The Forgotten Room(49)
Mr. Schuyler shrugged modestly. “I get around.”
He pushed open a door at the top of the stairs, and Lucy found herself in an entirely different world. A long bar ran down one side of the room, the wood gleaming in the muted light. The walls were wood paneled, with the subdued opulence of a gentleman’s club. It was relatively empty at six o’clock on a Wednesday. Two businessmen had their heads together at one of the round tables, and a bored-looking society girl powdered her nose at another, while the man with her sipped morosely at his drink.
A small stage in the corner was unoccupied, a music stand devoid of music.
“It doesn’t really get going until later,” said Mr. Schuyler. He led her to a small table in the corner, standing courteously as she settled herself on the black leather banquette. “Well, Miss Young? How does it feel to enter a den of iniquity?”
“My grandmother would never approve,” said Lucy, looking at the man and woman together, her dress dipping in a daring vee in the back.
“Mine would,” said Philip Schuyler. “She was a ripping old soul. And she did like her drink. What’s your poison?”
“Er—a gin fizz.” Lucy wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she’d heard the name somewhere.
“That’s my girl,” said Mr. Schuyler approvingly.
No, Didi Shippen was his girl. Lucy wondered if he would take Didi to someplace like this, up a secret stair, whispering together in the shadows, or if Didi was for sunlight and tennis courts and brightly lit ballrooms.
Lucy glanced covertly around as Mr. Schuyler ordered their drinks, both nervous and exhilarated. There was a curious unreality about it all, about the dark, tobacco-scented room, the low lights, the small table, Mr. Schuyler so close to her she could feel his knee—unintentionally, of course—brushing hers.
Not Mr. Schuyler, Philip, Lucy reminded herself, and forced herself to relax her hands. She looked, she knew, like a nervous spinster paying a call on a crotchety maiden aunt, not a woman of the world about to have a clandestine drink with a handsome man.
Deliberately, she set her bag on the table and drew the pins from her hat. Little enough in the way of debauchery, but at least it made her feel less like an Irish schoolteacher.
A waiter set their drinks in front of them, the contents icy cold, the glasses already sweating gently in the warm room.
“Bottoms up,” said Mr. Schuyler—Philip—and drained half his glass in one swig. He set it down with a satisfied sigh. “That’s better.”
Lucy sniffed cautiously at her own drink before taking a very small sip. “I don’t want to pry . . . but is something wrong?”
“You’re the least prying person I know,” said Philip, and Lucy felt a small flush of shame.
If he knew why she had taken the job . . . If he knew that she had gone through his files when he wasn’t there . . .
He raised his glass in a salute. “What’s wrong is that my father married the Hag from Hell. And then the old so-and-so had the nerve to die and bequeath her to me. Cheers.”
“The Hag from Hell?” Lucy took another small sip from her drink.
“Demanding Witch will also do.” Philip Schuyler drained the last of his martini. “God, I needed that.”
It was the perfect opening Lucy needed to ask about the Pratts. “Is she really that bad?”
Mr. Schuyler waved for the waiter. “It depends on how you define bad. She never locked me in the attic or sent me to my room without my supper. Of course, she would have had to be aware that I was having supper to send me to my room without it.”
Tentatively, Lucy asked, “How old were you when your father married her?”
The waiter set another martini down in front of Mr. Schuyler, the astringent smell of undiluted spirits strong enough to strip the varnish from the table.
“Eight. I was eight when my father married her.” Philip wrapped his hands around the stem of the martini glass, his shoulders hunching forward, and, for a moment, Lucy saw not the confident man she saw in the office every day, but a lonely little boy. “I remember him telling me that he’d found a new mother for me. Mother. Ha. She’s about as maternal as a mongoose.”
If Philip had been eight when his father had married Prunella Pratt, that meant he was old enough to remember the family; old enough, perhaps, to have noticed Lucy’s mother. Prunella Pratt had announced her engagement to Harrison Schuyler in the winter of 1892. Lucy’s mother had married her father in early 1893.
Did you ever meet a woman there? Lucy wanted to ask. A woman who looked like me?
If her mother was a houseguest, she would have been included in family events. But Philip Schuyler, eight years old and confined to the nursery, wasn’t likely to remember.
Philip was still musing over his martini. “She had me fooled for a bit. You wouldn’t think of it to look at me now, but I was a very pretty child.” There was a mocking note. “Blond ringlets and all. Prunella liked to dress me up in a little velvet suit and take me to tea with her friends, so they could all exclaim over how maternal she was, how sweet. Then she’d send me back to the nursery as soon as we got home. I used to wonder what I was doing wrong. I’d try to find ways to get her attention, to make her love me. Stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” said Lucy softly. “I—”
She bit her lip on what she had been planning to say. The drawings she had made, trotting to her mother with them like a dog with bones. She’d known her mother loved art, and she’d thought, maybe, if she could create it, then her mother would pay attention to her, would look at her as though she really saw her.