by Karen White
Caroline’s lips curved upward. “Dr. Greeley told me that I could come at any time. And because those awful sirens woke me up at such an ungodly hour, I thought I’d just come straight here to see Cooper.”
I used my foot to slide the pile of clothes out of the way and against the wall, then stepped past her. “Well, then, I see Captain Ravenel’s in good hands, so I’ll leave you. If you’d like coffee, there’s usually a fresh pot at the nurses’ station on the first floor. And it’s the real thing, too. New York City managed to get an exemption on a few rationed items, thanks to the Society of Restaurateurs. Being that we’re a military and war production area, and all. But it’s still in limited supply, so go easy on it.”
Caroline sat down in the chair by the bed and slowly slid off her gloves. “Oh, just one cup should do me. I like mine black with two sugars.”
I paused in the threshold just for a moment, then turned back to her with a wide smile. “So do I,” I said, before quickly heading down the corridor toward the stairs, listening to Cooper’s laughter echoing off the plaster walls.
Seventeen
CHRISTMAS EVE 1892
Olive
The fire in the grate was already lit, and the room radiated a homely warmth. Harry released her hand—they had raced up the stairs together like guilty lovers, Harry’s fingers wound so tightly around hers that she could hardly breathe—and closed the door behind them.
“This had better be quick,” Olive said. “I’ve got to be in bed by eleven for Mrs. Keane’s inspection. And if she catches me stealing down the stairs . . .” She let her words trail away, because she couldn’t quite say what the consequence of this malfeasance might be (too horrible to contemplate—immediate dismissal without reference, possibly a public flogging) and because Harry was hurrying across the room to the squat old Chinese cabinet by the wall, and why on earth would he be doing that?
A surprise, he’d said. Well, she couldn’t help but flutter a bit, could she? She was human.
“Don’t worry about Mrs. Keane,” Harry was saying, as he took a key from his pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer of the cabinet. “I’ve already set her up with a bottle of Christmas brandy and an entire mince pie all to herself. With my grateful thanks for a year of service, of course.”
Olive tried to imagine Mrs. Keane drinking a glass of brandy. “And she accepted it?”
“She’s always had a soft spot for me. God knows why.” Harry rose from the cabinet and turned, smiling his brilliant smile.
“You know very well why.”
“Well, I shared the first glass with her, just to get her started, and I can promise you she won’t be in any condition to make an inspection this evening.” He saluted. “You are hereby dismissed from your duties, Miss Olive, and have only yourself to please.”
“Until five o’clock tomorrow morning.”
For a moment, he was silent, and a little of the smile faded from his mouth. He still stood before the cabinet, holding something in both hands behind his back. “Are you really up so very early?” he said at last.
“Didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t think five o’clock. And I’ve made you stay up so late.”
“It was worth it.”
“Was it?”
She dropped her gaze to the worn Oriental rug. “You know it was.”
The floorboards creaked as he stepped toward her. She counted each one, because they belonged to Harry, because the floorboards were so lucky to bear the touch of Harry’s feet. Her hands twisted together atop the wilting white face of her pinafore apron. When he stopped before her, she admired the curve of his shoes.
“I have something for you. But you’re going to have to look up first.”
Olive looked up slowly, but only as far as his hands, which now held a small framed miniature portrait.
“I painted it from the sketches. It’s the best one yet. I think I’m finally getting it right. Getting you right, I mean. The lines of your face and figure, the pose, the way your nightgown drapes against your skin, although of course it’s not a nightgown here, it’s more like a—a medieval garment that— Anyway, do you like it?”
Her gaze darted upward to Harry’s face, because he was nervous; he was actually babbling like a schoolboy. His brows slanted upward, anxious for her approval.
She looked back down at the miniature and took it from his fingers. “It’s wonderful. It’s like magic. It’s not even me.”
“It’s yours.”
“I can’t take this. You need it for your painting.”
“I’ll make another. I want you to keep this. I want you to keep this in your trunk in your awful grubby room in the nunnery, and to take it out every night when I’m gone and look at it and say, Harry loves me, Harry’s coming back in June to take me away to Europe, Harry’s going to make up for all this work and misery and make me as happy as a man ever made a woman.”
Olive stepped back. “What?”
