The Forgotten Room(79)
Not for all the times they had come together this week, just like this, furtive and beautiful and primeval, like a pair of lovers resurrected from legend. Like Tristan and Isolde, like Lancelot and Guinevere: the kind of tale with which Olive, as a budding young lady, had always become impatient. Why would any sane woman give up everything for an object so chimerical as passion? But now she knew. She would give up anything for this. It frightened her, what risks she would take, what price she would pay, what conventions she would ignore, for this instant of joy in Harry’s arms.
An instant of true happiness, before she returned to reality.
She tightened her fingers around his hair and whispered, “I have to go back. Someone’s going to come looking for me.”
“But not here. No one ever comes here, except us.” His thumbs moved against her bottom. “One more minute.”
“Why? You’ve had what you wanted.”
“Not yet.” He kissed her neck. “This is what I really wanted, Olive. This is what I can’t get enough of.”
“Harry—”
“Just be still, won’t you? Don’t spoil it. Trust me, for once.”
Olive relaxed against the wall, against Harry’s sturdy hands, and closed her eyes. Just for a minute. Because he was right, wasn’t he? Harry was always right. This was the best part. This was what she couldn’t get enough of, not if she lived forever: Harry on her skin, Harry’s grateful kisses on her neck, Harry and Olive, teeming and sated, brimming over with each other, as if this house and this world had been built by God’s hands for their love alone.
But they weren’t, not really. The world was more practical than that. Two minutes later she was hurrying back down the staircase, legs atremble, smoothing her rumpled skirt, to burst onto the fifth-floor landing and the maelstrom of preparation for the evening’s festivities.
If anything, she thought, the house and the world had been built for Prunella Pratt’s engagement ball.
A curl brushed against her cheek. Olive put her hands to the sides of her head and realized that her hair was damp and loose, that the pins had been dragged from the knot at the base of her neck: a natural consequence of repeated ecstatic abrasion against a plaster wall. She turned in horror to the gilded mirror that hung at the end of the landing, right where the winding staircase reached the floor, and began jabbing the pins in place.
“Olive! What’s the matter? You’re blushed to the gills!”
Olive spun around. It was Bitsy, one of the parlormaids, a quiet girl with a lilting Irish accent.
“Nothing! I was just fetching something, and the stairs . . .” She shrugged helplessly.
Bitsy rolled her eyes. “Well, you’d best clean yourself up right quick. Ellen’s burned her hand on the curling tongs, the old galoot, and there’s no one else to help Miss Prunella dress.”
“But I’m not a lady’s maid!”
“Seems you are now. I’d hop to it, if I was you.”
Bitsy turned and hurried back down the stairs, without another glance, until she rounded the curve and disappeared. But her voice floated up in her absence: “Mind you straighten your cap, now, Olive!”
Olive turned back in horror to her reflection. Bitsy was right: She was flushed, and her cap sagged shamefully to the left. Upstairs, Harry had ducked into the studio to reconstruct himself back on orderly lines, but Olive had no such luxury, did she? She forced her fingers to stop their shaking and put each pin back in place. She drew in a long and steadying breath and straightened her white cap. There was nothing she could do about the blush. She had earned it, fair and square.
Miss Prunella’s room lay only a single floor down from the nunnery but it occupied a different universe: high of ceiling, deep and intricate of molding, lavish of decoration. Olive knocked on the door and pretended not to notice that the entrance to Harry’s room beckoned only a few feet away. He had left his door carelessly ajar. If she craned her neck, she could peek through the few inches of space and spy his bookshelf, the corner of his bed.
But the summons from Miss Prunella came at once, sharp and annoyed, and Olive had no time to waste on sightseeing. She put her hand on the knob and pushed open the heavy wooden door.
Olive had never entered Miss Prunella’s room while its owner lounged inside, and she was surprised by the way the Pratt presence transformed the space: from tranquil sanctuary, upholstered in pleasing shades of green and yellow, to a bristling silk-strewn hive, dominated by an enormous cheval mirror and the tiny young woman who stood before it, dressed in her underclothes.
“There you are!” Miss Prunella spun around, hands on hips, in a white vortex of lace and satin. “Where have you been?”
Engaged in passion with your brother, in the attic stairwell.
“My duties,” Olive mumbled.
“Well, help Mona here with my dress. She’s so simple, she can’t tell one end from another.” Prunella spun back to the more agreeable contemplation of herself in the mirror, and for the first time Olive noticed Mona cowering in the corner, huge-eyed, next to a chaise longue that bore the holy of all holies: Prunella’s engagement gown.
“It’s that heavy,” she whispered to Olive, lifting one scrap of a sleeve, and Olive sighed and slid her arms under the voluminous skirt. The gown was of cream-colored satin, embroidered with tiny pale-pink flowers, and trimmed at the neck and sleeves with satin rosettes that must have cost the Pratts’ dressmaker weeks to create. All for a single night, for the care and feeding of Prunella Pratt’s vanity.