The Forgotten Room(42)

I looked at Dr. Greeley and could see Nurse Hathaway behind his shoulders, rolling her eyes. “Yes,” I said. “I helped.” The necklace quivered against my skin as I turned to Cooper and then back to the ice queen in confusion. “Your name isn’t Victorine?”

She threw back her head and laughed, the sound low and throaty. “Oh, no, my dear. Victorine is the name of the artist Manet’s muse, a woman he dearly loved.” She turned her attention back to Cooper. “Just like yours is Caroline, isn’t it, darling?”

I grabbed the empty water pitcher by the side of the bed, said a hasty good-bye while avoiding Cooper’s gaze, then left the room. I was halfway down the steps before I thought to wonder why the woman he called out for in his dreams wasn’t Caroline.





Fourteen




CHRISTMAS EVE 1892


Olive


When Olive first set foot in the kitchen of the Pratt mansion, her jaw had fallen straight to the floor.

Of course, she’d already seen the plan in her father’s architectural drawings, so she shouldn’t have been shocked at all. Her fingers had once slid lovingly along the generous dimensions, lingering on the cupboards and counters, the massive oven—or rather ovens, for there were two of them—the larder, the silver closet, the wine cellar. Wondering what it might be like, to command a kitchen like that, so modern and large and efficient, lit and ventilated by special windows and shafts, so that you hardly noticed you were in the basement of a New York City town house at all.

But it was one thing to sigh over a set of two-dimensional drawings, and quite another to don apron and cap and walk through the doorway into the enormous and bustling three-dimensional room, presided over by a cook who might have sent Genghis Khan to the devil. In a household that revolved around the precise and formal succession of splendid meals, the kitchen was the pulsing center, the steam engine driving the propeller that was Pratt family life. (Or was Pratt family life the steamship itself, and the food the propeller?) Regardless, just presenting herself in the doorway each morning, apron crisp and cap pinned in place, was enough to make Olive’s heart fail at the magnitude of the work looming before her, the same damned Sisyphean boulder she would have to push up the hill yet again, just as she had the day before, and the one before that, unto (so it seemed, anyway, at five o’clock in the bleak winter morning) eternity.

The task seemed especially impossible this morning, which happened to be both Christmas Eve (more work!) and the day after last night: a night that had concluded only three hours ago, as Olive tiptoed down the back staircase to the nunnery, slipped her Bible from the doorjamb, and crept into her cold bed. Except she hadn’t noticed it was cold, had she, because she was aglow, aglow, dizzy with the promising adoration in Harry’s eyes, the warmth of his smile, the understanding that filled the attic room in the sizzle of the coal fire. The smell of oil paint and human skin. The scratch of pencil, the rumble of laughter that moved her heart against her ribs. As she laid her head on her early-morning pillow, she had never felt warmer. She had never felt more alive.

It was only upon waking, a few scant hours later, that Olive found the cold.

“Having trouble sleeping, are you?” snapped the cook.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’ve got circles under your eyes the size of quarters.” The cook’s face was red and suspicious, and her thin black hair was already wisping away from the side of her cap. Christmas was her Armageddon, the annual life-and-death climax of her struggle against the towering demands of an Important Family during the festive season.

Olive wanted to say that she had already laid the fires and scrubbed the floors and polished the silver for Christmas Eve dinner, and all before nine o’clock in the morning. She had served breakfast to Mr. and Mrs. Pratt and Miss Prunella Pratt at nine thirty (really, how many cups of coffee could a man drink?) and cleaned up the table afterward. She had done all this on exactly two hours and forty-eight minutes of sleep, and if she had circles under her eyes, she had damned well earned them.

On the other hand, if anyone in the Pratt mansion was working harder than Olive just now, it was Mrs. Jackins.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said instead. “It’s so exciting, my first Christmas here.”

“It’s a load of bother, is what it is,” the cook said, conciliatory. She tucked the loose hair back under her cap and glanced up at the clock. “And them boys not even awake yet. Up to no good last night, I don’t doubt. Boys that age is never up to any good.”

Was it Olive’s imagination, or did the cook put a bit of emphasis on those words?

She shrugged. “It must be nice, being rich.”

“Well, and so it is nice, but it’s not for the likes of us working folk. Do you hear me, Olive? Now—”

But the sharp ring of a bell interrupted her words, and she glanced up at the row of them on the wall.

“Master Harry,” she said, sighing. “He’ll be wanting his coffee.”

“I’ll get it,” Olive said quickly.

“Oh, and you will, will you?”

“It’s my job, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Jackins put her hands on her spacious hips. “You and the half dozen other housemaids who might take Master Harry his morning coffee.”

Olive took a tray from the cupboard and began to collect the coffee service. “Well, I’m here, aren’t I? I might as well.”