The Forgotten Room(25)

But the door remained chastely closed.

Quickly, quickly. Hands shaking, Lucy drew the papers out of their cardboard casing. Invoices and accountings, that was what most of it seemed to be, and none of it older than—she flipped hastily through the pile—1912. The Pratt trust paid out monies quarterly to Prunella Schuyler, nee Pratt. The correspondence consisted largely of bills from tradesmen, demanding payment from the Pratt trust, and formal letters from Mrs. Schuyler, demanding advances on next quarter’s payment. Mrs. Schuyler, it seemed, lived considerably outside her income.

It was an income that would have kept Lucy in stockings and carfare for a very long time, but, judging from the documentation, Mrs. Schuyler hadn’t the least problem blazing through an entire quarter’s allowance in one visit to Cartier.

Fascinating, in its way, but none of her affair. Tearing herself away from descriptions of diamond clips and sapphire and emerald brooches, Lucy set the pile relating to the Pratt trust aside. Which didn’t leave terribly much. There were papers concerning the sale of the house, all of the proceeds from which had gone into the Pratt trust.

Well, what had she expected? Henry August Pratt’s personal diary? Letters to his lawyer? Dear Mr. Cromwell: My wastrel son has impregnated a guest in our home . . .

Had her mother been a guest? She must have been. She knew the house too well, had described it too fully, to have been a mere visitor.

But who was she? Strange to be asking that about one’s own mother. Lucy knew her mother as a brush of serge, as her small hands clutched her mother’s skirt; she knew her as the scent of lavender; as a low, sweet voice singing lullabies, and later, much later, as a quiet, withdrawn presence, the sound of pages in a book being turned, a darkened room, a cough that wouldn’t go away.

Sometimes, Lucy wondered if the mother she had known was only a shadow, if the real woman had been left somewhere, across the bridge in Manhattan. There had been a hint of something vital about her, but only a hint, like the impression of a flower in an old book, long after the actual petals had faded and crumbled away.

Her mother loved her; she had said so, time and again. But Lucy had never been able to shake the feeling that there was someone her mother loved more, someone who had taken the best of her, leaving only a husk for Lucy and her father.

Lucy’s knuckles were white against the dark wood of the desk. She forced herself to relax her hands, finger by finger.

The file, Lucy reminded herself. She still had a dinner dress to acquire, a client to charm. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath, scrunching the old hurts down, as far as they would go.

There wasn’t much left in the file. Miscellaneous financial documents—apparently, Mr. Pratt’s investments hadn’t fared that well in the nineties—and, at the very bottom, a copy of Henry August Pratt’s will.

It was surprisingly short. There were no charitable bequests, no recognition of old servants. In fact, the only legatee—the sole legatee—was Pratt’s daughter, Prunella.

Had she missed a page? Lucy leafed back through the closely typed pages. No. It was all in order. To my daughter, Prunella . . . and then a complicated spate of legalese, which, when translated to English, seemed to be the provision of a trust that kept her from touching any of the principal. There were four trustees, of whom one was Philip Schuyler.

There were no bequests to his wife or to his other children. It was as if they had never been.

One son had died, hadn’t he? Lucy struggled to remember. A bar fight on the Lower East Side? The papers had only hinted, but it had been something vaguely sordid. An angry husband?

But there had been two sons, twins. What had the other twin done to be excluded from his father’s will?

The date on the will was 1893, the year Lucy had been born.

There was a sharp rapping on the door. “Yoo-hoo? Anyone in there?”

Lucy jammed the file into the drawer and kicked the cabinet closed with her foot. “Yes?”

Fran poked her head around the door. She already had her hat on and was drawing on her gloves. “We’re going for chop suey. Want to come?”

Lucy pressed her eyes shut. Only Fran. Fran wouldn’t know a file if it bit her. “I would, but . . . I have a dinner engagement.”

Fran’s eyebrows went up. “A dinner engagement? You’ve been holding out on us. You never said you had a fellow. Hey, El! Miss Dark Horse has a dinner engagement!”

Lucy cut around Fran, yanking the door of Mr. Schuyler’s office firmly shut behind her. She walked purposefully toward her desk. “No, no. It’s not like that. It’s just . . .”

“‘Just . . .’?” Fran trailed after Lucy, scenting fresh gossip.

Blast Philip Schuyler and his schemes. Philip Schuyler, sitting seraphically in a box at Tosca, his stepmother in silk and diamonds beside him.

Lucy improvised. “It’s just . . . a friend of the family. He’s visiting from out of town.”

Fran pursed her lips significantly. “An out-of-town friend.”

Lovely. It would be all over the steno pool by Monday.

There was no strategy like distraction. On an impulse, Lucy said, “Fran, do you know where I can get a cheap dinner dress in the next”—Lucy glanced at the clock above Miss Meechum’s desk—“hour and a half?”

“What sort of dinner dress are we talking about?”

“A respectable one. Something I can wear to Delmonico’s.”