An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,62

the press was good. Success suited her and she was not ready to relinquish it. This was possibly how Dalton had felt, too, when she’d come to town and taken over the store.

Elizabeth was longingly caressing the silk with a faraway look in her eyes, clearly imagining herself in gowns and corsets and parasols made of it, living her best life in this pink silk. Finding love, personal fulfillment, saving orphans, and being declared the best-dressed woman in all of New York, in this silk.

Maybe Dalton did understand women and what they wanted after all.

Didn’t that just make her feel . . . Oh, that made her feel all sorts of violently conflicting things. Mainly, though, it made her feel hot and bothered. Because he wanted to love her and make love to her and dress her in beautiful pink silks and she . . . couldn’t. The price was more than she was willing to pay.

“No, Ava. Put down Dalton’s Wild Rose,” she said, sharing the name of the shade of pink.

“Oh, it has a name!” Ava cried.

“I know. I know.”

“Could you do your own version? Perhaps even slightly cheaper?”

“It’s possible. But it would be a second-best version and people will see that we are copying Dalton’s, which is to say that we are just following what the man does, which means that they will see we are second best,” Beatrice replied. “I’m not ready to be second best just yet. Though I suppose it’s bound to happen. This fabric will be a sensation, it will draw in all the customers who will buy other things while they’re already there, and they’ll have no reason to go across the street into Goodwin’s and we’ll be ruined. My apologies, ladies, I tried.”

“No, we’re not ruined,” Adeline, the dressmaker, declared in no uncertain terms. The room fell silent. But it was the glimmer in her eye that had them on tenterhooks because Adeline clearly had an idea of what to do. “We’re not ruined. We will simply make it unfashionable.”

And didn’t that inspire some curious expressions and refills of teacups.

“Do go on.”

“Adeline, I am intrigued.”

“Does this mean we cannot wear it?”

“We cannot wear it,” Adeline said firmly. “We won’t even want to wear it. No one will. If we do this correctly.”

“Sad!”

“But how do we make it unfashionable?”

At this, Adeline’s eyes lit up. “This we are uniquely suited to do. And if we work together we can all pull it off. Ladies who write for the papers—Fanny, Nelly, Jane—you shall have to pick another color to champion. You will have to write disparaging things about pink. Harriet, Susan, perhaps you might give lectures on the frivolity of the color. And as for myself, I should of course refuse to make anything with it. Better yet, my dressmaking establishment is soon to be launched at Goodwin’s. And . . . we’ll have a fashion show.”

“What is a fashion show?”

“I have no idea. I just invented it. But it will be something that will display our rival color and fabric, something that all the newspapers will cover, something that women will clamor to witness and will tell their friends about.”

Was this fluttering feeling . . . hope? Perhaps not all was lost after all. Perhaps this team of women might save everything. All they had to do was sacrifice the joy and pleasure of wearing the most delectable pink silk that had ever been invented.

“But this means we will have to deprive ourselves of gorgeous pink gowns and everything pink.”

“Yes,” Adeline said sadly. “None of us can wear it.”

“It might not have worked with your complexion anyway.”

“That’s going too far. It’s clearly universally flattering.”

“I suppose but . . .”

“We must make sacrifices for the sake of what we are building with Goodwin’s,” Harriet said. “Think of what is on the line here . . . All the jobs we have created for women.”

“To say nothing of all the female entrepreneurs who tied their businesses to it,” Adeline said. Such as herself. She exchanged a glance with Daisy and Martha and Madame CJ Walker, who had all opened outposts of their popular cosmetics stores and salons within Goodwin’s.

“All the women we have made feel good about themselves by offering them a safe space to be inspired by beautiful things,” Daisy said.

“And the safe space we have created for women to develop dreams and friendships and purchase the things they need without hassle.”

“Think of what a beacon we are to other women the world over,”