The Forgotten Room

by Karen White

  “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.”

  Six

  JULY 1920

  Lucy

  “Where have you been?”

  The senior partner’s secretary pounced on Lucy as Lucy slipped through the door of the office. Miss Meechum’s usually tidy hair had escaped in gray wisps from the knot at the back of her neck; her crisp collar was wilted. She looked, in fact, thoroughly frazzled.

  “I’m very sorry, Miss Meechum.” Lucy hastily set her bag on the floor by her chair, tugging at the fingers of her cotton gloves. She felt flushed and disheveled from the run from the El, made worse by the summer heat. But the room was hers. She had her entrée into the Pratt house. “If it’s the memo for Mr. Cochran—”

  Miss Meechum shook her head, her glasses slipping down to the tip of her nose. “Never mind about Mr. Cochran. It’s Mr. Schuyler.”

  Electricity prickled down Lucy’s spine. Or perhaps it was just the damp cotton of her blouse. “Mr. Schuyler?”

  After three weeks at Cromwell, Polk and Moore, Lucy could still count her interactions with Mr. Schuyler on the fingers of one hand. He was out a great deal. Meeting with clients, Miss Meechum said piously, although Fran whispered, “Golf,” between her fingers.

  Once, he had breezed past Lucy into the office, handsome in evening wear, to pick up a box of chocolates and a black leather box that his secretary had purchased at his request, passing so close by Lucy’s desk in the secretarial pool that she could smell the sandalwood of his cologne.

  Another time, he had stood next to her at the elevator, pausing only to smile down at her and say, “You’re the new girl, aren’t you?” before tipping his hat to her and standing back for her to precede him, as though she had been a debutante rather than a secretary.

  His eyes were a very deep blue in his tanned face.

  Not, thought Lucy sternly, that she had any designs on Mr. Philip Schuyler’s person. Everyone knew he was engaged to a Philadelphia debutante whose photos appeared regularly in the papers. Lucy had seen those pictures. Didi Shippen was always impeccably turned out, whether in tennis whites or an evening frock, her perfectly waved hair framing a face whose symmetry was spoiled only by a certain hint of a pout about the lips.

  All the gossip columnists agreed: A Shippen was a fitting match for a Schuyler.

  Not Lucy Young, who had grown up above a bakery in Brooklyn, who had spent her first few years fist deep in bread dough. She might as well sigh for the moon as for a Schuyler.

  Besides, it wasn’t Mr. Schuyler she was interested in; it was his files. Specifically, the files pertaining to the Pratt estate.

  So far, however, there had been little opportunity. When Lucy had offered, casually, to bring Mr. Schuyler’s coffee, she had been subjected to a freezing stare from his secretary, Meg, who had informed Lucy that she was quite capable, thank you very much, and hadn’t Lucy any documents to type?
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br />   Meg, however, was nowhere in evidence. Her desk chair was empty, the cover over her typewriter.

  Miss Meechum wrung her hands. “The worst possible timing—the Merola deal closes on Tuesday—they want several changes to the contract—”

  “Meg is in the hospital!” chimed in Fran from the next desk.

  “The hospital?” Lucy echoed, looking from one to the other.

  “A taxi swerved and—smash!—there she was, just white as a sheet and all crumpled on the ground,” jumped in Fran. “Right outside!”

  Miss Meechum glared at Fran. “Frances is, unfortunately, correct.”

  “Oh, goodness,” said Lucy helplessly. “I hope she’s all right.”

  “If one can call a fractured leg and broken wrist all right,” said Miss Meechum tartly. “I suppose it might have been worse, and, for that, one must be grateful, but—”

  “They say she won’t be back to work for months,” contributed Fran. “And she might have a limp.”

  “The limp,” said Miss Meechum, “is the least of our worries.” She thrust an armload of files at Lucy. “Mr. Schuyler needed these fifteen minutes ago.”

