The Forgotten Room (3 page)

Still she went on staring at the desk drawer, unable to accept her defeat. Just to give up and go back to her bed, after all that effort. To admit that, perhaps, the entire project was beyond her: Olive, reader of books, dreamer of dreams, middle-class daughter of a failed middle-class architect. Absurd, to think that she could carry off a deception like this, a plot for revenge (
justice
, not revenge, she reminded herself), a clandestine midnight search for papers that, if they did exist, would be hidden well beyond the reach of a common housemaid, even a clever one.

Olive's hand fell away from the handle of the drawer.

The climb back upstairs was cold and weary. The library lay on the third floor, along with the billiards room at the back (the masculine floor, she called it in her mind); the next floor held Mr. and Mrs. Pratt's stately bedrooms, and the next held the children's bedrooms. Well, not children, really. The youngest was Prunella, who was eighteen years old and newly engaged to a wealthy idiot, a widower with a young child; Olive couldn't remember his name. Then there were the twin boys, August and Harry, who had just returned home from Harvard for the Christmas holiday. It was their last year of university, and everybody was speculating what they would do next: the family home or bachelor apartments? Professional ambitions? Wedding bells? Olive hadn't listened much. One of them was supposed to be quite wild and artistic; the other was supposed to be simply wild. They had gotten into daily scrapes when they were younger, said one of the maids, who had been with the Pratts at their old house on Fifty-seventh Street. One of them
had gotten some poor woman with child—so it was rumored, anyway—some earlier housemaid; Mr. Pratt had dealt with the matter himself, so Mrs. Pratt wouldn't be bothered.

Olive paused with her foot on the final step at the sixth-floor landing. Now, that might serve Mr. Pratt right.
If
the story was true, of course, and
if
it reached the newspapers . . .

A soft sound reached her ears.

Olive glanced down the stairwell and saw a faint triangle of light on the floor below.

She bolted without thinking, right past the entry to the sixth floor and up the last narrow flight to the seventh floor. A storeroom, wasn't it? She'd never been there. But she couldn't go to her room; the intruder would hear her opening the vestibule door, would hear her creeping down the corridor to her cramped little chamber.

But no one would be going as high as the seventh-floor stairs.

She waited in the shadows of the landing. There was no door here; the stairs opened right out to a short hallway. A small round window let in a hint of moonlight, illuminating a narrow portal at the end of the hall, six or seven feet away.

A voice called out in a low, rumbling whisper.

“Is someone there?”

Olive took a single step back, toward the door.

“Hello?” the voice whispered again. Not a threatening whisper at all; only curious. Curious and quite male, she thought. There was no doubt of that. The whisper had
resonance
; it had timbre; it matched, somehow, the expansive, backslapping voices she'd overheard a few hours ago, when the boys had arrived home together in a cab from the station.

He's sneaking out,
she thought. Sneaking out to see a shopgirl, perhaps, or to meet his friends for God knew what mischief.

Olive stood quietly, hardly breathing, while her heart smacked and smacked against the wall of her chest.

Then footsteps, careful and quiet and heavy. Making their way not down toward the first floor, Olive realized in horror, as the tread became louder, but
up
. Up toward the seventh floor, and Olive's helpless and guilty body on the landing.

She took another silent step back, and another. The door was at her shoulders now.

A shadow lifted itself up the final steps and came to rest on the landing. Olive could see a large hand on the newel post, a large frame blocking the moonlight from the small round window.

“Hello there,” said the voice, surprisingly gentle. “Who the devil are you?”

“I'm Olive,” she whispered. “The new housemaid. I—I couldn't sleep.”

“Ah, of course. I couldn't sleep, either.”

Olive fingered her dressing gown.

A hand extended toward her. “I'm Harry Pratt. The younger son, by about twelve minutes.”

Olive, not knowing what else to do, reached out and took the offered hand and gave it a too-brisk shake. His palm was warm and dry and quite large, swallowing hers in a single gulp, and he smelled very faintly of tobacco. She whispered, without thinking, “Are you the wild one or the artistic one?”

The outline of his face adjusted, as if he were smiling. “Both, I expect.”

“Well. It's—It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pratt.”

“Just Harry. Have you been having a look in there?” He nodded to the door behind her.

