The Forgotten Room(50)

“It’s not stupid,” she repeated.

Philip shook his head. “Wasted effort. She’d make up to you when she wanted something and then forget you a moment later. It took me years to realize it.”

“What about your father?” She was wandering away from the Pratts, but she was curious. This was a side to Philip Schuyler she’d never imagined. He’d always seemed so untouchable to her, a man in control of himself and his destiny.

Yes, she could hear the strain in his voice sometimes when Prunella would call for the second or third time that day, but he had always covered it with a smile.

But not now.

Philip gave a short laugh. “My father was besotted with her. Thought she was the embodiment of all womanly virtue. He couldn’t believe his luck when she passed up all the others and chose him instead. He didn’t know that her father was about to go broke.”

Lucy’s head went up. “I thought Mr. Pratt was one of the wealthiest men in New York.”

“New money,” said Philip dismissively. “Easy come, easy go. They put on a good show . . . but by the time my father married Prunella, it all came out. There was nothing left but the house.”

Lucy remembered that file in the cabinet, the Pratt trust, funded by the sale of the house on East Sixty-ninth Street. It had never occurred to her to wonder why there was nothing else.

So much for any hopes of being a long-lost heiress, she thought wryly.

“What happened?”

“Railroads,” said Philip Schuyler succinctly. “One minute they were up and the next they were down. August Pratt went down with them.” With a stiff wrist, Philip knocked back his second martini. “My father wasn’t the love of Prunella’s life. He was her lifeboat.”

He looked so miserable that Lucy cast around for something that might comfort him. “That doesn’t mean she didn’t love him.”

“Prunella loves Prunella.” He considered for a moment. “Also diamonds.”

Lucy saw her chance. Artfully, she said, “There were brothers, weren’t there? Surely she must have loved them.”

Mr. Schuyler—Philip—let out a very ungentlemanly snort. “There was no love lost there. Prunella used to snoop around, look for things she could use against them.” He leaned forward confidingly. “When you’re eight, no one pays any attention. You fit in cracks and corners. I heard all sorts of things I wasn’t supposed to hear.” He nodded emphatically. “All sorts.”

Lucy’s heart was in her throat. “What sorts of things?”

Philip leaned back against the banquette, squinting at the smoke-wreathed ceiling. “I ’member—I remember—Prunella threatening her brother that she was going to tell his father about some of his less ladylike lady friends.”

Lucy tried to ask casually, tried not to show how much it mattered. “Which brother?”

“Gus. August. He reeled in drunk that night, smelling like a brothel. I was sitting on the stairs, playing with my top—they didn’t want me in the drawing room.” A shade of childhood hurt passed across Philip’s face. He shrugged. “So I saw them. Prunella told Gus she’d make it all right if he got her a ruby brooch she wanted. Or maybe it was a necklace? Doesn’t matter. Prunella smashed a glass when Gus laughed at her.”

“They don’t sound like very nice people.” Somehow, Lucy had always assumed that life must have been better in the Pratt household, that wealth brought with it gentility, in the muted clank of silver against porcelain, in the soft swish of the servants opening the drapes. Rudeness, lewdness, those belonged to squalor and noise, not to a place where the very sound of footsteps was swallowed up by the vastness of soaring marble ceilings.

Apparently, she had been wrong.

“Do you know the worst of it?” Philip leaned his elbows on the table, so close that Lucy could smell the gin sharp on his breath.

“There’s more?” Lucy braced herself for some new revelation.

Philip’s face was bleak. “Didi is just like her. I didn’t realize it before—I don’t think I wanted to realize it—but when I heard her on the phone today . . . Christ. They might have been twins.” He looked up, fiercely. “Do you know what Didi wanted?”

Lucy mutely shook her head.

“She wanted me to drop everything tomorrow and go down to Philadelphia to take her to buy a hat.”

“A hat?” Lucy nodded her thanks as the waiter set a fresh round of drinks in front of them. She had barely touched her first, but Philip seized on his third martini gratefully.

“A hat,” he repeated grimly. “She saw one that was just too darling and wanted me to cancel my meetings to come to the milliner with her. In Philadelphia.”

“Perhaps she was joking?” suggested Lucy, with more optimism than hope.

“Ha,” said Philip. “It’s a test, you know. Show of devotion. She liked to do that sort of thing to her beaux—wait till they were in the middle of a conversation, then send one to get her a drink, another to find her gloves. . . . She liked to keep ’em hopping. But I’d thought, well, it was just a game. I thought, she’s young, she’ll grow out of it. But she won’t, will she?” He looked owlishly at Lucy over the rim of his martini glass.

Lucy wished she could tell him otherwise, could give him some comfort. But basic honesty prevented her. “No,” she said. “I think people are who they are. It’s a mistake to marry someone and believe you can change them.”