The Forgotten Room (19 page)

She couldn't be certain, but she thought he leered. She sat up and looked down at her black dress, her white pinafore apron, the ruffles now crushed and guilty.
But it's Christmas,
she thought recklessly.
It's Christmas, and in two weeks, I'll never have the chance again.

She rose and went behind the screen to take off her pinafore and her dress, her corset and petticoat and stockings. “Everything?” she called, over the screen.

“Everything.”

“You won't look?”

“Of course I'll
look
, Olive. That can't be avoided, even if I wanted to.” (She imagined he was grinning.) “But I'll drape you with a sheet, and I promise to be a gentleman.”

She pulled her chemise over her head, and her skin crawled and tingled against the air, as if she could distinguish the delicate rub of each molecule. “Oh, the same way you were a gentleman just now?”

“Trust me, those were the most gentlemanly kisses a fellow ever bestowed on the girl he adores. Come along, now.”

Olive looked down at her belly and limbs, shockingly bare. The tips of her breasts had crinkled into tiny nubs, the way they did when she climbed into the bath. What would Harry think? He had probably sketched dozens of naked women already. That was part of his training, wasn't it? To transform the female form into art. Olive had never imagined her body as a thing of art, as a collection of curves and lines designed to entrance the viewer, to express some sort of human or feminine ideal. What if she wasn't ideal enough? What if her bones and
flesh were all wrong? What if the fraud in her soul had somehow warped her exterior, in a way that would be instantly recognizable to Harry's true blue eyes?

She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Would it help if I removed my own clothes?” called out Harry in a stage whisper.

“No!”

“An article or two. Only fair.” His waistcoat winged into view, skidding across the floor, followed by his necktie.

“Harry, no!”

A shoe tumbled past. The other shoe.

“I'm going to keep going, Olive. Do you want me to keep going?”

“No!”

“Then come out of there. I'm picking out the studs of my shirt right now.” A few pings sounded, as of metal hitting the floor.

“Harry!”

“Do you think I'm bluffing?” A flash of white flew past, landing on top of the waistcoat.

She thought,
My God, he's serious.

And then, in horror:
Trousers next.

She snatched up her pinafore, clutched it to her breasts, and stepped from the screen.

“That's better,” Harry said warmly, but she couldn't look up, she wouldn't look up. She made for the cushions on the floor and sank down, trying to arrange her pinafore for the maximum possible effect, and not succeeding particularly well. A flush began to spread over her skin.

“Here, let me.” Harry's hands appeared, pulling away the pinafore gently, like a doctor examining a wound. An instant later, a sheet of fine white muslin replaced the pinafore, and Harry's long fingers arranged it over her shoulder, down along her breasts, under her opposite arm.
Olive couldn't breathe. Harry's bare chest balanced before her, a very pale gold, flat with elegant muscle, exactly as beautiful as it had looked that morning, only far less frightening. His bent knees, covered with sleek black wool, appeared enormous. “Now lie down on your side,” he whispered, and she did, and he adjusted the sheet again, and this time she was quite sure that her right breast was now open to the air, but she didn't look down, and she didn't protest, because she could tell by the expression on Harry's face that he thought she was perfect.

The broad hands moved lower, draping the sheet over her hip, and then he moved back and surveyed her.

“Am I up to your standards?” she said.

“Yes.” He reached for the pins in her hair and slid them free, one by one, until the curls tumbled over her shoulders and down her back, and he rose to his feet. “One more thing.”

She watched him pad across the room to the Chinese cabinet and admired the flex of muscle in his back, the little secrets of him she hadn't even suspected. When he returned, she was watching his bare feet: not because she was shy, but because they fascinated her.

“Hold up your hair,” he said, and Olive's eyes flew to his face, and then to his hands.

A delicate gold filigree chain hung from his fingers, weighed down by a prodigious crimson stone.

“Tell me that's just a garnet,” Olive whispered.

Harry smiled and reached around her neck with both hands. “But that would be a lie, Olive dear. And I can't tell you a lie. Anyway, it's yours.” He settled back on his heels and touched her cheek. “
For her price is far above rubies.”

The stone settled into the hollow of Olive's throat, like an enormous drop of blood, cool and heavy. She touched it with one finger, not daring to look. A coal popped in the fire behind her. Harry lifted a curl
of hair from her shoulder, pressed it to his lips, and picked up his sketchbook.

