The Forgotten Room(106)

And nothing in the world mattered more than Lucy.

Olive gazed at her reflection a moment longer: the ruby bright against the white hollow of her neck, her hair dark and tired on her forehead. No longer a girl, but a wife and mother. Already the tiny maternal lines had sprung into place at the corners of her eyes. She was going to live and die above a Brooklyn bakery instead of inside an Italian villa, and the Olive who had existed for a few precious moments inside the seventh-floor attic of the Pratt mansion was now only a memory, entombed in a few drawings that had not become a glorious mural, after all.

When she was ready, she lifted her arms and reached behind her neck.

The clasp was stiff, but she persevered, until at last the two ends came away in her hands. She opened the small wooden box on the dressing table that held her few pieces of jewelry, and she laid the necklace carefully inside.

When Lucy was older, Olive decided, she would give the ruby to her daughter. She would say it was a legacy from Olive’s father, a man whom Lucy would never know.

And in a way, that was the truth.





Thirty




JULY 1920


Lucy


“Why would you think Harry Pratt was your father?” Lucy looked at John in confusion. “I know you said your father changed his name, but . . .”

But you knew your father, she had almost said. John knew who his father had become; he didn’t know who he had been.

Lucy felt like the Red Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, believing five impossible things before breakfast. Harry Pratt, whom she’d believed to be her father, wasn’t. Her mother, whom she’d always believed was a lady, had been a servant in this house.

And John, who came from a thoroughly different world, a world away, might be Harry Pratt’s son.

“This is his work. I would know it anywhere.” Bemusedly, John looked at the sketch in his hands and then up at Lucy. “And they’re all signed H. Pratt.”

Lucy dropped the detective’s report on the top of the Chinese cabinet. “So this is really your house.”

“No,” said John, shuffling the papers together. “My home is in Charleston. But this does explain why Prunella Pratt was selling my father’s paintings.”

Lucy looked at him in surprise. “She’s your aunt. Do you realize? Prunella Pratt is your aunt.”

Not hers. And for that she could be grateful. It meant her father, her warm, loving father, was hers. There was no shadow marring her love for him or his for her.

And if it meant she didn’t belong to the contentious, quarreling Pratts, that was even better, no matter how much she might once have believed their world preferable to hers.

John rose gracefully to his feet, the sheaf of drawings in his hands. “No. My father ran away from all that—with reason, I’m guessing. And maybe part of that reason was Prunella.”

Lucy bit her lip. “I think I can tell you the reason.”

There is nothing for me here without you.

She took a step forward and then stopped, her attention arrested by the drawing John was holding. “That’s my necklace. And my mother.”

But it was her mother as Lucy had never seen her, never imagined she could look. Her long hair was free, falling down her bare back. Lucy’s mother, always so carefully buttoned, boned, and stayed, was naked. Her nudity ought to have been jarring, but it was overshadowed by the expression on her face, an expression of transcendent joy.

“She was beautiful,” said John quietly.

Lucy had never realized that before. Her mother was handsome, true, but she had so drawn into herself that it rendered her looks unremarkable, part of the background like a murky wallpaper.

“She was happy,” Lucy murmured, and with it came a spark of anger. Why had her mother never looked like that for her?

Because all her happiness had left with Harry Pratt.

“When—” It took Lucy a moment to find her tongue. “When did your father go south?”

“He left New York in January of 1893,” said John promptly. “That was part of family legend.” His expression turned wry. “I just never imagined him leaving anything quite like this.”

“He left because of my mother.” Lucy’s throat felt very dry. “I found a letter, in the wall. There’s a hidey-hole, behind the bricks. He says he can’t live here without her.”

John set the drawings gently down on top of the cabinet. “Why did she leave him? I take it she did leave him.”

“I don’t know,” said Lucy despairingly. “She never told me.”

She wished, now, that they had had that sort of closeness, that she could have asked her mother. Not only asked, but listened, without judgment. At the time—no, Lucy could see why her mother had never told her. She had been too much her father’s daughter; she would have been furious to know that her mother had betrayed her father, even in thought.

I’m ready to listen now.

But her mother wasn’t there to tell.

“Well,” said John, “I, for one, am grateful.”

Lucy cast him a startled look. “That my mother broke your father’s heart?”

John took Lucy’s cold hands in his own. “Without that, I wouldn’t be here. And neither would you.”

Something about the way he looked at her made the color rise in her cheeks.