Somewhere, Sophie could hear a clock chiming. Drawing herself up to her full height – which wasn’t very tall – she lifted her chin and set off smartly round the side of the great building, the little heels of her buttoned boots clicking briskly over the cobbles. As she approached, her heart began to thump, and she put up a hand to check that her hat, with its blue-ribbon bow, was still at exactly the right angle, and that her hair was not coming down. She was part of Sinclair’s department store now: a small cog in this great machine. As such, she knew she must be nothing short of perfect.
Through the doors was another world. The staff corridors were humming with activity. All about her, people were hurrying along carrying palms in pots, or stepladders and tins of paint, or stacks of the distinctive royal-blue and gold Sinclair’s boxes. A smart saleswoman whisked by with an exquisitely beaded evening gown draped carefully over her arm; another hustled along with an armful of parasols, seemingly in a terrific rush; and the strict store manager, Mr Cooper, could be seen dressing down a salesman about the condition of his gloves. Sophie dived in among them and then slipped into the empty cloakroom to take off her coat and hat.
It still seemed extraordinary that she was here at all. Even a year ago, the thought of earning her own living would never have entered her imagination – and now, here she was, a fully fledged shop girl. She paused for a moment before the cloakroom looking-glass to survey her hair, and pushed a hairpin back into place. Mr Cooper was a stickler for immaculate personal appearances, but worse than that, she knew that Edith and the other girls would be only too quick to notice any shortcomings. Once upon a time she had been rather vain about her looks, carefully brushing her hair one hundred times each night and fussing Miss Pennyfeather to tie her velvet ribbon in exactly the right sort of bow, but now she only wanted to look neat and businesslike. She didn’t feel in the least like the girl she had been back then. Her face in the looking glass was familiar, but strange: she looked older somehow, pale and tired and out of sorts.
Her shoulders slumped as she thought of the long week that lay ahead of her, but at once she frowned at herself sharply. Papa would have said that she ought to be thinking about how fortunate she was to be here. There were plenty of others who weren’t so lucky, she reminded herself. She had seen them: girls her own age or even younger, selling apples or little posies of flowers on street corners; girls begging for pennies from passing gentlemen; girls huddled in doorways, wearing clothes that were scarcely more than rags.
Thinking this, she shook her head, squared her shoulders and forced herself to smile. ‘Buck up,’ she told her reflection sternly. Whatever else happened today, she was determined that she wouldn’t give Edith any more excuses to call her stuck-up.
She strode purposefully towards the door, but before she had taken more than a couple of steps, she tripped and fell forwards.
‘Oh!’ exclaimed a voice. As she righted herself, she glanced down to see a boy gazing up at her in alarm. He was sitting on the floor, partly hidden behind a row of coats, and she had fallen over his boots. ‘Are you all right?’
‘What are you doing down there?’ demanded Sophie breathlessly, more embarrassed to have been caught pulling faces and talking to herself than actually hurt. No doubt this boy would make fun of her now, like all the rest, and he’d soon be telling all the others what he had overheard. ‘You shouldn’t hide in corners spying!’ she burst out.
‘I wasn’t spying,’ said the boy, scrambling to his feet. He was wearing the Sinclair’s porters’ uniform – trim dark-blue trousers, a matching jacket with a double row of brass buttons and a peaked hat – but the jacket looked too big for him, the trousers a bit short, and the hat was askew on his untidy, straw-coloured hair. ‘I was reading. ’ For proof, he held out a crumpled story-paper, entitled Boys of Empire, in one grubby hand.
But before Sophie could say anything else, the door slammed open, and a cluster of shop girls pushed their way into the room, in a flurry of skirts and ribbons.
‘Excuse us! Beg your pardon!’
A pretty dark-haired girl caught sight of the boy and smirked. ‘Haven’t you fetched that tin of elbow grease for Jim yet?’ she demanded, sending a ripple of titters through the group.
‘Learned to tie your bootlaces all by yourself, have you?’ another girl giggled.
A third took in Sophie, and made a ridiculous curtsy in her direction. ‘Forgive us, Your Ladyship. We didn’t see that you were gracing us with your presence.’
‘Aren’t you going to introduce us to your young man?’ added the dark-haired girl in an arch tone, making the others laugh even more.
The boy’s cheeks flushed crimson, but Sophie tried her hardest to look indifferent. She had heard this kind of thing many times already during the two weeks of training that all the Sinclair’s shop girls had undertaken. She had realised that she had started all wrong on the very first morning, arriving wearing one of her best dresses – black silk and velvet with jet buttons. She had thought she ought to be smart and make a good first impression, but when she arrived, she realised that every other girl in the room was dressed almost identically, in a plain dark skirt, and a neat white blouse. The rustle and swish of her skirts had made them all look at her, and then begin giggling behind their hands.
‘Who does she think she is? The Lady of the Manor?’ the dark-haired girl, Edith, had whispered.
The next morning she had come carefully dressed in a navy-blue skirt and a white blouse with a little lace collar, but it was already too late. The girls called her ‘Your Ladyship’, or if they wanted to be especially mean, ‘Your Royal Highness’ or ‘Princess Sophie’. All through the training, they made game of the way she spoke, the clothes she wore, the way she did her hair, and especially whenever she was praised by Mr Cooper or Claudine, the store window-dresser.
She had tried hard to look unconcerned, and not to let her feelings show. Papa had always said that in times of war, the most important thing was never to let the enemy see that you were intimidated. Remembering this she saw his face again, almost as if he were standing right in front of her with his bright, dark eyes and neat moustache. He would have been pacing up and down on the hearth rug in his study, the walls hung with maps and treasures he had brought back from distant lands, relating one of his many stories about battles and military campaigns. Keep calm, keep your head, keep a stiff upper lip: those were his mottoes. But the truth was, the more she ignored the other shop girls, the worse they seemed to become. They said she was haughty and high-and-mighty, and called her the name she hated most, ‘Sour-milk Sophie’. Not for the first time, she reflected that perhaps Papa’s advice was not entirely helpful when it came to dealing with horrid shop girls.
Now, she turned away and went out into the passage, the boy trailing behind her. He looked so miserable that she felt a twinge of guilt for having assumed that he would make fun of her, when, in fact, it seemed that they were in the same boat.
‘I shouldn’t pay any attention to them,’ she said.
The boy tried to smile. ‘I really wasn’t spying on you – honest, I wasn’t,’ he said anxiously. ‘I just wanted to finish my serial. I didn’t even notice you were there. It’s the latest Montgomery Baxter.’ Seeing that she looked blank, he went on: ‘It’s about a detective. He’s only a boy, you see, but somehow he always solves the crime and outwits the villain, even when