The air was warm, and Harry worked in a state of silent concentration, until Olive, exhausted and relaxed on the old velvet cushions, drifted to sleep, started, and drifted back.

“That's all right,” said Harry. “Sleep if you like.”

So she allowed her heavy lids to close, terribly grateful, to the sound of the sizzling fire and the scratch of Harry's charcoal pencil, and the utter peace of the sanctuary around them.

When she awoke, the world was black, and a woolen blanket was tucked around her, so snugly that she thought for a moment she was safe in her bed in the nunnery.

But the bed was far too comfortable, and then there was no accounting for the weight that lay like a bar across her stomach, and the warmth at her back and shoulders. The stir of breath at the nape of her neck.

Her eyes flew open. Her limbs went stiff.

“Harry!” she whispered.

But there came only a faint snore in response, a reflexive twitching of fingers at her waist. The arm, she perceived, rested over the blanket, and Harry's body did not quite touch her back. A few respectful inches lay between them. The velvet cushion was soft under her cheek.

What time was it? There was no telling. It might be midnight or half past four; she might have hours left or none. How daring and delicious, to lie here quietly with Harry, while the rest of the house slept, while the rest of the world had to endure some ordinary bedfellow.

Well, so would Olive, in two more weeks. In two more weeks, there would be no more Harry, and she would return to the leather portfolio marked
VAN ALAN
. She promised herself that. She made a bargain with God, or Saint Nicholas, or the baby Jesus, or whoever was keeping vigil with her, in the warm, black, brandy-scented Christmas night. A fortnight of Harry, just Harry and nothing else, no guilt or regrets, no anxiety about tomorrow. And when the carriage had left for that stinking great terminus on Forty-second Street, for the waiting train to carry him to Boston, why, that very morning she would steal into August Pratt's study and take those Van Alan papers. This time, for good.

But until then. Harry.

Her stiff limbs had gone limp and soft, absorbing him. She should have been ashamed, but she wasn't: all those nights of posing, all that intimacy. They were in their room, their own sanctuary at the top of the stairs, where Olive could shed her old skin and be someone she'd never known before, someone she never imagined she was.

“Olive.”

She should have been startled, but she wasn't.

“You're awake?”

“Not really.”

She smiled. She was filled with heat and certainty, and a flutter deep in her belly that she could not name but supposed was anticipation.

She turned beneath his arm, until they were facing each other, and the scent of Harry's skin blended with the scent of hers, warm and salty and sleepy. The ruby slipped along her collarbone. With one hand, she lifted the blanket and enclosed him; with the other, she touched his cheek. She couldn't really see his face, but she heard the damp sound of his lips, parting in surprise.

“Merry Christmas,” she whispered.

J
ULY 1920

Lucy

Lucy tasted gin.

Tingling on her tongue. On Philip Schuyler's lips as he kissed her, his hand cupping her cheek, his other arm snaking around her waist, pulling her close despite the interfering curve of the table. The black leather of the banquette encased them, shielding them from the rest of the room.

Those were Philip Schuyler's fingers on her cheek, the gold of his Yale class ring cool against her skin; it was Philip Schuyler's lips against hers, murmuring her name as he kissed her, the culmination of a thousand guilty daydreams, daydreams in which he took her hands in his and declared that he'd been a fool, a terrible fool, that she was the girl for him and he didn't care who knew it, like something out of the serial stories in the papers, where the shopgirl always won the love of the heir to the fortune.

But this wasn't a daydream.

This wasn't a ball; she wasn't wearing a silver-spangled gown and
diamond clips in her hair. She was in her work suit, crammed into a corner of a dark speakeasy where the floor smelled of spilled spirits. She wasn't floating; there weren't violins. There was no rapture, just the side of the table biting into her rib cage and a nagging sense of the wrongness of it all, the wrongness of kissing a man who was engaged to someone else.

Three tables away, the bored socialite laughed, a high-pitched whinnying laugh. Lucy gave Philip Schuyler a push, hard enough to make the table rock, gin sloshing over the sides.

“Philip—Mr. Schuyler—don't.”

“Lucy . . .” The banquette creaked and groaned as he lurched after her, falling against the spot where she had been.

He was drunk. She'd never seen him drunk before, never imagined he could be drunk. Drunkenness was for the louts who used to swill beer from the barrel behind the bakery, singing rude songs straight from the beer garden. Drunkenness was for red-nosed old men and high school dropouts, not for Philip Schuyler, the epitome of all that was elegant and refined.

