The Forgotten Room
Page 11
Harry replaced the bricks. “Three up, five over. Now let’s get to work, shall we? I don’t want to keep you up too late. I know you start work early around here.”
They returned to the cushions. Olive lay on her back, still stunned, leaning slightly to one side. Harry drew one arm above her head and arranged her hair around her shoulders. His hand touched the drawstring of her nightgown. “May I?” he asked solemnly, and she thought about the cavity among the bricks, and she nodded.
He untied the ribbon, and the nightgown loosened about her chest. Without touching her skin, Harry slid the gown over her shoulder, so that it pooled loosely around her breasts. Olive stared upward at the tin ceiling, the neat repeating pattern of squares, stamped with scallops and intricate trailing vines, and tried not to think about how she must look. Like a wanton, like one of those bad women you read about in novels and magazines, a cautionary tale. Was this how August’s housemaid had fallen? One little step at a time, until she lay half-naked and helpless on a cushion at midnight. Stupid Olive. Thrilled and daring Olive. Who knew she had even existed until now?
A pair of large hands touched her cheeks, dry and warm and inexpressibly gentle.
“Olive, look at me.”
She turned her eyes.
“Do you know what captivates me? This. You, like this. I don’t know what to call it. Your artlessness, your decency, it’s everything I’ve been dreaming of, the exact opposite of that world downstairs, the world I’ve been living in all my life. Every night this week I have lain in my bed, thinking about you. How I want to paint you, to capture—no, that’s not the right word. To express this essence, this wonderful nobility here”—he drew his thumb along her cheek and jaw—“and here.” He touched her collarbone.
“I’m not noble,” she whispered.
“That’s what’s so innocent about you. You don’t realize. You don’t know what you are; you don’t realize everything you could be. You think you’re one thing, but my God, you’re another. I want to show you what I see.” He picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. “I want to thank you for showing yourself to me.”
Olive wanted to say that she wasn’t showing herself to him, not at all. That this nobility he saw was just an illusion, a hallucination of his own making, because Olive happened to look like a girl he saw in his dreams.
But she couldn’t say the words. His eyes reflected her image, white and clean against the blue irises, and maybe it was just possible, while she was here with him, in this room where nobody knew her, that she could be that girl. The snowy white girl reflected in Harry Pratt’s eyes.
The girl, perhaps, her father wanted her to be.
“You see?” Harry said.
He rose to his feet, picked up his charcoal, and began to sketch.
Twelve
JULY 1920
Lucy
“Your eyes are blue,” John Ravenel said.
At first Lucy thought she must have misheard him. Not Hello, how are you. Not How do you do, but Your eyes are blue. It sounded almost like an accusation.
What color were her eyes meant to be? Of course they were blue. They’d always been blue. And why were they talking about eyes anyway?
“Mr. Ravenel?” Lucy withdrew her hand, assuming her most forbidding expression. “It is Mr. Ravenel, isn’t it?”
He had to be drunk. There was no other explanation. Drunk or mad. The man in front of Lucy wore a conventional suit, but there was something about him that made her think of bandits and brigands, highwaymen and pirates. It might have been his hair, black and soft, not parted and slicked down as fashion commanded. Or it might have been his skin, browned by the sun to the color of well-crisped toast. His eyes—since they appeared to be commenting upon eyes—were a deep, velvety brown.
Right now, they were staring at her as though she were a ghost instead of a woman in a cheap dinner dress, disheveled from her sprint across town.
Mr. Ravenel blinked, and said, unevenly, “Yes, ma’am. Forgive me—I wasn’t expecting—”
His voice was different from the voices she was accustomed to, deep and slow. He took his time with his words, letting them spin out like syrup from a jug.
“Lucy Young,” said Lucy briskly. “From Cromwell, Polk and Moore. Mr. Schuyler was unavoidably detained. He sent me in his place.”
