The Forgotten Room(55)
“I would say a wedding gown, except I don’t think it was ever a true white. Maybe a gown for a very special occasion.” I leaned forward, examining a dark stain of brownish red on the front bodice. It was a garish blemish on the pale satin, like a scar. “Possibly worn only once because of a wine spill. What a shame.”
“Should I put this in a pile for you?”
I actually thought about it for a moment before shaking my head. “No. I have no use for it, and certainly no place to put it. But it is lovely, isn’t it?”
He’d taken two steps toward the pile before he stopped. “There’s an embroidered label inside.” He fumbled for a moment with the collar, bringing it closer to his face. “It says, ‘Made Expressly for Prunella J. Pratt.’”
“Prunella?” I said, the name jarring.
“Not the most attractive of names; that’s for sure. It’s a good thing she was wealthy. I’ve found that people will overlook a lot if one has money.”
I barely heard him, my brain too busy racing. “That’s odd,” I said. “It is an unusual name, yet when I was growing up I remember having an Aunt Prunella. I don’t know what her exact relationship was—she could have been a great-aunt or something—but I called her Aunt Prunella. I don’t recall if her last name was Pratt—it wasn’t something I ever thought to ask. She seemed ancient even back then to my four-year-old self and smelled like mothballs. My parents would take me for an obligatory Sunday afternoon visit and I’d have to kiss her cheek and then sit still for a whole hour gnawing on stale cookies and listening to her talk about how wonderful her life had once been, and how many times she appeared in the society pages labeled as a ‘great beauty.’ She had a scrapbook she’d always bring out just to prove to us that she was telling the truth. And my parents usually brought her a check. She must have always been asking for money, because I remember that part very clearly.”
I paused, the memory not wholly unwelcome. My father and mother had both been alive then, and if the weather was nice, on the way home we’d walk through the park and my father would buy me an ice-cream cone. And when I was very small, he’d lift me up on his shoulders for the last block, pretending to stagger under my weight.
I slammed the armoire door shut. “We stopped visiting her when my father died—I always got the sense that we did so only out of my father’s sense of duty, and my mother saw no sense in extending the misery after his death. I have no idea if Aunt Prunella is even still alive.”
“She sounds delightful,” he said, the laughter in his eyes again.
I looked down at my watch. “I really need to get started on rounds . . .”
“What’s this?” he asked as he pushed aside a hanging rack of more garments, these draped with an old sheet. But the object he’d focused his attention on was hiding behind it—a short and squat Chinese chest with two drawers, its ornate mother-of-pearl design nearly obliterated by what appeared to be splattered paint. Each drawer had a lock, but no key.
“I really should go downstairs now,” I said, my voice sounding halfhearted even to me.
“Or I could open this top drawer,” Cooper said as he tugged on the ornate drawer pull and it slid open as far as it would go.
“It’s sketches,” I said with surprise. Of anything I anticipated being inside the drawers, that wouldn’t have been it.
Cooper reached in and took out a small pile of various-sized papers, then began slowly flipping through them, showing them to me before moving on to the next.
“They’re sketches of this room,” I said. “Before it became a storeroom.”
Cooper pointed at one of the far wall where the tall blacked-out windows with fanlights sat recessed within the brick walls and under elaborate gilded keystones. “And before there were dimouts in the city.”
Each sketch was a detailed analysis of various parts of the room—the brick fireplace with the painted medallions over the mantel, the delicate scrolls of the ornate ceiling, the domed skylight that magnified the sun, shooting prisms of light throughout the room. I stared at the last one for a long moment while I searched for my voice. “It’s exactly what I thought it would look like. Before they painted it black.”
He was quiet for a moment. “They look . . . familiar somehow. Like I’ve seen them before, or at least the artist’s work. Look,” he said, tapping the bottom right corner of the top sketch. “They’re all signed.”
The signature was tiny, making me squint as I tried to read it. “I think it says Harry Pratt,” I said, handing it back to Cooper.
“Harry Pratt,” he said slowly. “I’m pretty sure I don’t know his work. Most likely some relation to Prunella Pratt, who owned the dress. He’s quite good, whoever he is. Or was.” His glance fell to the second drawer. “Would you like to do the honors?”
With my rounds having been completely forgotten, I knelt in front of the chest and pulled, but nothing happened.
“Is it locked?” Cooper asked.
I shook my head. “No. It looks like something’s stuck. It might be a sketch, and I’m afraid that if I pull on it, it might get damaged.”
I stood back and allowed Cooper to take a look. “I think you’re right.” He began tipping the chest forward to study its back, and then tilted it on its side to look beneath it. “If you can get me some kind of chisel, a hammer and a screwdriver, I should probably be able to take it apart without damaging anything inside.”