The Forgotten Room(66)

“It might not be the same . . .”

“Kate. Don’t. You and I both know it is. Please stay. Just a little longer. And tell me how you came to own this necklace.”

I lay back down, unable to walk away from him no matter how much I knew I should. He lay down, too, our faces only inches apart. I took a deep breath, smelling the laundry detergent clinging to the pillowcase and the alluring smell of man and sweat and him. “It belonged to my grandmother, and then to my mother. It passed to me when my mother died. She never wore it, although several times when I was a little girl, I’d see her take it out of her jewelry box and put it on for a little while. But she never wore it outside the house.”

His fingers lifted the stone from my throat, feeling its heft, turning it around in his hand, the brush of his skin against mine like tiny flaming matches. “It’s a large stone, probably worth a great deal.”

“I never really thought about it until I showed it to my friend Margie—she keeps it in her apartment for me. She said the same thing and she and I agreed that it didn’t make any sense. You see, my grandmother was a baker’s wife. I never could figure out how a baker’s wife would come by such a beautiful and expensive piece of jewelry.”

He gently rested the stone against my neck, then placed his arm around my waist as if it belonged there. He was silent for a long time, and I wondered if he’d gone back to sleep. “What are we going to do, Kate?”

For a moment I imagined the ruby crushing my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs, feeling for the second time since I’d met Captain Cooper Ravenel suddenly bereft.

I swallowed. “You’ll continue to heal and then you will leave and go back to your home in Charleston where you will marry Miss Middleton in November and forget all about me. And I will continue to nurse the wounded officers that the war will spit out until there are no more bodies to throw into the war machine. I hope to become the best doctor that I can be and continue to practice medicine until I’m too old to see straight.”

I’d tried to make my tone light and flippant, but my voice had caught on the last word, as if I imagined Cooper seeing the bleak world I’d painted for both of us.

“Then let me finish your sketch, so I won’t forget you. But I want you to wear the necklace. Would you do that for me? As a parting gift.”

I pulled away and sat on the edge of the bed, my back to him. I should say no. I should stand up and walk out of the room without saying anything. But the ruby lay heavy around my neck, as if all the unanswered questions lay trapped inside of it. He would be leaving in two weeks and I’d never see him again. It was a small thing, really. To allow him to sketch me wearing my grandmother’s necklace. It would be a fitting way to say good-bye.

“Yes,” I said without turning around. “I’ll let you finish the sketch, and I’ll wear the necklace.” I’d made it to the door before he spoke.

“Kate?”

I turned the door handle.

“You feel it, too, don’t you? This thing between us. This connection.”

I closed my eyes, seeing my face in the miniature, remembering how I’d felt the first time I’d seen him being pulled from the ambulance in the pouring rain. But he was promised to another, and my life’s path was never meant to intersect with his.

“Good night, Cooper.”

I closed the door behind me with a soft snap before I felt compelled to answer.





Twenty




CHRISTMAS DAY 1892


Olive


The tracks of the New York Central Railroad lay like an open scar all up the length of Fourth Avenue, and to cross over this dirty gulf by one of the steel bridges was to cross into another world.

Well, maybe the transition wasn’t quite so dramatic as that. Nobody wanted to live next to the stink and steam of the railway line, after all, so the houses began shrinking once you walked across Madison Avenue. But the inhabitants of the western side of the tracks still had some aspirations to grandeur. They lived within gazing distance of the mansions around Fifth Avenue. They passed these limestone palaces on their way to a morning stroll in Central Park and rubbed shoulders with their well-heeled neighbors at every opportunity.

Like an old English ha-ha separating one pasture from another, however, the Fourth Avenue railway viaduct neatly separated the upper classes from the middle ones. On the eastern side lived the respectable professionals, the artisans and shopkeepers seeking a little more fresh air than could be found farther south, and here, in a narrow and neatly kept house on Seventy-eighth Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, lived Olive’s mother and the three boarders in the upstairs bedrooms, one of which had once belonged to Olive herself, in the long-ago days of her girlhood.

When Olive trudged up the steps to the front door on her afternoons off, she always remembered how her father had scorned this house, which the Van Alans had bought in the early days, when he was only an ambitious junior draftsman at McKim, Mead & White. He hadn’t liked its narrow proportions, or its cheap construction, or the muddy brown stone of its fa?ade. When the Pratt mansion was finished, he told Olive, he would buy them a beautiful wide house on the other side of Fourth, the right side of Fourth, made of noble white limestone with a proper garden in back. The commissions would come pouring in, once the Pratts’ wealthy friends saw the beauty of the Pratts’ new home, and they would have an upstairs and a downstairs maid, a trained cook and housekeeper, and even their own carriage. The Van Alans would take their place—this was her father’s dream—among the very society that employed him.