The Forgotten Room(91)
My gaze panned over the cluttered room as I sipped, taking in the cosmetics on the dressing table and a crumbling bouquet of dried roses that listed languidly in a dome-shaped glass cover on a tall plant stand. Disappointment and regrets. I shivered despite the mugginess, and continued my perusal of the room. A low bookcase sat beneath one of the windows, where a large leather-bound volume was squeezed in between much smaller books. I paused with my cup held to my lips, remembering the book from my childhood visits. “Aunt Prunella, is that your scrapbook?”
She saw where I indicated and elicited a bored sigh. “Yes, it is. My mother clipped every article about me from my debutante ball through my wedding. I thought it was quite tiresome, but she insisted.” A spark lit her eyes, belying her ennui.
“May I see it?” I asked, already walking toward the bookcase.
“If you must. But do not take too long. I need my rest.”
I looked back and saw Mona rolling her eyes. After placing my cup and saucer on top of the bookcase, I slid the thick volume from its place and brought it back to the bed. Mona cleared the tea set before excusing herself for a moment. She returned with a kitchen stool that she placed next to Prunella as I settled the scrapbook against the older woman’s scrawny knees.
The glowing young woman in the aged photographs was barely recognizable as the same woman in the bed beside me. I calculated that Prunella would be about seventy years old now, but her air of frailty and helplessness added years to her age. I wondered if disappointment and regret could do that to a person, could etch themselves into the curves and planes of a young girl’s face, like time’s library stamp.
I let her turn the pages with her still elegant hands, listening to her stories of what it was like for her in the latter part of the last century, to imagine Stornaway Hospital as the glittering mansion it had once been, seeing her handsome brothers in their formal wear dancing with beautiful women at the various balls the Pratt family had hosted in their short stay in the mansion on East Sixty-ninth Street. It made me nostalgic for something I had never known but felt a connection to nevertheless.
I was thinking of an excuse to leave when she turned the page to reveal a large article and photographs that filled facing pages. There was an inset photo of the entire Pratt family in formal attire, posing in front of the familiar circular stairs of the mansion. I pointed to the tall and handsome fair-haired young man standing next to a younger Prunella, his smile full of mischief. “Is this Harry?”
She nodded, her finger gently brushing the clipping. “He was so handsome, wasn’t he? Gus was handsome, too,” she said, tapping the image of another blond young man, who was still nice to look at yet lacked whatever spark his brother seemed to have. “But Harry . . .” She sighed. “My mother used to say he hung the moon in the sky, and if you’d known him, you might even agree.”
I leaned closer, studying his eyes. I examined the curve of his jaw and the way his nose was a little too thin and a little too long but which made it all the more arresting in his otherwise perfect features. “He looks . . . familiar,” I said, leaning back to get a better perspective.
“He should,” Prunella said indignantly. “We favored each other.”
I looked at her and nodded. “Of course,” I said, knowing that wasn’t it at all.
The larger photo was taken at Prunella’s engagement ball. A full orchestra was set up at one end of the ballroom, which was currently being used as examining areas for the patients, with cots running the length of the gilded room. Some of the couples were blurred as they swirled around the floor, smudges of white from ladies’ gloves resting on the shoulders of black-frocked gentlemen. I recognized an older version of Prunella, the mother from the smaller photo, holding court near the punch table. I leaned in closely and felt my breath stop.
Standing directly behind Mrs. Pratt was a young woman in a maid’s uniform almost identical to the one Mona currently wore. Except this uniform was new and crisp and fit the slender form of the woman who wore it. She had dark hair pinned up beneath a white cap, and her gaze was fixed on the tray of champagne glasses that she gripped with both hands, as if she were unaccustomed to serving.
Despite the pressing heat in the room, I felt a chill dance up my spine and take residence at the nape of my neck. It wasn’t that the woman resembled me. It wasn’t even that she was a dead ringer for the woman in the miniature portrait that belonged to Cooper and had once been his father’s and his father’s before him. It was the dark-stoned necklace that hung on the outside of the uniform, the delicate chain tangled in the neck of her dress as if some exertion had coerced it from its hiding place and it had become stuck in the high collar.
It took me a moment to find the words in my dry mouth. “This maid—with the necklace. Do you know who she is?”
Prunella leaned forward and squinted, her eyes then widening in apparent recognition as her expression changed to a scowl. “Her name was something like Olivia or Olivette or something.” She shook her hand like she was shooing a fly. “Something common.”
I forced my voice to remain steady. “And she worked as a maid for your family? At the house on Sixty-ninth Street?”
Her lips formed a single line of disapproval. “She thought she was one of us because her father had been an architect. But blood does tell in the end, doesn’t it? My father discovered some horrible things about him and dismissed him, hoping he’d just go away. But the fool killed himself, and his daughter was left to believe that he’d been slighted. The one thing I do know is that she was a thief. She stole that necklace from me. And she disappeared with it before I could get it back.”