In a matter of weeks, her hearty, active father sickened and wasted away until he simply didn’t wake up one morning.Īgnes was devastated. The doctor came, but no tonic or poultice helped. Agnes, by then allowed to come to the shop every afternoon, listened as his cough grew harsh and hacking. Mama scolded him and begged him to stay in bed, but he insisted he needed to work. By the time she was ten, Agnes had come to think of the shop as her future, and she spent hours daydreaming of how she would arrange the window displays and the salon, when it was hers.Ī month after she turned twelve, Papa developed a cough. “That’s my clever girl,” he would exclaim as she figured yardages and costs on her slate for him. She couldn’t wait to stand behind the counter and unfurl a roll of silk before someone’s rapturous gaze, the way Papa did. She loved running her fingers over the beautiful, delicate silks, imagining them made into lovely gowns and frock coats. He would sit her on the counter and let her touch the shining bolts while he told her where the silk came from and how it was made.Īgnes loved the shop. By then Drew was in school and her mother was home with her two little sisters, Winifred and Isabella, so Agnes got Papa all to herself at the shop.
He had bought it when she was a small child. He took her on long walks in the nearby countryside, and even taught her to play golf and cricket with her older brother Andrew and his friends.īut her favorite place to go with Papa was the family’s silk shop. He taught her to swim in the firth, this time with her mother’s approval. He taught her to ride their pony astride, without her mother’s knowledge. James just laughed and took Agnes to the Exchange, to his banker, to visit merchants. Some of her earliest memories were of bouncing along atop his shoulders as he did errands around Edinburgh.
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