“From Cromwell, Polk and Moore,” Mr. Ravenel echoed, as if the words didn’t quite make sense. Mr. Ravenel’s eyes dropped to the pendant at her neck. A strange expression crossed his face. Calculating. Wary. “Mr. Schuyler sent you?”
“He sends his apologies,” Lucy lied.
And wasn’t that just like Philip Schuyler, to wiggle out of the disagreeable tasks and foist them onto someone else. He might have warned her that Mr. Ravenel was what her mother would have charitably termed “simple.” Her grandmother used rather less charitable terms, in her native German.
No wonder Mr. Ravenel needed to be entertained on his visit to New York. Mr. Cromwell was probably afraid he would wander off if left unattended, Lucy thought tartly.
The waiter was holding her chair for her, waiting for her to sit.
Have a steak, Philip Schuyler had said. Lucy decided she deserved one, right on Philip Schuyler’s tab. No, not a steak. Lobster. And champagne and all the most expensive things on the menu.
“Thank you,” Lucy said to the silent waiter, and sat, fixing Mr. Ravenel with her most forbidding stare. “Good evening, Mr. Ravenel.”
“Shall we start again?” Instead of sitting, he took her hand with a courtly gesture that was more an homage than a shake. “I am honored to make your acquaintance, Miss Young.”
There were callouses on his thumbs. Lucy wondered how it was that an art dealer came to have such muscular arms. Hauling canvases? Art dealer, it seemed, might be a very broad term.
What had Mr. Schuyler said about him? Something about his father being a famous artist. Lucy had seen it often enough at home, sons who weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer being taken into the family business.
“Thank you, Mr. Ravenel.” Lucy crossed her legs at the ankle, sitting primly on the edge of her chair. “I understand that you were expecting Mr. Schuyler.”
Mr. Ravenel seated himself on the other side of the table, moving with the easy grace of a sportsman. “And instead I see a vision in blue.”
Or just a vision. He had looked like a skeptic who had seen a statue of a saint weeping, a rationalist who saw a blurry face in a window of a deserted house, a man confronted with an impossibility that had become possible.
“I trust you had a comfortable trip?” said Lucy, determined to make polite conversation if it killed her. Open a gallery in New York? The man would be lucky if he could cross the street by himself.
“Not so very bad,” allowed Mr. Ravenel, drawling out the words so that the sound was as thick as the scent of wisteria from the flowers twining around the trellis on the walls.
Lucy reached for her napkin. The waiter whisked it away, shaking it out over her lap, leaving Lucy grasping at air.
Amusement glinted in Mr. Ravenel’s brown eyes.
Perhaps he wasn’t so simple, after all.
Lucy seized on her water glass to hide her confusion, taking a prim sip. “Is this your first time in New York, Mr. Ravenel?”
“I passed through in ’seventeen, on my way to France.”
Mr. Ravenel said it so casually, but there was no mistaking his meaning. Lucy remembered those days, the troops in their khaki, shipped through New York from Minnesota, Missouri, Maine. Men who had never left their hometowns, desperate to sample the pleasures of the big city before facing death in the trenches.
“I’m finding it a great deal more pleasant this time around,” said Mr. Ravenel, and Lucy couldn’t quite tell if he was making fun.
“Yes, well, I imagine one would, not having to worry about be
ing shot at and all,” said Lucy and winced at how callous she sounded.
She was saved by the waiter, who appeared unobtrusively at the side of the table. “If madam and sir are ready . . .”
Defiantly, Lucy ordered lobster Newburgh. If Philip Schuyler wanted a steak, he could have one himself.
John Ravenel ordered in French. Not the rough sort of French picked up by a soldier trying to finagle a loaf of bread out of the locals, but impeccable, perfectly accented French. The sort of French Lucy’s mother had spoken.
“Your French is very good,” said Lucy. Hers wasn’t nearly as good, but at least she spoke enough not to disgrace herself among the Philip Schuylers of the world. Her mother’s lessons had been erratic, but they had stuck.
“Does that surprise you?”
“I—” It did, actually. It was Philip Schuyler, she realized, calling Mr. Ravenel “Huck Finn.” It had set an image in her mind, one their first meeting had done nothing to counteract.
