The Forgotten Room (5 page)

“Nurse Hathaway—may I ask a favor?”

“Yes, Doctor.” She gave me a helpful smile, so different from what I'd grown used to from most of the staff at Stornaway.

“Captain Ravenel's personnel file is in Dr. Greeley's office. When you have a moment, would you be so kind as to get it for me? I have rounds now, and so does Dr. Greeley.”

I added this last part so she'd know he'd also be out of his office and she would be safe entering. I wasn't under any illusion that his attentions were directed only toward me. “Captain Ravenel was admitted last night,” I added. “So his file should be on top of Dr. Greeley's desk or on the filing cabinet.”

“Yes, Doctor,” she said again, her gaze telling me that she knew exactly what I was saying.

I managed to get through rounds without thinking about Cooper Ravenel. The patients were mostly young, many not much older than I was. Yet their faces had aged prematurely, a permanent reminder of
what they'd seen and done. The wounds they'd sustained were bad enough to have them sent home—amputations, mostly, and burns—and several men had lost their eyesight in at least one eye. One man, a first lieutenant from Muncie, Indiana, was twenty-eight and now profoundly deaf from an exploding bomb. When I'd first started treating these patients, I'd expected to see them grateful to be home permanently, and I'd seen a few like that. But there were some eager to return to their comrades, disappointed not that they were missing a leg or an arm, but that they would never again be sent to the front.

When we were through, I managed to escape without Dr. Greeley noticing that I'd left the group, and headed toward the stairwell. As I'd expected, Captain Ravenel's file was waiting on the top step, and I picked it up before quietly entering the attic room.

I could tell that Nurse Hathaway had been in, had cleaned up the patient and tidied the bedside table. He slept in a sheen of perspiration, his condition apparently unchanged. I checked his chart and noticed the nurse had taken his vitals and all was stable. His temperature hadn't decreased, but neither had it risen. For now, all was good.

I remembered the look in his eyes as he'd called me Victorine and asked me to let down my hair. I had to remind myself that Victorine was another woman, a woman who was probably waiting to find out where her captain was, and that the sooner she came, the sooner I could regain my focus on what I wanted in life.

I moved the file to my makeshift desk and pulled out a piece of stationery and a pen. With a deep breath, and taking time with my unruly penmanship, I began to write, hoping my letter would reach
Charleston as quickly as possible, while a small part of me wished that it would not.

D
ECEMBER 1892

Olive

The room at the top of the stairs.

Olive expected an attic of some sort, filled with furniture and objects that hadn't found a home in some other corner, or else boxes and crates that still awaited unpacking. She'd never seen the seventh-floor blueprints. Why bother? Architects saved their best work for the principal floors, the floors that counted. They didn't waste magic where no one would admire it.

So when she stepped through the doorway, she lost her breath.

“You don't mind, do you?” said Harry, brushing past her to busy himself at the other end of the room.

Olive turned in a circle, coated in moonlight from the long Palladian windows. The brick walls—they were like a secret garden. She gazed upward at a beautiful dome, a smaller version of the one at the top of the staircase, except this one was paned in clear glass, suspending
her in the center of a velvet star-flecked Manhattan night. A beautiful and unexpected gift.
Thank you, Papa.
“Mind what?”

“If I sketch you.”

Olive whirled around. “
Sketch
me?”

“Please?”

He stood near the wall, dangling a white rectangle from one hand and a short dark pencil from the other. His hair spilled onto his forehead, and his eyes were winsome. She took in his white shirt, which was unbuttoned to a point just below the hollow of his throat, and his loose pajama trousers, and she thought,
Good God, I shouldn't be here. This is quite wrong.

She swallowed. “Of course not. This is quite wrong. I should return to bed immediately.”

She began to turn away, and as quick as a June bug, Harry darted around her and stood akimbo before the door. “I said please.”

“I don't know what sort of girl you think I am, Mr. Pratt . . .”

“The very best sort. I promise, I won't touch you. It's just your face. You look exactly like the woman I've been wanting to imagine, and I couldn't quite see you until now, and if I lose you at this moment, the moment of invention . . .”

His voice trailed away, and his expression was so contrite and beseeching, she wavered, just an inch or two, physically
wavered
there in the moonlight.

“Please,” he said again, more softly.

“How long will it take? Mrs. Keane might come back upstairs to check on us.”

