The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  I clenched my eyes, reminding myself to remain focused, inordinately thankful that I was alone in the room with nobody to witness my foolishness.

  “Victorine.”

  The word startled me, and I almost dropped the chart on the wounded leg. His eyes were open but still glazed from fever and morphine, and although I knew he was oblivious to his surroundings, the way he was looking at me made me feel again as if he knew me.

  I placed the chart back on the table and moved closer to him. “Captain Ravenel? Can you hear me?”

  “Victorine,” he said again, his eyes focused on my face, the name filled with hope and wonder, making me want to answer yes. But for the first time in my life, I couldn’t speak. None of my resources, or my authority as a medical doctor, gave me whatever it was I needed to answer the longing in the soldier’s voice. It unnerved me, made me feel the loss of something I never knew existed.

  He continued to look at me as I recovered my composure and slipped back into my Dr. Kate Schuyler persona. “Captain Ravenel, you’re in a hospital in New York City. Your leg is badly hurt, but we are doing our best to save it.”

  As if he hadn’t heard me, his hand gripped mine, and I knew I couldn’t pull away even if I’d wanted to.

  “It’s you,” he whispered, his eyes settling on my face.

  A sensation like hot chocolate sliding down my throat cocooned me so that I was aware only of this man, and me, and the heat of our clasped hands. My logical mind tried to reason with me, to tell me that Cooper Ravenel was in a feverish delirium and had no idea who I was. But there was something in his eyes that made me cling to the fallacy that there was something more.

  “I’m here,” I managed to say. “I’m here to take care of you.”

  “I know,” he said through dry lips.

  I knew there was a glass of water on his bedside table and that I should give him some to drink, yet I couldn’t look away or drop his hand. Not yet.

  His words rushed out, like they’d been held back for a long, long time, his sentences broken in the middle as he fought for the energy to speak them. “I’ve been . . . waiting a long time . . . to meet you.” With great effort, he lifted his other arm and touched my hair. “Take it . . . down.”

  Since medical school, I’d worn my long hair twisted into a tight bun and held securely with a large comb at the back of my head. My hair was my only vanity, and I couldn’t cut it even though I knew it would be so much easier than putting it up every morning. But it was long and dark like my mother’s, which had framed her face with a pronounced widow’s peak just like mine, and I remembered how as a little girl she’d allowed me to brush it before bedtime, giving it one hundred strokes, until it crackled. Nobody at the hospital had ever seen it down; to allow them to do so would have seemed like a nod to my femininity, an admission of weakness. I clung to that thought, the word no hanging on my lips as he reached for me.

  “Take it . . . down,” he said again. Before I could pull away he reached up with his free hand and dislodged the large comb.

  I reached up with my hand to keep it in place, but I was too slow. It fell below my shoulders, almost to my waist, long enough for him to grab and pull a handful toward his face and breathe in deeply, keeping me pinned to his side.

  “It’s how . . . I always thought . . . it would be,” he said, and I heard the soft cadences of his words, his accent touching briefly on each syllable, just as I’d imagined.

  As if unaware that he was hurt, and lying in a hospital bed, he moved to sit up, grimacing as the pain coursed through him.

  His words startled me, making me forget where I was. Who I was. “How do you know me?” I asked, transfixed by his eyes and his accent and the way he breathed in the scent of my hair.

  His eyes drifted closed, and I wanted to protest, not ready to stop staring into them no matter how inappropriate it was.

  His lips moved again. “I’ve always . . . known you,” he said, his words slurring as he fell back to sleep, my hair sliding from his grasp.

  I became aware of footsteps on the stairs leading up to my attic room, and for once I was grateful that the elevator didn’t come this far. It was too quiet and I would have been aware of visitors only right before they entered.

  As it was, I’d just finished twisting my hair in a knot and fastening it to the back of my head with the comb when the door was thrown open without a knock. I knew it was Dr. Greeley and didn’t give him the satisfaction of turning around with surprise. Instead, I leaned forward toward the washbasin Nurse Hathaway had brought up the previous night, and dipped a cloth into the water before gently dabbing at Cooper’s face. He was drenched in perspiration from the fever, and it was warm in the attic despite the electric fan I’d purchased at Hanson Drugstore and guarded greedily.

  “How’s the patient?” he asked, his tone carefully guarded. It wouldn’t do for a doctor to want a patient to deteriorate. He picked up the chart and began to scan the latest notations.

  “No change, which means he’s not getting worse,” I said optimistically.

  Dr. Greeley grunted, then replaced the chart on the bedside table. He crossed his arms, lifting one hand to his chin. I was sure he thought it made him look scholarly, but I had the feeling that he did it to hide the slight paunch he’d begun to develop despite his relatively young age of thirty-one. “But he’s not getting better, either.”

  I shook my head. “He’s been here less than twenty-four hours. He’s feverish, but I can tell he has a strong will. That will go far in his recovery.”

  He looked bored. “Medicine heals, not wishful thinking. Eventually his leg will have to come off. I’m keeping operating room one open just in case.”

  I focused on wiping Cooper’s face, glad my hands were otherwise occupied so I wouldn’t be tempted to throw something at the doctor.

  In an attempt to change the conversation, I said, “He keeps saying the name ‘Victorine.’ It must be a Southern name because it’s not one I’ve ever heard before. Do you know if his family in Charleston has been notified that he’s here? Families are usually notified as soon as the ship docks, but his situation is different because he was sent here instead of on a train home. I’d hate to think of his family worried about him and not knowing why they haven’t heard from him.” I had been about to say that his Victorine must mean a great deal to him, which was why her name was always on his tongue, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I didn’t know this man at all, and there were no logical reasons why I’d be feeling a sense of jealousy toward a woman I would never meet.

  “You could always write to them yourself. In your spare time, of course. I came up here to remind you that you’re late for your rounds.”

  I dropped the cloth into the basin and stood quickly. “Of course. I lost track of time. I’ll be right there.”

  “We’d be delighted for you to join us, of course. And if you need the captain’s home address, I have his personnel file in my office. You can stop by after rounds.”

  I knew better than to ask him to bring it to me. The whole point of this exercise was to get me alone in his office again so he could try to pin me against his desk. This had happened twice before, and both times I’d been successful in outmaneuvering him and making it out of the office unscathed. The sheer fact that he was my superior was the only reason I hadn’t used his gold letter opener for a greater purpose.

  “I’ll do that,” I said, my mind already trying to figure out a way to obtain the folder without having to actually go into his office. My problem was solved when I passed Nurse Hathaway on the stairwell leading toward the mansion’s ballroom on the second floor, which was now used as a patient ward. I disliked taking advantage of her willingness to help, but I knew I didn’t have the energy needed to fend off the doctor’s advances.

  “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.

  Five

  DECEMBER 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 th
e 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.