The Forgotten Room(95)

She turned away, without looking at the man sprawled over the cushions near the dressing screen, his beautiful limbs covered by blankets that smelled faintly of turpentine and human love.

The pain in her chest was already too great to bear.



Harry was right: nobody stirred in the great house as she crept down to the nunnery and changed into an ordinary dress, shivering as the chill air of her bedroom struck her bare arms. Outside the small window, Manhattan lay in cold and dirty quadrangles, shrouded in smoke from a million coal fires, so that you couldn’t tell who was rich and who was poor. Which block contained a single breathtaking Beaux Arts mansion and which contained a row of cramped and narrow brownstones. Sprawling, striving, charcoal-dusted Manhattan. How she hated it. How she loved it.

She gathered up her petty belongings and put them into the small valise with which she had arrived here, two months ago, on a November morning that now seemed like another lifetime. She settled her threadbare wool coat over her back and wrapped her muffler over the collar, and still she shivered a little. Maybe the cold wasn’t on the outside, after all.

As she slipped down the staircase, she caught sight of the handsome Louis Quatorze commode that stood near the study door, and she paused. The empty wineglass had already been removed by some industrious housemaid. Poor Prunella, she thought, and the words surprised her. Poor Prunella? But it was true. The fury in Olive’s heart last night had ebbed into pity. Poor Prunella, trapped in her pretty gilded body, behind her pretty gilded face, with no way to break free from herself. No possibility of finding happiness, even for a day, even for a single night. No possibility of redemption.

Olive had come to a stop, standing there in the landing, staring at the priceless piece of furniture before her. The rich golden detail was almost invisible in the smoky dawn that filtered from the dome at the top of the staircase. How perfectly silent the house lay! Each chair and beam and tendon, each square of marble and inch of plaster, seemed to hold its breath, as if waiting for some extraordinary turn of destiny.

Another thought came to her through the stillness: that it was in her power, just now, to perform an act of grace.

The study door was closed, but Olive opened it without hesitation. She was surprised to see that the room had not been attended to; each paper lay exactly where she had left it last night. She arranged everything back in its neat leather portfolio and put the portfolio back in its place, and when she was done, and the desk was tidy once more, she opened the topmost drawer with her key and took out a sheet of fine ecru stationery and a black fountain pen.

If a man is wise, he will sell his assets in the P&R at the earliest opportunity.

From a Well-Wisher

She left the paper on the desk, in the center of the leather blotter.



As Olive opened the small service door in the basement, then climbed up the iron staircase to the street, she heard sounds of life at last. A commotion was taking place on the street outside, a most untoward commotion, involving a delivery wagon and a number of men in a high state of furor. They were carrying something from the back of the wagon, long and thick and wrapped in blankets, and as Olive paused in astonishment next to the small iron gate, a head lolled to the side from one end of the bundle, blond-haired and bloodstained, and she realized that it belonged to Gus Pratt.

“Why, what’s happened?” she exclaimed, and one of the men turned and spoke in an Irish lilt.

“Got himself in a wee bit of a brawl, didn’t he, poor bugger. Knocked on the old head.”

“Is he alive?”

“Only just, miss.”

Two of the men began to pound on the great double door, while the others hoisted Gus on their shoulders, in the manner of pallbearers. Olive clutched her valise and stared at Gus’s senseless head, and she thought, So this is what the house was waiting for.

She stood there until the door opened at last, and a cry sounded from within. The men hustled Gus inside, and the door slammed behind them, echoing down the empty street, into the dawn of the New Year.





Twenty-seven




JULY 1920


Lucy


“Young!”

It was Dottie, one of the other residents, shouting through Lucy’s door. The door was closed, but the wood was thin, not like the thick oak of the doors downstairs.

Lucy cracked the door open. “Yes?”

She didn’t much like Dottie, who had a rude laugh and a habit of leaving her stockings hanging in the bathroom.

“Gentleman caller to see you,” said Dottie. She jerked a thumb toward the stairs. “With Matron.”

Lucy started to close the door. “I’ll be right down.”

“Well, la-di-da,” said Dottie, and flounced off in a wave of scent.

With trepidation, Lucy pinned on her collar, straightened her cuffs, anchored the pins that held up her hair in a low knot on the back of her neck. There was something about the way Dottie had said gentleman . . . a leer and a hint of envy. Philip had promised to give her time, but Philip was Philip and accustomed to being granted his every whim.

Was that what she was? A whim? Lucy’s fingers went automatically to the chain around her throat. Much, she suspected, as her mother had been to Harry Pratt.

Philip had offered her answers, but she wasn’t sure, now, that she wanted those answers. Or the price she would have to pay for them.