“No, she won't. She never does. Trust me, I've spent enough nights up here, and in the attic I used in the old house.” He held up the sketchbook. “I just need to make a study of you, and then I can paint you in from the sketch.”

“Paint me in what?”

His eyebrows lifted, indicating the rest of the room, and Olive, who had been so transfixed by the architecture—the multitude of windows, the glass dome, the bricks, the beautiful tin ceiling—saw for the first time that the walls were stacked with canvases.

“Oh,” she said, a little faintly, and she turned in another circle, aiming her gaze lower. She couldn't see the details, not in this pale wash of moonlight, but she saw the images: men on horseback, intricate landscapes, strange creatures. Behind her, Harry busied himself. She heard the crisp strike of a match, the sudden yellow glow of a lamp, and the color jumped away from the paintings, blues and reds and greens, like a handful of jewels. She gasped. “They're beautiful!”

“They're junk, mostly. Practice. I'm working on something, this idea of an idea, and I can't seem to get it right. I can't hold it in my head long enough. But I know it's there, waiting for me to find it. Like you.”

“Like me?”

“Your face, I mean.” He laughed. “I don't know
you
, of course. But your face is just how I imagined it, even if I couldn't quite see it until now. Does that make any sense?”

Of course she turned back to him then. He stood there holding the kerosene lamp, smiling from the corner of his mouth, almost apologetic, and the light turned his hair into gold. The smile smoothed slowly away. “My God,” he whispered. “Please. Just thirty minutes, I swear it.”

Olive touched her face, her ordinary face. Except that it wasn't ordinary anymore, was it? It was now, apparently, extraordinary. In the eyes of Harry Pratt.

“Very well,” she said. “Where do you want me to sit?”

He moved so quickly, he was like a dervish. “Right here,” he said, clearing away a pile of papers from a wooden chair. He set the lamp on a small table.

Olive sank into the chair and looked up at him.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Do you mind—I assure you I don't mean to be indelicate—but if you could perhaps loosen your dressing gown?”

Olive looked down at the thick and ungainly folds of her robe. “Certainly not.”

“Miss Olive, I'm an artist. A professional. There's nothing improper, I assure you. All for the sake of art.”

She squashed her lips together. “Is it necessary?”

“Not necessary, exactly. But the nightgown is closer to the effect I hope to achieve.”

Olive considered the white flannel nightgown beneath the robe, a plain, high-necked affair, almost matronly. “I suppose it won't make any difference, since you have me in your clutches already.”

“There's the spirit.” He grinned and plopped himself in the opposite chair, a respectable five yards away, and crossed one leg high over the other. He leaned the sketchbook against his raised knee and poised his pencil, while Olive undid the belt of her dressing gown and let it slip a careful few inches below her flannel shoulders.

“Is that enough?”

“Perfect. Thank you.” He touched his pencil to the paper and began to frown in concentration. “Loosen your hair a bit, could you?”

Olive frowned again and removed the narrow ribbon from the end of her braid.

“That's it,” he said. “Undo the braid. And don't frown quite so hard. I'm not so awful as that, am I?”

“No. It's just that I really shouldn't be here.”

“Yes, you should. You're doing nothing wrong.”

“Mrs. Keane won't think so, if she finds out.”

“Well, she won't.” His voice was full of calm assurance.

“She'll dismiss me without reference.”

“And I'll take the case straight to my father.”

Olive thought that was a little strange. Wouldn't this be Mrs. Pratt's task, to sort out trouble in the domestic staff? But maybe things were different that way, among the upper classes. Olive came from a good family, a respectable professional family, well educated, well dressed—at least before Papa's disgrace, anyway—but they weren't anything like the Pratts. On the other hand, hadn't Mr. Pratt sorted out that little rumored difficulty with another housemaid? Which brother
was
that, anyway? Olive wondered, and she shifted her bottom uncomfortably against the chair, suddenly conscious of the thin barrier of flannel between her collarbone and the rapacious male gaze of Harry Pratt.

I shouldn't be here,
she thought again.

Harry went on sketching, looking even more beautiful with his brow creased like that, his sleeves rolled up to expose a few inches of each forearm, his capable long legs crossed to support the sketchpad.
Scènes de la vie de bohème,
Olive thought, and she smiled.

“That's better,” said Harry.

“What's better?”

