The Forgotten Room(5)
Olive realized she was trembling, that the match had nearly gone out. She whipped the candle under the flame. The wick caught instantly, and she dropped the match onto the rug just as it singed her fingers.
She held still for a moment, while the taper flickered uncertainly in her hand. The room looked different by night, forbidding, almost Gothic in the ominous dim wavering of the candle flame. There were the bookcases she had polished so industriously that afternoon; there were the deep armchairs and the leather Chesterfield sofa near the fireplace. There was the liquor cabinet, the enormous sash windows now enclosed by damask curtains, the paneled walls, and the long-necked brass floor lamps, one poised next to each armchair.
And the desk.
Of course, the huge brown desk, supported by curved legs and feet in the shape of lions’ paws, covered by a red baize blotter and a small Chinese lamp and a sleek black enamel fountain pen perched in its sleek black enamel holder at the very top and center.
Olive picked up the spent match, placed it in the pocket of her dressing gown, and stepped carefully across the rug and around the corner of the desk, where the drawers lined up on either side of an immense leather chair. (Mr. Pratt was a large man to begin with, six feet tall and framed like a Cossack, and he had allowed a layer of prosperous fat to gather and thicken over that frame, steeped with smoke from the finest imported cigars, so that Olive imagined if he were slaughtered and brought to market, he would taste exactly like a well-cured side of bacon.) The chair was too large to fit between the drawers, so Olive had to pull it away. The wheels squeaked softly, and she froze for an instant, horrified, waiting for doors to bang and footsteps to drum along the stairs. Sleepwalk? She would pretend to be sleepwalking. It might work; you never knew.
But the house remained still. Olive counted the gentle ticks of the clock above the mantel, until her heartbeat slowed to match them. A curious dark spot appeared before the curtains, and another, and she realized she had stopped breathing. A silly thing to do.
She released her lungs and bent down to address the first drawer on the right.
It was locked.
Of course it was locked. My God. What had she been thinking? Even her father had locked up all his papers, and her father’s papers consisted of nothing more than drawings and bills and technical correspondence. She rattled the drawer gently, hoping the lock might somehow wake up and take pity on her, the way one took pity on the beggar children who inhabited the street corners downtown. But of course it didn’t. How stupid. How disastrously stupid, to think she could just steal into Henry Pratt’s library and find incriminating papers, hey presto, lying about unguarded. When even the housemaids’ virtue was kept under lock and key in the Pratt mansion.
Still she went on staring at the desk drawer, unable to accept her defeat. Just to give up and go back to her bed, after all that effort. To admit that, perhaps, the entire project was beyond her: Olive, reader of books, dreamer of dreams, middle-class daughter of a failed middle-class architect. Absurd, to think that she could carry off a deception like this, a plot for revenge (justice, not revenge, she reminded herself), a clandestine midnight search for papers that, if they did exist, would be hidden well beyond the reach of a common housemaid, even a clever one.
Olive’s hand fell away from the handle of the drawer.
The climb back upstairs was cold and weary. The library lay on the third floor, along with the billiards room at the back (the masculine floor, she called it in her mind); the next floor held Mr. and Mrs. Pratt’s stately bedrooms, and the next held the children’s bedrooms. Well, not children, really. The youngest was Prunella, who was eighteen years old and newly engaged to a wealthy idiot, a widower with a young child; Olive couldn’t remember his name. Then there were the twin boys, August and Harry, who had just returned home from Harvard for the Christmas holiday. It was their last year of university, and everybody was speculating what they would do next: the family home or bachelor apartments? Professional ambitions? Wedding bells? Olive hadn’t listened much. One of them was supposed to be quite wild and artistic; the other was supposed to be simply wild. They had gotten into daily scrapes when they were younger, said one of the maids, who had been with the Pratts at their old house on Fifty-seventh Street. One of them had gotten some poor woman with child—so it was rumored, anyway—some earlier housemaid; Mr. Pratt had dealt with the matter himself, so Mrs. Pratt wouldn’t be bothered.
Olive paused with her foot on the final step at the sixth-floor landing. Now, that might serve Mr. Pratt right. If the story was true, of course, and if it reached the newspapers . . .
A soft sound reached her ears.
Olive glanced down the stairwell and saw a faint triangle of light on the floor below.
She bolted without thinking, right past the entry to the sixth floor and up the last narrow flight to the seventh floor. A storeroom, wasn’t it? She’d never been there. But she couldn’t go to her room; the intruder would hear her opening the vestibule door, would hear her creeping down the corridor to her cramped little chamber.
But no one would be going as high as the seventh-floor stairs.
She waited in the shadows of the landing. There was no door here; the stairs opened right out to a short hallway. A small round window let in a hint of moonlight, illuminating a narrow portal at the end of the hall, six or seven feet away.
A voice called out in a low, rumbling whisper.
“Is someone there?”
Olive took a single step back, toward the door.