An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,63

Beatrice said, tripping slightly over the word beacon, but aware as always that this was never just about her. It was all of these women who were finding professional success and personal fulfillment because of what they’d built together.

“All right, for all that, I will sacrifice the Wild Rose pink,” Ava said mournfully. “But I want front row seats at this fashion show, whatever it is.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Dalton’s Department Store

One week later

The tantalizing advertisements had appeared in all the New York City papers, so everybody who possibly cared about this sort of thing—people who liked stylish attire, not a small number—knew that Dalton’s was launching a newly invented, totally exclusive shade of silk called Wild Rose. In addition to the advertisements, brilliantly designed and executed with the assistance of a new firm established by Theodore Prescott the Third, there was dramatic advertising throughout his store so that the legions of Dalton’s shoppers would know there was something coming.

A massive pink silk bow hung on the exterior, over the revolving door, a bright spot on the gray stone of Broadway. Inside huge swathes of it draped the walls and the ceiling, enveloping the store in a soft, delicate glow of pink. It was like being inside of a kiss, or something even a little more intimate.

In other words, Dalton went all in.

On pink silk.

He had learned from the automobile debacle. Spectacle in and of itself was pointless if it appealed to the wrong clientele. Asserting the power of his engine, trying to impress with a hunk of metal was not what would bring women into the store, their hearts pounding and purses open. The truth was plain, in black and white and numbers in the store account ledgers: he was sunk without women.

He had known this instinctively—harnessing their power was how he’d built his empire—but this rivalry with Beatrice had made him forget this inviolable truth.

Women were the real engine who made everything else possible.

And so, he had bought a mill and staffed it with well-paid girls eager to escape a life of housewifery and drudgery on farms all over New England and out West. They came by train in droves.

And so, he’d invented this Wild Rose Pink and designed it with a woman’s pleasure in mind. The color that flattered all complexions, the pleasingly soft caress of it against bare skin. It was designed to appeal to all senses, to be wearable at all hours of the day whether a corset, a tea dress, or a ball gown.

And he Made It Known.

The silk would be available on the first Saturday of the month.

Exclusively at Dalton’s.

But when the appointed day and the appointed hour arrived, there were no more than the usual number of customers milling about in the usual way, purchasing the usual things. He experienced a slight pang of concern.

Some of the silk sold. But not nearly enough considering how much he had spent on acquiring the massive inventory. Excess inventory could be lethal to a retail establishment.

By midday, when the anticipated hordes of women had failed to appear, Dalton started to fear that he would die, smothered to death by an absurd amount of stupid pink silk. He would be mummified in the stuff. Future generations would find him wrapped up in a cocoon of pink silk failure and question his soundness of mind, his mastery of his domain, his understanding of women.

At two o’clock the crowds he had anticipated still had not arrived.

Under his custom-tailored suit he began to sweat that this gamble would not pay off. It felt like failing to sell water to people in the desert, lifeboats to people on sinking ships, or give candy to children. It was mortifying.

But the calculations! The projections! He had done MATH! He had sixteen years of retail experience and extensive knowledge of his customers; such could not lead him so far astray. Dalton was not one to doubt himself, not on retail, in which he had made himself an expert at the expense of the rest of his life. He could not be wrong.

There must be something else at play.

“Something is afoot,” Dalton said to Connor. They were hovering anxiously in the mezzanine, awaiting the anticipated crowds and striving to appear utterly nonchalant at the nonevent happening in their store.

“Certainly not customers,” Connor replied drily.

“Where did we go wrong?” Dalton mused. “It’s pink silk. Women love pink and silk.”

“I generally like to avoid blanket statements of what women like and don’t like,” Connor replied. “But yes, it should