The Seamstress of Pell Street

Mrs. Adelaide Prue had dressed half the brides of Pell Street by the autumn of 1889, and she prided herself on never once asking a client a question that wasn't about hemlines.

So when a woman in unrelieved black arrived at dusk, veiled even indoors, and asked for a gown to be finished by All Hallows' Eve, Adelaide simply took her measurements and said nothing about the veil, or the cold that clung to the woman's gloves, or the fact that she gave no name.

The gown was to be ivory, old-fashioned in cut, with a high collar and buttons of jet. "For a reunion," the woman said, in a voice like a door easing shut. "I have been apart from him a long while."

Adelaide worked the commission by lamplight for three nights running, and each night she noticed the thread behaved strangely in her hands — knotting where it shouldn't, running smooth where it always caught, as though something were helping.

On the third night she pricked her finger and a single drop of blood fell onto the collar. Before she could blot it, the fabric drank it in and left no mark at all, as if it had been thirsty.

The woman returned exactly at midnight on the thirty-first, tried the gown once behind the screen, and paid Adelaide not with coin but with an old gold band, still warm, which she pressed into the dressmaker's palm and said, "For your trouble, and for your silence."

Adelaide sold the ring to a jeweler the following week, who told her, turning it over with some unease, that the engraving inside read a date thirty years past, and a name that matched a headstone in the churchyard two streets over — a bride, the jeweler said, who had died the night before her wedding, still waiting on her gown.

Adelaide never took another commission after dark. But she kept the receipt book from that autumn, and pressed within its pages, faint as a watermark, is the outline of a woman in a veil, standing exactly where the fitting screen used to be.