“Your smile. It transforms you. I may have lost my breath a bit just now.” That little curl was back at the corner of his own mouth, and combined with the studious crease in his brow, the disorder of his hair, it took a little of Olive's breath, too. She was still a bit stunned to find herself here at all, doing this, with a man she didn't know. It was daring and shocking, something the old Olive wouldn't have imagined, even as mischievous as she was. Alone in an attic with a beautiful young man at midnight?
In her dressing gown?
Unthinkable. But here she was.

“Still, I'm afraid it's not what quite I need at the moment,” Harry said.

“What isn't?”

“Your smile.”

Olive realized she was still smiling, that a silly wide grin hung from her mouth like a clown's mask. “I'm sorry,” she said, stiffening her back.

“Don't be. How long have you been with us, Miss Olive?”

“Only a few weeks.”

“Ah, that explains it. I would surely have noticed you if you were around this summer. Are you from New York, or elsewhere?”

“Elsewhere.” Which was true, if you counted Miss Ellis's Academy.

“But you're not going to tell me where?”

She hesitated. “I went to school in Connecticut.”

“But you haven't been in service long, have you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The way you talk. The way you don't lower your eyes when you speak to me. A thousand things, really. Am I right?”

She started to rise from the chair. “I think that's enough for now.”

“No, please.” He started up, too. “No more questions, I promise. Please. Just a few more minutes.”

Olive realized, in horror, that she was going to sit down again. That she couldn't say no to that charming voice, that humble
please
.

His voice dropped, shedding the charm, turning earnest. “Miss Olive, I assure you, I'm not like my brother. You have nothing to fear.”

“Your brother?”

“I'm sure you've heard the rumors.” He went on sketching, glancing at her and then at the paper before him, pencil stroking furiously. His mouth turned tense at the corners, his knuckles white around the edge of the sketchbook.

“You mean about the housemaid last year?” Olive asked daringly.

“That, among other things. I expect he'll drink himself to death by the time he's thirty. Poor devil.” He glanced up from under his brow. “Stay away from him, do you hear me? If you have any trouble, come to me.”

Olive huffed. “I've only just met you. How do I know
you're
not the one to stay away from?”

The pencil paused. Harry looked up at her and flashed that smile again, the old smile, lopsided and irresistible. “You don't, do you? You'll just have to take me on faith. Now. There we are. Would you like to see it?”

“You're done already?”

“I told you I'd be quick, so you can get back to the nunnery.”

“The nunnery!” She laughed, because it was true. The little locked hallway of tiny bedrooms was exactly like a convent.

“Old Mrs. Keane learned her lesson last year.” He lifted the sketchbook and turned it around. “Here you are, my lady.”

Olive rose from the chair and stepped across the clean wooden boards. He held out the book to her, still smiling, and she took it from his hand and gasped.

“That's not me!”

“Yes, it is.”

“But she's beautiful!”

“Olive, you
are
beautiful.”

She looked up. “Not like
this
.”

“What do you mean, like this?”

“She looks wild. She looks like . . . I don't know, someone medieval.”

“Exactly. You have that quality, don't you know? Hasn't anyone told you? Your skin, the angle of your face. It's very noble, very clean. Otherworldly. What's the word? Pure.”

Olive thrust the sketchbook into his chest, realizing as she did so how close he stood, only a foot away, and the smell of his soap filled her head. She watched his pulse move the golden skin at the hollow of his throat, just above the top of the sketchbook. Around them, the room was still and silvery, except for the pool of yellow lamplight in which they hovered. The stacked canvases against the wall, the warmth of the bricks, the worn old furniture, the intimate dimensions. It was like a separate flickering world from the house below, a small, enchanted square only the two of them could enter. Where Olive was a noble maiden, and Harry was a knight
parfait
.

Except it wasn't, was it? She was neither noble nor pure. She stood beneath this beautiful domed roof with a false name, under false pretenses, determined to ruin this charming young man's father. To ruin Harry Pratt's enchanted life.

“That's ridiculous,” she said. “I'm going back to bed.”

“Olive, wait.” He took her elbow. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to offend you. I spoke as an artist just now, nothing more. You just have a certain quality, that's all. It—It moves me.” He said the last words so quietly, she had to strain to hear them.

Olive pulled her elbow away, and the motion caused her dressing gown to drop another few inches. She hoisted the sleeve back up over her shoulders and yanked the sash tight, and then she whipped the ends of her hair back into an obedient braid. “Well, you've captured it now, whatever it is. Am I free to go?”

Harry closed the sketchbook and said in the same soft, deep voice, “You were always free to go, Olive.”