The Forgotten Room(14)

“What do you mean, like this?”

“She looks wild. She looks like . . . I don’t know, someone medieval.”

“Exactly. You have that quality, don’t you know? Hasn’t anyone told you? Your skin, the angle of your face. It’s very noble, very clean. Otherworldly. What’s the word? Pure.”

Olive thrust the sketchbook into his chest, realizing as she did so how close he stood, only a foot away, and the smell of his soap filled her head. She watched his pulse move the golden skin at the hollow of his throat, just above the top of the sketchbook. Around them, the room was still and silvery, except for the pool of yellow lamplight in which they hovered. The stacked canvases against the wall, the warmth of the bricks, the worn old furniture, the intimate dimensions. It was like a separate flickering world from the house below, a small, enchanted square only the two of them could enter. Where Olive was a noble maiden, and Harry was a knight parfait.

Except it wasn’t, was it? She was neither noble nor pure. She stood beneath this beautiful domed roof with a false name, under false pretenses, determined to ruin this charming young man’s father. To ruin Harry Pratt’s enchanted life.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Olive, wait.” He took her elbow. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I spoke as an artist just now, nothing more. You just have a certain quality, that’s all. It—It moves me.” He said the last words so quietly, she had to strain to hear them.

Olive pulled her elbow away, and the motion caused her dressing gown to drop another few inches. She hoisted the sleeve back up over her shoulders and yanked the sash tight, and then she whipped the ends of her hair back into an obedient braid. “Well, you’ve captured it now, whatever it is. Am I free to go?”

Harry closed the sketchbook and said in the same soft, deep voice, “You were always free to go, Olive.”





Six




JULY 1920


Lucy


“Where have you been?”

The senior partner’s secretary pounced on Lucy as Lucy slipped through the door of the office. Miss Meechum’s usually tidy hair had escaped in gray wisps from the knot at the back of her neck; her crisp collar was wilted. She looked, in fact, thoroughly frazzled.

“I’m very sorry, Miss Meechum.” Lucy hastily set her bag on the floor by her chair, tugging at the fingers of her cotton gloves. She felt flushed and disheveled from the run from the El, made worse by the summer heat. But the room was hers. She had her entrée into the Pratt house. “If it’s the memo for Mr. Cochran—”

Miss Meechum shook her head, her glasses slipping down to the tip of her nose. “Never mind about Mr. Cochran. It’s Mr. Schuyler.”

Electricity prickled down Lucy’s spine. Or perhaps it was just the damp cotton of her blouse. “Mr. Schuyler?”

After three weeks at Cromwell, Polk and Moore, Lucy could still count her interactions with Mr. Schuyler on the fingers of one hand. He was out a great deal. Meeting with clients, Miss Meechum said piously, although Fran whispered, “Golf,” between her fingers.

Once, he had breezed past Lucy into the office, handsome in evening wear, to pick up a box of chocolates and a black leather box that his secretary had purchased at his request, passing so close by Lucy’s desk in the secretarial pool that she could smell the sandalwood of his cologne.

Another time, he had stood next to her at the elevator, pausing only to smile down at her and say, “You’re the new girl, aren’t you?” before tipping his hat to her and standing back for her to precede him, as though she had been a debutante rather than a secretary.

His eyes were a very deep blue in his tanned face.

Not, thought Lucy sternly, that she had any designs on Mr. Philip Schuyler’s person. Everyone knew he was engaged to a Philadelphia debutante whose photos appeared regularly in the papers. Lucy had seen those pictures. Didi Shippen was always impeccably turned out, whether in tennis whites or an evening frock, her perfectly waved hair framing a face whose symmetry was spoiled only by a certain hint of a pout about the lips.

All the gossip columnists agreed: A Shippen was a fitting match for a Schuyler.

Not Lucy Young, who had grown up above a bakery in Brooklyn, who had spent her first few years fist deep in bread dough. She might as well sigh for the moon as for a Schuyler.

Besides, it wasn’t Mr. Schuyler she was interested in; it was his files. Specifically, the files pertaining to the Pratt estate.

So far, however, there had been little opportunity. When Lucy had offered, casually, to bring Mr. Schuyler’s coffee, she had been subjected to a freezing stare from his secretary, Meg, who had informed Lucy that she was quite capable, thank you very much, and hadn’t Lucy any documents to type?

Meg, however, was nowhere in evidence. Her desk chair was empty, the cover over her typewriter.

Miss Meechum wrung her hands. “The worst possible timing—the Merola deal closes on Tuesday—they want several changes to the contract—”

“Meg is in the hospital!” chimed in Fran from the next desk.

“The hospital?” Lucy echoed, looking from one to the other.

“A taxi swerved and—smash!—there she was, just white as a sheet and all crumpled on the ground,” jumped in Fran. “Right outside!”