She hesitated. What else could she say? “Yes.”

“What do you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of my paintings, of course.”

“I—I don't know. I couldn't see much.” She turned the last word upward, like a question.

“You didn't switch the light on?”

“No.”

The young man took a single step forward, and good Lord, just like that, the moonlight from the window poured in around them, and Olive lost her breath.

Harry Pratt was the handsomest man she had ever seen.

She thrust her hand behind her back and braced it against the door.

“Don't be afraid,” he said softly. “I'm not going to tell anyone.”

“Y—you're not?” She was stammering like a schoolgirl, utterly unnerved by the angle of his cheekbones, drenched in moonlight. It was unfair, she thought, the effect of unexpected beauty on a sensible mind. (Olive had always prided herself on her sensible mind.) He was Henry Pratt's son; he was probably a reprobate, a complete ass, undeserving in every way, no doubt just
chock
-full of those base male appetites that had to be locked up every night by Mrs. Keane. And yet Olive stammered for him. That was biology for you.

Harry Pratt was tilting his head as he stared at her. “No,” he said, a little absent, and Olive had to think back and remember what question he was answering. He tilted his head the other way, and then he moved to her side and peered, eyes narrowed, muttering to himself, as if she were a specimen brought up for his inspection.

“What's wrong?” Olive whispered.

“I need you,” said Harry Pratt, and he snatched her hand, threw open the narrow door, and pulled her inside.

J
ULY 1920

Lucy

“There'll be no gentleman callers in the rooms.” Matron looked at Lucy sternly over the rims of her spectacles, spectacles that appeared to be there for no purpose other than overlooking potentially problematic young female persons. “A gentleman in one of the rooms is a cause for immediate expulsion.”

Did they throw the errant sinner on the street with all her goods and chattels?

Not that it mattered. Lucy wasn't in Manhattan for romantic entanglements.

“That won't be a problem,” said Lucy coolly, wishing she had spectacles of her own. It was difficult, at twenty-six, to look suitably forbidding, especially when one had been blessed—or cursed—with long, curling lashes that gave a false promise of pleasures to come. “I don't expect to have any gentlemen callers.”

“I wouldn't be quite so sure about that, my dear.” Matron's eyes, an unexpected cornflower blue, crinkled slightly at the corners. Before
Lucy could relax, Matron asked, with a studied casualness that fooled neither of them, “What brings you to the city?”

“I have a job at Cromwell, Polk and Moore,” said Lucy quickly. Surely, Matron couldn't find fault with that. It even had the benefit of being true. “The law offices.”

“Yes, I have heard of them.” Lucy did her best not to squirm beneath Matron's level gaze. “But wouldn't you be served better by lodgings farther downtown? There's the Townsend or the Gladstone . . .”

“It would be so tedious to live too near where you work, don't you think?” said Lucy glibly. “And, besides, it's not really so far. It's just a quick ride on the Third Avenue El. And the air is fresher up here near the park.”

Lucy sniffed enthusiastically, getting a noseful of cleaning fluid and someone's stockings left out to dry.

Matron looked long at Lucy, but what she saw there must have convinced her, because she said, in her brisk way, “You will find all the rules posted in the lobby. Gentlemen guests are welcome in the back parlor on the third floor between the hours of four and six Wednesday through Saturday. The front door is locked at midnight and will remain locked until six the following morning. Baths are taken by rota—”

The list went on and on, in Matron's calm voice. Hot baths allotted at the rate of one every other day, no more than ten minutes apiece; towels and sheets to be laundered on alternate Mondays . . .

Was breathing rationed, too? No more than ten exhalations per tenant per minute, except on Easter Sunday and Christmas, when they might have extra for a treat?

Lucy began to wonder just what she was letting herself in for. In the July sunshine, the attic room was stifling. She could feel the sweat trickling beneath the collar of her suit jacket; her blouse clung damply to her back. The only window was high and small, nailed shut. Through
a film of decades of coal smoke, the sunshine swam dimly, painting the walls of the room with dingy shadows.