“Lucy . . . Sweetheart . . .” He reached for her, his smile a parody of that easy charm she knew so well.

Miss Young, if you wouldn't mind . . .

Miss Young, be a sweetheart and . . .

And she had. She'd brought his coffee; she'd taken his meetings; she'd even gone to dinner with John Ravenel.

The thought of John Ravenel—smiling down at her in the sunshine of the park—made her push with renewed energy at the hands clasping her waist.

“I'm not your sweetheart.” Lucy's voice rose as she struggled to free herself. “Mr. Schuyler—
stop
.”

The waiters stopped in their tasks and the bored socialite threw a glance over her shoulder and then said something in a low tone to her companion that made him throw back his head and laugh.

Lucy could feel shame, hideous shame, rising red in her cheeks.
Your mother's daughter,
her grandmother said.

“You called me Philip before,” said Mr. Schuyler, looking like a disappointed little boy.

“Before, you hadn't tried to kiss me.” Lucy reached below the table, rooting for her bag. It had fallen in the scuffle, somewhere under the table.

“Lucy . . . Lucy, wait.” Philip Schuyler grabbed her hand, pulling her up to face him. He twined his fingers clumsily through hers. “I thought you liked me.”

He was looking up at her with such big eyes, all vulnerability. A little boy, rejected by his stepmother. Indignation warred with pity, and, worst of all, flattery. “I did like you. I do like you. It's just—I can't—”

Philip's hand tightened on hers. “Sit down.” He gave a little tug. “Have another drink.”

Lucy stared down at him, fighting a crushing sense of disappointment. “And what? Be your little bit on the side? Kiss you in the dark and then take your calls from your fiancée? No, thank you, Mr. Schuyler.”

Philip Schuyler stared at her in genuine consternation. Or perhaps that was just the gin, slowing his wits, wrinkling his forehead. “I never thought— You're a girl in a million, Lucy. Has anyone ever told you that? You're the bee's knees. The cat's meow.” Grandly, he declared, “You're the best secretary I've ever had.”

And whatever last illusions Lucy had cherished shriveled and died.

What had she thought, really? That Philip Schuyler was going to sweep her into his arms and declare he loved her, only her? She'd seen the pictures of him with Didi Shippen.

It wasn't that Didi was beautiful. In themselves, Didi's features were pleasant but pedestrian. It was what she had made of them. It was the arrangement of her hair, the set of her mouth, the pearls in her ears, all of which proclaimed her status as loudly as any number of entries in the social register.

Didi was the sort of woman a man like Philip married. Maybe, in the end, he wouldn't like her all that much. Maybe, after a few years, he'd take to kissing his secretaries at speakeasies.

But Lucy wouldn't be that secretary.

“What? Lucy? What did I say?”

Lucy's head was beginning to ache. The smell of gin and Turkish cigarettes was strong in the air, clinging to her hair and clothes. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing but the truth. I'm your secretary. You are my employer. Which is why I shouldn't be here right now.”

“No reason not to be.” Philip Schuyler was still clinging to her hand. He tapped a finger against his nose. “After business hours. No one's going to know about it.”

Lucy yanked her hand away. “No one is going to know because this never happened.” She wanted to cry with shame, to drum her fists against the scarred wooden tabletop, but she kept her back straight and her voice level. “Meg comes back in another month. Until then—I'm your secretary. And this never happened.”

“Can you really say that?”

A crazy laugh bubbled up in Lucy's throat. “I have to say that! Don't you think I wish it were otherwise? Don't you know that it's going to make me crazy, every day, seeing you, and having to pretend this never happened? But I can't afford to do otherwise. If I ask to be reassigned,
Miss Meechum will know something happened! And who do you think she'll blame? Not the junior partner. She'll blame me. And I'll be out on the pavement, looking for another job and wondering how I will pull together the money to pay my rent!”

Philip Schuyler stared at her, frozen in tableau against the banquet.

Once started, the words kept bubbling out. Lucy couldn't stop them. “I need this job. I'm not one of your debutantes. I don't work on a whim. I work because it's how I keep myself alive. Do you think I enjoy typing and filing? Do you think anybody enjoys typing and filing?”

“I didn't—” Philip Schuyler shook his head as though he were trying to clear it. “Lucy—”

“Don't you mean Miss Young?” Lucy's tone was as acid as the bootlegged gin. “I thought you were different. Everyone knows that Mr. Cochran pinches and Mr. Gregson isn't to be trusted after a few drinks. But I thought you—I thought you were something special.” More fool she. “I thought you were a gentleman.”

