The Forgotten Room(4)

It was a good time to be a builder in Manhattan. It was a good time to be an architect, or so Olive’s father had believed, in that lifetime ago. A year ago.

Many minutes had now passed since the last bedspring had squeaked, since the last pipe had trickled and groaned. The floorboards were still too new to creak. Olive pinched herself again, waited another five minutes, and rose so carefully from her bed that she didn’t disturb a single coil.

Her flannel dressing gown lay over the wooden chair. She slid her feet into her slippers and eased the robe over her shoulders and arms.

Mrs. Keane was right: The Pratt family housemaids weren’t locked in. Olive’s own father had, toward the dusty end of construction, insisted that the newly hung vestibule door should operate a dead bolt from the inside, because—my God!—think of the plight of the poor housemaids if, heaven forbid, a fire should tear through the house in the middle of the night! The scandal would be enormous, the headlines thick and torrid and accusatory. They would brand Mr. Henry August Pratt a heartless slayer of the innocent lower classes, a Dickensian villain of the worst sort: in short, a real prat. Possibly he might face criminal charges. So, thanks to her father’s indignant intervention, the dead bolt lifted and the new brass knob turned easily under Olive’s hand, and before she closed the door again she slid her Bible into the crack between portal and frame, a trick she’d learned at Miss Ellis’s.

Outside the housemaids’ corridor, the air was almost fresh. The grand staircase, winding like a great marble ribbon up the center of the house, had been built not so much for ornamentation, Olive’s father had told her, running his finger along the neat architectural drawings before them, though ornamentation—eye-watering, breath-snatching, jaw-weakening—drove Mr. Pratt’s approval of the design. That thick vertical column of empty space, soaring into the dome, created a vital circulation of healthful air. No cramped and stuffy corridors, no atmosphere allowed to fester in place. In the summer, when the vents were opened and the rising hot molecules were allowed to escape harmlessly into the Manhattan sky, why, you might almost call it bearable. You might not even want to flee to your cottage in Newport or East Hampton or Rumson.

But that, reflected Olive, as she turned the corner and found the back staircase with her foot, just in time to avoid tumbling down it, had been her father’s problem all along. He hadn’t understood that, to men like Mr. Pratt, the healthful aspects of his beautiful soaring staircase didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that Mr. Pratt and his wife and children could stay in Manhattan in the summer, instead of spending money on an entirely different mansion in an entirely different town. The point was to show off, to demonstrate to your wealthy friends that—oh, yes—you could afford the finest, too. Even if you couldn’t, really, or wouldn’t. Even if you refused payment to your architect, after taking up two years of his undivided professional time, just because you could. Just because you’d been clever enough to seal your contract on a handshake and nothing else. A gentleman’s agreement.

Now, that was a laugh, Olive thought. Mr. Henry August Pratt, a gentleman.

The lights were out, and Olive didn’t dare light the candle she held in her left hand as she navigated the narrow little staircase, the poor cousin of the one so impressively occupying the center of the house. No, this was Olive’s staircase, the service stairs, plain and honest, her new lot in life, and anyway it got her where she wanted to go, didn’t it? Utility, that was the point. She could slip through quite unnoticed this way, without making any noise, without stirring the tremendous column of healthful air that fed into all the principal rooms of the Pratt mansion. She could enter Mr. Henry August Pratt’s august library without anyone knowing at all.

Still, her pulse slammed against her throat as she pushed open the heavy door. She felt like a thief, even though she knew she was right. She was only correcting a great wrong; she was fighting for her father’s justice, since he could no longer fight for himself. The real thief, she told herself, as her shaking fingers found the small box of safety matches in the pocket of her dressing gown, as she tried and failed to strike one alight against the edge of the box, was Mr. Pratt.

At last the tip of the match burst into light. The crisp sound of the flare, the acrid saltpeter scent, struck Olive’s senses so forcibly that she nearly gasped, certain that everyone in the house would hear and smell them, too. Her blood felt like ice as it pumped along the arteries of her body, down her limbs, up to her head, making her dizzy. My God, she was actually here. Actually standing here in Mr. Pratt’s library, five feet away from his massive desk, holding a guilty candle in the middle of the night.

She had better get to it, hadn’t she?

But where did one begin to find written evidence of a professional relationship that had never been properly formalized? Just send me the bill, Mr. Pratt had said indulgently, and her father had sent the bill, and it hadn’t been paid. Had Mr. Pratt saved that bill? And if he had, was it proof enough that her father had been cheated of his rightful fees?

That Mr. Pratt had, by cheating her father, effectively destroyed his career, because who would employ an architect who gave such unsatisfactory service that his client wouldn’t pay the bill? And who would employ an architect who dared to make any trouble about those unpaid bills?

That Mr. Pratt had, by destroying his career, effectively destroyed his life, because if her father wasn’t an architect, he was nothing, a negation, an invisible column of empty space for whom no one was willing to pay?