The Magnolia Palace(13)
A few years ago, she’d done some work in a studio nearby, a former carriage house on East Seventieth Street, off of Madison. The sculptor had tipped her generously. She’d go by and ask him for a loan, explain that her grandmother was sick and she needed to get to her immediately. That she’d pay him back right off.
She located the carriage house easily, but was dismayed to see that the name on the doorbell wasn’t the same as the sculptor’s. He must have relocated. Still, she hit the button and waited. No one answered.
The day was warming up, and she wished more than anything she could have a glass of water, something to drink. There was a water fountain in the park, back where she’d come from, but just before she reached Fifth Avenue, a figure carved above the entrance to a three-story mansion stopped her in her tracks. It was a reclining nude, leaning on one elbow, chin and gaze pointed down, as if assessing the respectability of anyone who dared pass beneath. Lillian had had to don a ridiculous headdress with two long braids as she’d posed for the artist, Sherry Fry. The figure’s stomach rippled with muscles that did not exist in real life, and the shoulders and arms were meaty. Kitty hadn’t liked the final outcome at all. “If he’d wanted a man, he should have had one pose for him,” she’d declared, before allowing that the breasts were quite well done.
“What are you doing, just standing there?”
A woman appeared beneath the archway to the mansion’s porte-cochère. She wore a plain, dark day dress and had one of those faces that made her exact age difficult to guess, with a thick brow and loose jowls.
Lillian braced herself, expecting to be shooed away, but instead, the woman drew close, lifting one hand. It shook slightly, as if affected by some kind of nerves.
“You’re early,” she said with obvious disapproval. “Go in through the servants’ entrance, there.” She pointed to the right, where a passageway between an iron fence and the front of the residence descended into a stairway. “Through the basement. The cook will give you a cup of tea while you wait. She’s not ready for you yet.”
A cup of tea had never sounded so appealing.
Before Lillian could say anything, the woman turned and disappeared into the shadows of the arch.
Lillian’s stone likeness smiled calmly down at her, as if curious as to what she was about to do next.
The woman thought she was someone else. A messenger picking something up, perhaps. Or a scullery maid. Lillian could at least get a cup of tea out of it, until they figured out their mistake. She’d apologize and leave, but until then, why not? These big houses were filled with servants; probably no one would pay her any mind. Luckily, she was very rarely recognized from the statues themselves. Each artist she’d worked with had put his own spin on her visage, playing up whatever features he admired most, making her unlikely to attract attention from strangers when she was out and about in the world.
She’d drink her tea. And then disappear back into the streets.
Chapter Four
The steps the jowly woman had directed Lillian to led to a basement door, which opened up into an anteroom. To the left was an enormous kitchen, where she counted seven maids bent over their work, peeling potatoes or stirring pots, under the watchful eye of a man who had to be the chef, barking out orders in a French accent. The tantalizing smell of caramelized onions almost made her swoon. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.
The woman reappeared and told one of the kitchen maids to fetch Lillian a cup of tea. “You may wait in there,” she said, pointing through a door to the staff dining room. The kitchen maid brought the tea in a few minutes later, barely looking at Lillian before rushing back to work.
The tea soothed Lillian’s dry throat. It was nice being below street level, in the cool of a basement. No one cared who she was, and she felt deliciously invisible. But she couldn’t stay long. She drained the cup quickly and was standing to leave, eyeing some scones cooling on a sideboard, daring herself to slip one into her pocket, when the woman’s silhouette filled the doorway.
“Follow me. Upstairs.” She turned and started out the door.
Lillian froze, trapped. How to make an excuse and get out of whatever was waiting for her upstairs?
If someone did recognize her as Angelica—and if anyone would, it would be the family who had purchased her visage to look at every time they passed under the porte-cochère—then they might call the police and she’d be done for.
“I’m afraid I must go,” she said.
The woman kept walking away, one finger up in the air. “This way. Come on.”
Lillian followed, but only so she could make excuses and leave. “I’m not well, you see. I should go. I’ll make another appointment when I’m better.”
Her words echoed up the staircase. Again, the woman didn’t appear to have heard her, tromping solidly upward.
“Hello?”
No response. Lillian was about to pull on her elbow to get her to stop, but by then they’d reached the landing, and it was all Lillian could do not to gape. After the functional trappings of the lower level, the floor above was an absolute shock. The delicately veined marble walls blended seamlessly into the marble floors like a shiny stone waterfall. Through the lacy black iron balustrade of a grand staircase, she spied some kind of grand pipe organ with a gilded console and four rows of keys, like gleaming white teeth.