But Huck Finn, she ought to have remembered, was cannier than he had appeared. And she might not know much about anything outside the five boroughs of New York, but she knew enough to be aware that Charleston was hardly a backwater. Mr. Ravenel was the son of a famous artist, owner of a gallery.
And she was just a secretary.
“I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising.” Lucy scrambled to regain her footing. “Given that you were, er, over there.”
“My father insisted we learn the language.”
“We?” She’d lost control of the conversation somehow.
“My sister Anna and my brother Oliver.” Mr. Ravenel was watching her with a calculating expression, quickly replaced by a self-deprecating smile. A Huck Finn smile, all Aw, shucks and Don’t mind me. “We started off on the wrong foot, didn’t we? When I saw you . . . you have the look of someone . . . someone I used to know. It startled me. That’s all.”
Reluctantly, Lucy asked, “Were her eyes blue?”
John Ravenel smiled at her. “Green,” he said.
Mr. Ravenel couldn’t know that Lucy had always secretly wished for green eyes, like her mother’s, instead of a pedestrian pale blue. Growing up in an area populated by immigrants from Northern Europe, blue eyes were about as unusual as having two feet.
Lucy hadn’t wanted to be like everyone else. She had wanted to be exceptional. Different.
Mr. Ravenel raised his glass to his lips. “When I saw you walking toward me, I thought I must be dreaming.”
Lucy wondered who the mystery woman was. A fiancée who had died while he was away at war? Someone lost at sea? Whoever she was, she must have been very dear.
“She sounds very glamorous.”
“Well, yes,” said Mr. Ravenel, and this time, Lucy didn’t miss the amusement in his expression. “She looks very like you.”
All too late, Lucy saw the trap she had walked into. “I didn’t mean like that,” she said quickly. “I would hardly—”
Mr. Ravenel looked at her quizzically. “Are all New Yorkers as leery of compliments as you?”
“Are all Southerners as free with them as you?” Lucy countered.
“Only when they’re deserved.” John Ravenel’s voice was an intimate drawl. Above, the fans swirled lazily, sending a pleasant draft of cool air down the back of Lucy’s neck. The air was sweet with wisteria and hydrangeas, the light low and soothing.
“It’s not polite to tease,” said Lucy sternly. “I thought Southern gentlemen were supposed to be the soul of chivalry.”
“Ah, but you’re a Yankee.” John Ravenel grinned, a pirate’s grin, all white teeth. His smile faded as he looked at her. He was studying her as though she were a painting he couldn’t quite place, a work of art without a signature. But all he said was, “That’s a fine necklace you’re wearing. Might I ask where you acquired it?”
Lucy’s fingers closed protectively over the pendant. “It was my mother’s.”
For you . . . Her mother’s voice had been so weak Lucy could hardly hear her. She had reached beneath the pillow, fumbling at the sheet, falling back as a fit of coughing bent her double, red blood on white linen. Red blood and the glint of gold. For you . . .
Lucy had never seen the pendant before, never known her mother had it. It wasn’t the sort of thing worn by a baker’s wife in Brooklyn.
Father . . . Her mother had managed to gasp out. With the last of her feeble strength she pushed the pendant toward Lucy. Legacy.
And then Lucy had run for a glass of water, the pendant hastily thrust inside her skirt pocket, as though water might have any effect against those horrible hacking coughs, wrenching up her mother’s blood and guts, coughing, coughing, coughing. She’d had the pitcher in her hand, the glass in the other, when it happened, a gush of blood, a rattle of breath.
Harry . . .
And then nothing. Nothing but a pendant in her pocket and a name she didn’t know.
Mr. Ravenel nodded at the necklace. “A family heirloom?”
“Yes, something like that.” It was just polite chitchat, but Lucy found that she didn’t want to talk about her mother or her necklace. It was too close, too raw. “I understand that you wanted to speak to Mr. Schuyler about opening a gallery?”
