The Forgotten Room(33)

Harry replaced the bricks. “Three up, five over. Now let’s get to work, shall we? I don’t want to keep you up too late. I know you start work early around here.”

They returned to the cushions. Olive lay on her back, still stunned, leaning slightly to one side. Harry drew one arm above her head and arranged her hair around her shoulders. His hand touched the drawstring of her nightgown. “May I?” he asked solemnly, and she thought about the cavity among the bricks, and she nodded.

He untied the ribbon, and the nightgown loosened about her chest. Without touching her skin, Harry slid the gown over her shoulder, so that it pooled loosely around her breasts. Olive stared upward at the tin ceiling, the neat repeating pattern of squares, stamped with scallops and intricate trailing vines, and tried not to think about how she must look. Like a wanton, like one of those bad women you read about in novels and magazines, a cautionary tale. Was this how August’s housemaid had fallen? One little step at a time, until she lay half-naked and helpless on a cushion at midnight. Stupid Olive. Thrilled and daring Olive. Who knew she had even existed until now?

A pair of large hands touched her cheeks, dry and warm and inexpressibly gentle.

“Olive, look at me.”

She turned her eyes.

“Do you know what captivates me? This. You, like this. I don’t know what to call it. Your artlessness, your decency, it’s everything I’ve been dreaming of, the exact opposite of that world downstairs, the world I’ve been living in all my life. Every night this week I have lain in my bed, thinking about you. How I want to paint you, to capture—no, that’s not the right word. To express this essence, this wonderful nobility here”—he drew his thumb along her cheek and jaw—“and here.” He touched her collarbone.

“I’m not noble,” she whispered.

“That’s what’s so innocent about you. You don’t realize. You don’t know what you are; you don’t realize everything you could be. You think you’re one thing, but my God, you’re another. I want to show you what I see.” He picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I want to thank you for showing yourself to me.”

Olive wanted to say that she wasn’t showing herself to him, not at all. That this nobility he saw was just an illusion, a hallucination of his own making, because Olive happened to look like a girl he saw in his dreams.

But she couldn’t say the words. His eyes reflected her image, white and clean against the blue irises, and maybe it was just possible, while she was here with him, in this room where nobody knew her, that she could be that girl. The snowy white girl reflected in Harry Pratt’s eyes.

The girl, perhaps, her father wanted her to be.

“You see?” Harry said.

He rose to his feet, picked up his charcoal, and began to sketch.





Twelve




JULY 1920


Lucy


“Your eyes are blue,” John Ravenel said.

At first Lucy thought she must have misheard him. Not Hello, how are you. Not How do you do, but Your eyes are blue. It sounded almost like an accusation.

What color were her eyes meant to be? Of course they were blue. They’d always been blue. And why were they talking about eyes anyway?

“Mr. Ravenel?” Lucy withdrew her hand, assuming her most forbidding expression. “It is Mr. Ravenel, isn’t it?”

He had to be drunk. There was no other explanation. Drunk or mad. The man in front of Lucy wore a conventional suit, but there was something about him that made her think of bandits and brigands, highwaymen and pirates. It might have been his hair, black and soft, not parted and slicked down as fashion commanded. Or it might have been his skin, browned by the sun to the color of well-crisped toast. His eyes—since they appeared to be commenting upon eyes—were a deep, velvety brown.

Right now, they were staring at her as though she were a ghost instead of a woman in a cheap dinner dress, disheveled from her sprint across town.

Mr. Ravenel blinked, and said, unevenly, “Yes, ma’am. Forgive me—I wasn’t expecting—”

His voice was different from the voices she was accustomed to, deep and slow. He took his time with his words, letting them spin out like syrup from a jug.

“Lucy Young,” said Lucy briskly. “From Cromwell, Polk and Moore. Mr. Schuyler was unavoidably detained. He sent me in his place.”

“From Cromwell, Polk and Moore,” Mr. Ravenel echoed, as if the words didn’t quite make sense. Mr. Ravenel’s eyes dropped to the pendant at her neck. A strange expression crossed his face. Calculating. Wary. “Mr. Schuyler sent you?”

“He sends his apologies,” Lucy lied.

And wasn’t that just like Philip Schuyler, to wiggle out of the disagreeable tasks and foist them onto someone else. He might have warned her that Mr. Ravenel was what her mother would have charitably termed “simple.” Her grandmother used rather less charitable terms, in her native German.

No wonder Mr. Ravenel needed to be entertained on his visit to New York. Mr. Cromwell was probably afraid he would wander off if left unattended, Lucy thought tartly.

The waiter was holding her chair for her, waiting for her to sit.

Have a steak, Philip Schuyler had said. Lucy decided she deserved one, right on Philip Schuyler’s tab. No, not a steak. Lobster. And champagne and all the most expensive things on the menu.