She found herself seized with a longing for her room in Brooklyn, with the bookcases her father had built for her with his own hands and the mural on the wall that her mother had painted when she was quite small, a mural of spreading trees and wandering lanes, of castle towers peeping just over the horizon, and, in the middle of it all, a knight on a rearing horse raising his sword high above his head, a dragon cringing at his feet.

Right now, Lucy rather knew how that dragon felt, cornered, frantic.

“Well?” said Matron, and Lucy fought the urge to tell her thank you very much, but this wasn't what she wanted at all, and flee down the back stairs, her smart heels click-clacking on the worn treads.

But this
was
what she wanted, she reminded herself, through a haze of heat and confusion. When she had heard that the old Pratt mansion had been turned into a women's boardinghouse, with rooms to let, it seemed nothing short of heaven-sent.

Even if the temperature in the room was more reminiscent of the other place.

That was, after all, where her German grandmother believed she was headed.
Lipstick, paugh!
Just one little slip . . . no corset . . . skirts up past the ankles . . . And that typing course—what did she need with more school? The bakery had been good enough for her father; it should have been good enough for Lucy, too. It was that mother of hers, putting ideas in her head, making her think she was more than she was.

Mother . . . Lucy felt an ache in her chest, beneath the place where her corset wasn't. They hadn't been particularly close, but her mother's death the previous summer had left her reeling, for more reasons than one.

Lucy gathered herself together, drawing herself up to her full height. “It's exactly what I wanted,” she lied. “How much is it?”

“It's eight dollars a week,” said Matron, and Lucy had to pinch herself to hide her surprise. Eight dollars for a cubby in an attic? She had known prices were higher in Manhattan than Brooklyn, but she'd had no idea how much. “Will that be acceptable, Miss . . .”

“Young,” said Lucy briskly.

It was Jungmann, really, but a German name was hardly an asset, not now, with so many still mourning their dead. She wasn't lying; she was merely Anglicizing.

Lucy had left her German name behind in Brooklyn with her grandmother's disapproval, with sauerkraut and sausages and the squish of dough between her fingers. An entire life, gone with a twist of the tongue.

But what of it? If her grandmother was to be believed, she had no more right to Jungmann than to Young.

Lucy raised her head high. “It's Young. Lucy Young. And yes, it is acceptable.”

“In that case, Miss Young”—Matron held out a hand—“welcome to Stornaway House.”

“Stornaway House?” Lucy couldn't quite hide her quick look of surprise. “I thought this house belonged to the Pratt family.”

She had done her research, thumbing through back issues of the
World
, the
Sun
, and the
Herald
, in which the Pratts were frequently featured, richly garbed, attending the opera, departing for Newport, returning from Newport, playing tennis, creating scandal. Even the house itself had been notorious, a nasty squabble between Mr. Pratt and his architect that dragged through the papers, and led, it seemed, to the suicide of the architect.

A house born in blood
, one paper had dramatically termed the house
on East Sixty-ninth Street, and so it would seem, given all that had happened after.

Lucy had snuck out from her work in the stenographic pool at Sterling Bates, squinting at old papers in the library, putting the pieces together.

All except the one piece she needed.

“It used to belong to the Pratts,” said Matron placidly, closing and locking the door of the room behind her with one of the many keys she wore at her waist. She ushered Lucy to the back stair. “The house was bought by Mr. Stornaway five years ago, and dedicated for use as a home for respectable women.”

Was it Lucy's imagination, or was there just a hint of emphasis on those last words?

Lucy held carefully to the banister as she picked her way down the steep, narrow stairs. Aside from the matter of her birth, she was as respectable as they came. She had no beaux; the boys back home found her too hoity-toity.

If by hoity-toity they meant that she wanted something other than to bear their children, to live from payday to payday, to pretend she didn't smell the beer on their breath or know what went on in the pool hall down the street, well, then, yes, she was hoity-toity. And she wasn't ashamed to admit it.

“Fortunately for me,” she said. “When may I move in?”

“The room is available for immediate occupancy.” Matron led Lucy out of the servants' stair on the fifth floor, to the grand circular stair that spiraled through the main floors.

Lucy could feel her lungs expanding here, in the quiet of marble and polish, with the sun casting multicolored flecks of light through the stained glass dome high above. Off the staircase hall, heavy oaken doors led to grand bedrooms, bedrooms with high ceilings and long, sashed windows, nothing like the little cubby upstairs for which she was to
have the privilege of handing over more than half her weekly pay packet.