  Lucy ignored the implied reproach. Breathlessly, she said, “But what about Mr. Cochran and Mr. Vaughn?”

  “I’ve assigned Frances to Mr. Cochran and Eleanor to Mr. Vaughn,” said Miss Meechum briskly. She gathered herself together, sounding a bit more like her old self. Looking over her spectacles warningly, she said, “This is a position of trust. Treat it accordingly.”

  Lucy clasped the files to her damp chest. “Yes, Miss Meechum.”

  Her heart was pounding beneath her blouse. The room at the Pratt house . . . and now Mr. Schuyler. As though it were meant.

  “Sometime today, Lucy,” warned Miss Meechum.

  Lucy shook herself out of her reverie. “Yes, Miss Meechum. Of course, Miss Meechum. Right away, Miss Meechum.”

  From far away, she could hear Fran giggle. Lucy ignored it.

  There was no such thing as fate. One made one’s own luck. And she was going to make hers.

  For now, that meant making sure Mr. Schuyler got the Merola contracts.

  Lucy suppressed the wish that she had had time to go to the washroom, refresh her lipstick, brush her hair. That didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to vamp Mr. Schuyler. In fact, she was fairly sure that was part of the reason she had been chosen as Meg’s replacement, even though Frannie and Eleanor were both more senior. But all of Eleanor’s meager mental powers were devoted toward her own upcoming nuptials—everyone in the office had already heard of the great bridesmaid dress debacle—and as for Frannie . . . Well, Frannie was on the hunt for a husband.

  Miss Meechum was very protective of her employers.

  Tentatively, Lucy knocked on Mr. Schuyler’s door. The brass plate read PHILIP C.J. SCHUYLER, ESQUIRE.

  She wondered what the C and the J were for. Charles James? Cornelius Justinius?

  There was no answer from within. Lucy heard the scrape of a chair being pushed back, then the sound of Mr. Schuyler’s voice, distinctly irritated. “I already told you—not again.” A pause. “Yes, I know. But it’s not my decision.”

  “Sir?” Lucy poked her head around the door.

  The wide mahogany desk in front of Philip Schuyler was littered with documents. Mr. Schuyler himself was kicked back in his chair, the telephone receiver in one hand, a grimace on his handsome face.

  “Come in!” he said, and then, back into the phone, “No, Prunella.”

  Prunella? Lucy’s ears pricked up. It wasn’t precisely a common name. Prunella Pratt was the sole living scion of the once illustrious Pratt family—and Philip Schuyler’s stepmother.

  She had been a debutante in the 1890s, still living in the family home. If Lucy’s mother had lived in that house, had stayed there, Prunella would know. And she might—Lucy clung to the frail hope—just might be the most likely person to know what had become of Harry Pratt.

  Yes, and Lucy could just see herself taking the receiver from her startled employer and saying, Pardon me, Mrs. Schuyler, you don’t know me from Adam, but do you think I might be the illegitimate child of your brother? And, by the way, do you happen to know if your brother is still alive, and, if so, where he might be?

  That would certainly go over well. As in being handed a pink slip and booted out into the street well.

  Holding up the files, Lucy mimed moving back toward the door. “I can come back,” she mouthed.

  Mr. Schuyler shook his head, gesturing her forward as he spoke into the phone. “Look, I’m sorry the people at Cartier’s are giving you nasty looks, but there are three other trustees.”

  Mangled by the receiver, the sounds coming through sounded like the chickens Lucy’s grandmother had once kept in a coop behind the bakery.

  Philip Schuyler held the phone away from his ear, grimacing expressively at Lucy.

  Lucy kept her face deliberately impassive, her spine very straight. Miss Meechum didn’t approve of secretarial staff fraternizing with their employers.

  As the squawking died down, Mr. Schuyler put the receiver back to his ear. “Look, we’ll discuss this tomorrow, all right? I’ve a client waiting for me.” He winked at Lucy. “Yes. Right now. A very important client. No. It can’t wait. Yes, I know it’s terrible to have to work for a living.”

