The Forgotten Room(34)

“Thank you,” Lucy said to the silent waiter, and sat, fixing Mr. Ravenel with her most forbidding stare. “Good evening, Mr. Ravenel.”

“Shall we start again?” Instead of sitting, he took her hand with a courtly gesture that was more an homage than a shake. “I am honored to make your acquaintance, Miss Young.”

There were callouses on his thumbs. Lucy wondered how it was that an art dealer came to have such muscular arms. Hauling canvases? Art dealer, it seemed, might be a very broad term.

What had Mr. Schuyler said about him? Something about his father being a famous artist. Lucy had seen it often enough at home, sons who weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer being taken into the family business.

“Thank you, Mr. Ravenel.” Lucy crossed her legs at the ankle, sitting primly on the edge of her chair. “I understand that you were expecting Mr. Schuyler.”

Mr. Ravenel seated himself on the other side of the table, moving with the easy grace of a sportsman. “And instead I see a vision in blue.”

Or just a vision. He had looked like a skeptic who had seen a statue of a saint weeping, a rationalist who saw a blurry face in a window of a deserted house, a man confronted with an impossibility that had become possible.

“I trust you had a comfortable trip?” said Lucy, determined to make polite conversation if it killed her. Open a gallery in New York? The man would be lucky if he could cross the street by himself.

“Not so very bad,” allowed Mr. Ravenel, drawling out the words so that the sound was as thick as the scent of wisteria from the flowers twining around the trellis on the walls.

Lucy reached for her napkin. The waiter whisked it away, shaking it out over her lap, leaving Lucy grasping at air.

Amusement glinted in Mr. Ravenel’s brown eyes.

Perhaps he wasn’t so simple, after all.

Lucy seized on her water glass to hide her confusion, taking a prim sip. “Is this your first time in New York, Mr. Ravenel?”

“I passed through in ’seventeen, on my way to France.”

Mr. Ravenel said it so casually, but there was no mistaking his meaning. Lucy remembered those days, the troops in their khaki, shipped through New York from Minnesota, Missouri, Maine. Men who had never left their hometowns, desperate to sample the pleasures of the big city before facing death in the trenches.

“I’m finding it a great deal more pleasant this time around,” said Mr. Ravenel, and Lucy couldn’t quite tell if he was making fun.

“Yes, well, I imagine one would, not having to worry about being shot at and all,” said Lucy and winced at how callous she sounded.

She was saved by the waiter, who appeared unobtrusively at the side of the table. “If madam and sir are ready . . .”

Defiantly, Lucy ordered lobster Newburgh. If Philip Schuyler wanted a steak, he could have one himself.

John Ravenel ordered in French. Not the rough sort of French picked up by a soldier trying to finagle a loaf of bread out of the locals, but impeccable, perfectly accented French. The sort of French Lucy’s mother had spoken.

“Your French is very good,” said Lucy. Hers wasn’t nearly as good, but at least she spoke enough not to disgrace herself among the Philip Schuylers of the world. Her mother’s lessons had been erratic, but they had stuck.

“Does that surprise you?”

“I—” It did, actually. It was Philip Schuyler, she realized, calling Mr. Ravenel “Huck Finn.” It had set an image in her mind, one their first meeting had done nothing to counteract.

But Huck Finn, she ought to have remembered, was cannier than he had appeared. And she might not know much about anything outside the five boroughs of New York, but she knew enough to be aware that Charleston was hardly a backwater. Mr. Ravenel was the son of a famous artist, owner of a gallery.

And she was just a secretary.

“I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising.” Lucy scrambled to regain her footing. “Given that you were, er, over there.”

“My father insisted we learn the language.”

“We?” She’d lost control of the conversation somehow.

“My sister Anna and my brother Oliver.” Mr. Ravenel was watching her with a calculating expression, quickly replaced by a self-deprecating smile. A Huck Finn smile, all Aw, shucks and Don’t mind me. “We started off on the wrong foot, didn’t we? When I saw you . . . you have the look of someone . . . someone I used to know. It startled me. That’s all.”

Reluctantly, Lucy asked, “Were her eyes blue?”

John Ravenel smiled at her. “Green,” he said.

Mr. Ravenel couldn’t know that Lucy had always secretly wished for green eyes, like her mother’s, instead of a pedestrian pale blue. Growing up in an area populated by immigrants from Northern Europe, blue eyes were about as unusual as having two feet.

Lucy hadn’t wanted to be like everyone else. She had wanted to be exceptional. Different.

Mr. Ravenel raised his glass to his lips. “When I saw you walking toward me, I thought I must be dreaming.”

Lucy wondered who the mystery woman was. A fiancée who had died while he was away at war? Someone lost at sea? Whoever she was, she must have been very dear.

“She sounds very glamorous.”

“Well, yes,” said Mr. Ravenel, and this time, Lucy didn’t miss the amusement in his expression. “She looks very like you.”