Free Hope for Tomorrow by Catherine Winchester Page A

up again in a day or two, either to tell her the problems with her idea or that he thought that she was right.
    “ I'll get dinner ready,” she said. “Come and join me in a few minutes.”
    Gus was quiet for the rest of that evening and when he came home the next night, his mood was much improved.
    They settled by the study fire as usual and Martha prepared his drink and handed it to him.
    “ I spoke with a few people about your idea today,” he said. “The reception was quite good.”
    Martha smiled. He had done so much to help her and Hope that she was pleased to be able to repay him in some small way.
    “ Which idea,” she asked.
    “ Both, actually. Myers especially thinks that the shop is an excellent way to boost sales and that some stores will even start visiting us to see our wares and place their orders.”
    “ So you won't have to pay commission to a salesman?”
    “ Exactly! Unfortunately he thinks, and I have to agree, that London is the only place for our flagship shop, though we could open slightly less extravagant ones all around the country.”
    London was quite a distance away but she supposed that he could leave someone else in charge of the shop.
    “ As for starting a custom service, or I'm told it's called, haute couture, that was also well received but unfortunately we don't seem to have design staff with enough imagination. We have some very talented seamstresses but they lack the necessary skills to design something extraordinary.”
    Martha opened her mouth, then hesitated for a moment.
    “ What?” he asked.
    “ Well, they're probably no good but I have some sketches that you could look at.”
    “ Well go and get them,” he encouraged. They certainly couldn't be any worse than the few sketches he had seen today, he thought.
    Martha headed to the library and returned with a notebook which she handed him.
    Slowly he looked through the pages. Many pages had entire outfits since she had started the book to house her dressmaking ideas but as she had become more interested in Gus's business, she had often often found herself focusing on just gloves.
    “ They're just basic styles,” she said when he reached the first glove designs. She had drawn them to try and understand what he meant when he mentioned things like tranks and half fourchettes.
    Some of the drawings were labelled, either with the components of the glove or notes on the materials to be used. Some were basic, some were more elaborate and lined with silk or cashmere, others were trimmed in fur. As he got to the final few pages though, the sketches really came to life and some she had even coloured slightly to give a better impression of what they would look like.
    One pair in particular caught his eye; a pair made from red dyed, hairsheep leather and encrusted along the points with semi-precious stones. The gloves ended half way up the forearm and the top was trimmed with a small row of reddish fox fur and red ostrich feathers.
    He continued leafing through to see more elaborate designs; some lace, some leather, some a combination of the two. She had based a lot of the designs on dresses that she had seen Lady Beaumont wear, incorporating features of the dresses so that they matched.
    “ That's how I imagined Queen Elizabeth's gloves would have looked from a description I read,” she said as she cringed at the over-ornate gloves he was looking at. It had just been a flight of fancy on her part really.
    He continued on without comment and the longer his silence lasted, the more worried she became. Of course they were rubbish. She had never even meant to show these to Gus but she had just absorbed information about his product over the past two years, almost by osmosis and sometimes found herself sketching gloves on occasion.
    Gus reached the last sketch in the book and closed it.
    “ My dear,” he said, his voice was grave and her heart sank. “Some of these are truly extraordinary!”
    “ What?” She couldn't believe that