prune-in-his-mouth voice thanking us lot for the hard work that we had all put in to make their Coronation Day run smooth as clockwork, and the queen (our very own May) said something of the same, and then they went to leave, except that just as she turned, May looked directly at Nora and me and said quietly, ‘You two are my little needlework orphans, are you not?’ We both blushed fit to match the carpet but Nora was the first one to find her voice. ‘That’s right, Your Majesty,’ she said, nipping in an extra little bob curtsey.
    May said, ‘I hope you are settling in well?’ and