  His smile invited Lucy to share the joke.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll see you at Tosca. No, darling, I won’t forget. Ta-ta to you, too.” Dropping the receiver into the cradle, Philip Schuyler let out an exaggerated breath. “Hello, hello. It’s Linda, isn’t it?”

  “Lucy. Lucy Young.” Lucy took a half step back. “If you’re busy, I can come back . . .”

  Philip Schuyler waved her forward. “No, no, come in. I needed an excuse.” His teeth were very white and very even. Almost as white and as even as those of Didi Shippen, who smiled out from a silver frame on the corner of his desk. “Those have the unfortunate look of work about them.”

  Charm. That was the word for it. Philip Schuyler had an easy charm that was nearly impossible to resist.

  But Lucy was very good at resisting.

  Stepping briskly forward, she dealt out the files like a hand of cards, laying them out on the cluttered surface of his desk. “The Merola draft contract . . . Mr. Samson’s letter of intent . . . and Mr. Cochran’s memo.”

  Mr. Schuyler turned the files over in his hands. “Read it . . . read it . . . rubbish.” Looking conspiratorially at Lucy, he said, “Cochran means well, but what he doesn’t know about lease law would fill—well, something extremely large. Don’t tell him I said that.”

  Lucy clasped her hands behind her back. “Of course not, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Other than smother my stepmother?” Mr. Schuyler kicked back in his chair, looking Lucy up and down from her sensible pumps to the hair she had knotted up at the base of her neck. She was uncomfortably aware of the curls escaping in damp wisps from her usually neat coiffure. “So you’re to be Meg’s replacement, then.”

  The way his voice dropped made it sound strangely intimate.

  “Yes, sir.” Lucy kept her eyes focused on the studio portrait of Didi Shippen. “I am available to assist you in any way that Meg did.”

  Mr. Schuyler eyed her speculatively. “And some ways she didn’t? Don’t look so horrified! I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just . . .” He rested his elbows on the discarded files, looking up at her from under his blond lashes with boyish candor. “I’m in a bit of a bind. And you might be just the person to help me out.”

  “I can type a hundred words per minute, take shorthand dictation, and operate a telegraph machine.” She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t resist adding, “I don’t smother.”

  Philip Schuyler rolled his shoulders. “This is a . . . different sort of favor.” A
nother flash of those white, white teeth. “No smothering involved.”

  Lucy’s heart sank a little. So he was going to be one of those? She’d dealt with them before, at Sterling Bates. Mr. Gregson, who seemed to think that the role of secretary was merely an audition for that of mistress—she’d soon seen him off, with high collars, a pair of false glasses, and an unflattering hairstyle—and Mr. Danzig, who pinched indiscriminately, and often inaccurately.

  Didi Shippen’s face smiled serenely from its silver frame.

  “I am delighted to assist in any way that is appropriate to my position,” said Lucy woodenly.

  “Spoken like a true Portia.” Mr. Schuyler’s smile broadened into a grin. “It’s nothing like that, Miss Young. Whatever you might be thinking.”

  Lucy could feel the color in her cheeks deepen. She wasn’t accustomed to being teased. “I wasn’t—”

  “Oh, yes, you were. And I can’t blame you. Lawyers can be old goats, can’t they?”

  “I wouldn’t say—”

  “No, of course you wouldn’t.” Fran had said Mr. Schuyler could charm the bees off the trees. At the time, Lucy had thought scornfully that it was more that anything in pants could charm the blouse off Fran. But she was beginning to understand just what the other woman meant. It was very hard to maintain the suitable air of professional detachment when Mr. Schuyler was looking at one with that mixture of boyish earnestness and mischief. “I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t myself. It’s just a bit of . . . client development.”

  “Client development?” Lucy echoed.

  “Yes.” Mr. Schuyler steepled his fingers in front of him. “You know how busy we’ve all been with Merola—”