The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier Read Free Book Online Page B

will!”
    Honor was only a short distraction, however, perhaps to be mulled over later. For now, once they’d made their remarks, the customers went on to the more important task of inspecting the latest goods and getting a bargain. Trying on the various hats and bonnets displayed on stands, they questioned Belle’s designs and criticized the shape and trim in order to drive down the price. Belle was equally determined to maintain her price, and a battle of words followed.
    Honor was unnerved by the haggling, with its underlying assumption that the value of something could change depending on how badly someone wanted to buy or sell it. The lack of a fixed price made Belle’s hats take on a temporary quality. Quakers never haggled, but set what they felt was a fair price for materials and labor. Each product had what was thought of as its own intrinsic merit, be it a carrot or a horseshoe or a quilt, and that did not change simply because many people needed a horseshoe. Honor knew of merchants in Bridport who haggled, but they didn’t when she went into their shops or to their market stalls. The haggling she’d witnessed was offhand, even embarrassed, as if the participants were only doing it in jest, because it was expected of them. Here the haggling seemed fiercer, as if both sides were adamant that they were right and the other not simply wrong, but morally suspect. Some of the women in Belle’s shop became so indignant as they argued with Belle that Honor wondered if they would ever return.
    Belle, however, seemed entertained by the haggling, and unbothered when, more often than not, it reached a stalemate and the hat remained unsold. “They’ll be back,” she said. “Where else can they go? I’m the only hat maker in town.”
    Indeed, despite not managing to knock the price down, many women placed orders. Belle rarely measured their heads—most she knew already, and she could gauge a newcomer at a glance. “Twenty inches, most of ’em,” she told Honor. “German heads a little bigger, but everybody else is pretty well the same, no matter how much or how little they got up there.”
    Her choice of hat shapes and trim was often unusual, but most customers accepted her judgment, saving their arguments for the price rather than the style. From what Honor could see of the customers who came to pick up their hats, Belle usually was right, often choosing colors and styles for them that were different from what they normally wore. “Hats can go stale on you,” she said to a woman she had just convinced to buy a hat dyed green and trimmed with straw folded and tucked to resemble heads of wheat. “You always want to surprise people with something new, so they see you different. A woman who always wears a blue bonnet with lace trim will start to look like that bonnet, even when she’s not wearing it. She needs some flowers near her eyes, or a red ribbon, or a brim that sets off her face.” She inspected Honor’s plain cap so frankly that Honor ducked her head.
    “But you wear the same thing every day, Belle,” the woman pointed out.
    Belle patted her cap, which was almost as plain as Honor’s, though with a limp frill around the edge and a cord at the back that when pulled made a little pleat in the fabric. “It don’t do for me to wear anything fancy in the store,” she said. “Don’t want to compete with my customers—you’re the ones got to look good. I wear my hats outside, for advertising.”
    Despite the haggling, the frivolous trimmings, the feeling at times that she was an entertainment for the hat wearers of Wellington, Honor liked working for Belle. Whatever she was making, she was at least kept busy, with no time to think about the traumas of the past, the uncertainty she was living in, or what lay ahead.
    As she sat by the open window, Honor twice heard the thudding shoe of Donovan’s horse and saw him ride past. One afternoon he stationed himself at the hotel bar across the square,