She had the satisfaction of seeing Philip Schuyler flinch. She had done that at least. She had torn a strip off his smooth façade. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. She would have done anything never to have come here, never to see what he could be, never to have known what he thought she could be. She had liked it before, when he was her preux chevalier, Saint George on the wall, unreachable and untarnished.

“Lucy.” The gold light winked off Philip Schuyler's class ring as he reached out a hand to her. “I never . . .”

Lucy slapped his hand away. “No, you never. And I never.” Reaching into her purse, she flung a dollar on the table. “For my drink.”

It was an absurd amount of money, money she couldn't afford to spend, but it was the only way she could think to salvage her pride, to claim some control over the situation.

She grabbed up her hat, her bag. “Have a martini on me,” she said
over her shoulder, and made for the stairs before Philip could extricate himself from the banquette, his long legs tangling against the legs of the table.

The waiters had seen worse scenes; they looked the other way as she ran from the room, down the malodorous stairs, past the gatekeeper in his loud checked suit.

The air on the street was little better than it had been inside, stinking in the July heat, thick with the scent of yesterday's garbage. It had grown dark when she was inside, the creeping dusk of the city summer. It wrapped around her like damp flannel. The dark brought no relief from the summer heat; it only pressed it in more closely around her.

Lucy clutched her bag in both hands and started walking, as quickly as she could. But not fast enough.

Philip Schuyler came trotting along behind her, face flushed, tie askew. “Let me put you in a taxi, at least.”

“Like you do all your girls?”

“You're not just any girl.” He darted around, in front of her, forcing her to a halt before the shuttered front of a greengrocer's establishment. “There haven't been other—I mean, there were, before Didi, but since then—there hasn't been anyone. Not like that—”

He was floundering; polished, glib Mr. Schuyler, who could talk the most contumacious client into good humor. He didn't look smooth and polished now. The veneer was off, his face raw and confused. He looked, Lucy realized, lost. As lost as she felt.

“You've had a spat with your fiancée,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she could. “And I happened to be there. That's all.”

He shook his head, adamantly, the blond locks disarranged. In the light of the streetlamp, Lucy saw gray, gray she had never noticed before, beginning to thread its way into the blond.

“It's not like that. Didi's not—you're not—”

Pity took the place of her anger, pity and an incredible sense of
weariness. “Go home. Take a glass of soda water and an aspirin,” she advised. “You'll feel better in the morning.”

This time, when she started walking, he didn't follow. He stood beneath the streetlight and watched her go, his face a mask of confusion.

When Lucy arrived at the office the next morning, there was a message with Miss Meechum. Mr. Schuyler had been called away to Philadelphia for an urgent meeting with a client.

Lucy had a shrewd idea of just who that client might be.

It was right, wasn't it? she told herself, slamming the typewriter shuttle from one side to the other so hard that it nearly jammed. It made sense for Mr. Schuyler to go to Philadelphia to make his peace with his fiancée. She'd all but told him to. In fact, she had told him to, hadn't she?

Either way, he'd done the right thing. He'd done the gentlemanly thing, removing himself from the office for a few days.

Why did it make her more angry, then?

When Lucy went into Mr. Schuyler's office—always Mr. Schuyler now, never Philip—to leave him a stack of neatly typed copies of the Kiplinger contract, she found a folded piece of paper in the middle of the desk, with
Miss Young
written, in Mr. Schuyler's elegant hand, across the outside.

Inside lay the same worn, crumpled dollar she had tossed on the table the night before.

No note. Just that dollar.

The phone on Mr. Schuyler's desk rang. Didn't that idiot at the switchboard know better than to put calls through when he was out of the office?

Lucy snatched up the phone. “Mr. Schuyler's office,” she snapped.

“Miss Young?” The voice had a warm Carolina drawl. “You sounded so fearsome I hardly knew you.”

She hardly knew herself these days. Lucy glanced quickly over her shoulder. “I shouldn't be talking with you at work.”

“I am a client, aren't I?” said Mr. Ravenel mildly. Then, “Bad day?”

“Bad week.” Bad month. Bad year.

Nothing had been right since her father had died. His absence was a hollow in her heart. No matter how she had fought with her grandmother, no matter how she had yearned to move to the city, to try a new life, her father had been home for her.