For a moment, it looked as though Mr. Ravenel would pursue the topic of the necklace. But he relaxed back in his chair, saying, “I’ve been considering opening a branch of my gallery in New York, yes. But I may have misled Mr. Cromwell just a bit. My reasons for being in New York . . . They’re a bit more complicated than that.”
“Complexity is our specialty,” said Lucy brightly. “I’m sure, whatever it is, that Mr. Cromwell and Mr. Schuyler will do their utmost.”
Mr. Ravenel turned the glass around in his hand, candlelight sparkling off crystal. “It’s not necessarily a legal problem.”
The waiter appeared with a small procession of underlings, and for a moment, they were silent, as porcelain plates were whisked into place and water glasses refilled. The pale damask tablecloth was nearly invisible beneath bowls of green vegetables swimming in butter, golden-brown slabs of potatoes Anna, and large crimson lobster shells, brimming with a mysterious concoction of creamy lobster meat.
Mr. Ravenel waited until Lucy reached for her fork before lifting his own. “I suppose you could say this visit is something of a pilgrimage.”
“Artistic or otherwise?”
“Both, you could say.” Mr. Ravenel’s lips twisted in a reluctant smile. “I don’t mean to make a mystery of it. It’s just difficult to find a way to explain. Do you know of my father?”
“Only by reputation,” Lucy hedged. She hadn’t heard of him at all until a week ago. Her mother’s artistic interests had skipped a generation; she was her father’s daughter, efficient and practical.
At least, she had thought she was.
Mr. Ravenel’s calloused fingers traced the delicate stem of his water glass. “My father made his reputation painting in Cuba in the nineties. Pictures of village life, local festivities. When war broke out, he painted what he saw. Those same villages burnt-out, scarred, destroyed. There are some who credit his paintings with bringing the U.S. into the war with Spain.”
“That is . . . impressive.”
“I wouldn’t know. I was only just born at the time, and I was too concerned with making sure I had a regular milk supply. At least, as my mother tells it.” He glanced up, a hint of a smile on his face. “She had a time of it, getting us out. She dragged my father and his easel with one hand, and hauled me with the other, clear up to the Texas border.”
“She sounds like a formidable woman.”
“She is.” The fondness in his voice was unmistakable. “She’s currently the terror of several ladies’ auxiliary committees and a constant thorn in the side of my sister.”
“You’re lucky,” Lucy said. “To have a sister.”
Mr. Ravenel was watching her with a little too much interest. Hastily, Lucy said, “But what does this have to do with your visit to New York?”
Mr. Ravenel regarded the baroque curlicues on the handle of his fork. “As I said, it’s hard to explain. Cuba made my father’s career—but it was more than that. He never spoke of his life before Cuba. It was as if he sprang full blown as a grown man, with an easel on his back and a paintbrush in his hand.” He shook his head. “Most artists have early works. Old sketches, experiments that failed. My father—we have only one painting that predates Cuba. And I only found that one by accident. He was,” he said, as if by way of apology, “a very private man.”
Lucy’s mother had been like that, too. Lucy had always had the sense of her mother as a traveler at a wayside inn, hugging her past to herself like a precious bundle she was afraid to lose.
“Do you think your father has something to hide?” Lucy asked practically. “Was he wanted by the law?”
Mr. Ravenel lifted both hands. “If I knew that . . . All I do know is that he was originally from this part of the world. He never said it in so many words, but . . . there were details he let slip. Mentions of Central Park, of the smell of the tanneries on the East River. Little things.” Parallel lines appeared between his brows. “And my mother said she once saw him writing a letter addressed to someone in New York.”
“About his paintings, perhaps?”
A shadow crossed John Ravenel’s face. “He hid it when he saw her coming. There was something—or someone—in his life in New York that he didn’t want her to know. I’ve wondered sometimes if Ravenel is even our name.” He gave a little shrug. “It’s the name on my birth certificate, so I suppose I’m as entitled to it as any other. But . . . it would be nice to know for certain.”