But it was done. She was in. Where she slept was immaterial. What mattered was that she was here.

A little voice in the back of her head whispered that this was folly, that there was nothing she could hope to learn here, but Lucy silenced it. She had come too far down this particular path to turn back now. Her belongings, such as they were, were contained in an ancient carpetbag and a cardboard box in her friend Sylvia's apartment. She had given up her job of four years at Sterling Bates and the prospect of advancement for a junior position at Cromwell, Polk and Moore.

Cromwell, Polk and Moore, among other, larger accounts, handled the affairs of the Pratt family.

They liked to keep the family in the family, did the Pratts. The junior partner in charge of the Pratt estate was the stepson of the notorious Prunella Pratt—the last remaining member of the once-thriving Pratt family.

The last remaining acknowledged member.

“My parlor is down that hall,” said Matron, and Lucy nodded obediently, turning her head in the indicated direction.

And stopped.

There was a terra-cotta bas-relief set into the wall. Against a stylized background, a dragon cowered at the feet of a knight on a plunging charger.

Not just any knight. Her knight.

Her dragon.

“Excuse me,” Lucy said, and had to clear her throat to get the words out. “But what is that on the wall?”

“Oh, that?” Matron looked at the mural incuriously, and Lucy wondered how she hadn't realized that the temperature in the hallway had dropped at least thirty degrees, the world frozen around them. “I
believe it is Saint George. The Pratts appear to have been rather fond of him. He appears in various forms throughout the building.”

Lucy made a noncommittal reply.

She remembered, very long ago, her father praising her mother's painting. Her father had always praised her mother, her elegance, her grace, her cleverness, perpetually in awe that she had chosen him, married him.

To say that her mother had tolerated his praise was too harsh, too unkind. It was more that she deflected it, gently and kindly.

It was the day her mother had finished the mural in Lucy's room. Lucy's father had been loud in his admiration, but Lucy's mother had only shaken her head, raising her hands as if to ward off further plaudits.

I am no artist,
she had said ruefully.
I can only copy
.
Mine
is a very secondhand sort of talent. Not like
—

She had stopped, abruptly, like a clock with a broken spring.

Lucy's father had swung Lucy up in his arms and swept her away to make bun men from bits of dough, and the conversation had been forgotten.

Until now.

“Miss Young?” Matron was regarding her with concern.

“I can bring my things tonight,” Lucy said brusquely. “I get off work at five, although sometimes they need me later. Will that be acceptable?”

“Just let me get you your key,” said Matron, and Lucy followed her down the winding marble stairs, past a long drawing room with an elaborate, gilded ceiling, and dark paneled walls that seemed cool even in the heat of the summer day.

In the middle of the day, all the tenants were at work. The stairwell was still and quiet; the woodwork smelled of beeswax and lemon oil. If
Lucy closed her eyes, she could imagine that the house was as it had been twenty-eight years ago.

When her mother had been here.

“I will need a deposit,” said Matron matter-of-factly, and Lucy dug quickly in her purse.

“How much?” she asked, hoping it wouldn't be more than she had.

“Two weeks' rent is standard,” said Matron, and Lucy counted out the crumpled bills, grateful that she was frugal about lunches and dinners and streetcar rides.

The front hall, once so grand, was marred by the addition of hastily constructed cubbies on one side, each marked with the name of a resident. On the other was a curious sort of concierge booth.

Lifting the hinged counter, Matron ducked behind it. Unlocking a tin cash box, she put Lucy's hard-earned money inside.

“Room 603,” said Matron, and made a note on a piece of paper. “Miss Lucy Young.” Reaching beneath the desk, she drew out a key, frowning through her spectacles at the little tag attached to one end. “Your key, Miss Young.”

They key was a modern thing, the metal shiny with newness.

“Thank you,” said Lucy, and took it, feeling as though she had just crossed a mountain range and arrived on the other side, only to find that the campfire was dying low and there were wolves in wait just beyond the wagon train.

Wolves? Or dragons?

Deep in her heart, Lucy had half hoped she was wrong, that, once here, she would find that the house was just a house and nothing to do with her.