He caught her hand. “Listen to me, Olive. I’ll be twenty-two in April, and I’m coming into a little money then, a tidy little nest egg my grandmother left me. It’s not a fortune, but it’s a start. Right after graduation, I’m taking you away from here—”
“But you can’t!”
“Yes, I can.” He kissed her hand and went down on his knees, pulling her to the floor with him. “I can’t stand watching you in your uniform, working the way you do, serving us like this. We should be serving you. The way Prunella sneers at you—”
“She sneers at me?”
“When you’re not looking. That’s just the way she is. She’s jealous of anyone who’s prettier than she is, and she’s seen me looking at you—”
“Oh, no!” Olive put her face in her hands, but Harry pulled the fingers gently away and tilted up her chin.
“Because she knows you’re her superior, Olive. She knows I love you.” He placed his palms on her cheeks. “I love you, Olive. What do you think of that? I’m taking you away with me. It’s going to be the biggest scandal. We’re going to live in Europe together, and we’ll be the happiest two people on the face of the earth, the king and queen of happiness.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “Don’t be silly. I’m just a—just a housemaid. You’re Harry Pratt—you have your future before you—”
He was shaking his head. “No, I’m not Harry Pratt. Not that Harry Pratt, the fellow who swans about Manhattan, pretending to be what people expect of him. The college boy, the ladies’ man, ready to follow his father onto Wall Street and marry some heiress and own a big fat mansion uptown filled with ten kids and a safe-deposit box filled with railway shares. Old drawings packed away in a crate somewhere. That’s not me. I want to paint, Olive. I want to paint for a living; I want to paint for life. I want to live with you in an attic in Florence and paint all night until I make something real, something almost perfect, and then tramp through the hills with you and lie naked in the vineyards. I want to see your face every morning and draw your face every day. I want to see the sunshine on your skin. Now, that’s what I call a grand future.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Oh, I know what I’m saying, all right. I’ve been thinking about it every second. I can’t imagine living without you. I want to know every inch of you and give you every inch of me, if you’ll have it. The real me, the Harry that’s hidden beneath all the shirtfronts and the dinner jackets.” He leaned forward, and his lips touched the tip of her nose. “You’re about the only one who’s ever met him, I think.”
“I’m just a passing fancy. You’ll go back to Harvard and forget me by February.”
“You know that’s not true. It would be like forgetting my own arm.” He kissed her nose again, a little longer, a little more tenderly. “Forgetting my own heart.”
“Stop.” His breath was sweet on her face, brandy and mincemeat
and adoration. “You promised not to—not to—” Not to touch me. Not to kiss me. Not to do this, the one thing she couldn’t afford. The final line she couldn’t possibly cross.
Unless she did.
He pulled away a few inches, and his smile and his blue eyes came into shining focus. He pointed to the tin ceiling above them.
“It’s Christmas, Olive. Look up.”
She looked up and up, into the skylight that showed the black Christmas night and the tiny bright stars, and the little sprig of green that hung with painstaking care in the exact center, several feet above.
“You’re a devious man, Harry Pratt.”
“When I have to be.”
He brushed his thumbs against her cheekbones. “I’ve been plotting all day. The mistletoe. The miniature. The darned brandy and mince pie—and she takes a lot of buttering up, that Mrs. Keane, you know, and for a moment there I thought she’d never give in—and then tracking you down before it was too late.”
“Just for a kiss?”
“Just one little kiss, Olive. A tiny Christmas miracle. What do you say?”
Olive had never kissed anyone on the lips. Her heart was striking her ribs, maybe twice every second, panicked and thrilled. Her fingers were cold. She thought, If he tastes like he smells, it can’t be so bad. Brandy and mincemeat and adoration.
“Well, Olive? Kiss me?”
She placed one brave hand against his shirtfront.
“I guess you’ve earned it,” she whispered, and his lips sank against hers, so much softer than she had imagined.
Olive wasn’t an only child, but her two brothers and a sister had all died before her. The usual scourges of childhood, and a little bad luck besides. Arabella, her sister, had had a weak heart, and it gave out during a scarlet fever epidemic when Olive was three. Olive had woken up one morning and found herself alone, and ever since—because she had been almost too small to remember Arabella at all, really, except as a kind of shadow, smelling of sugar cookies—ever since, she had always wondered what it would be like to have siblings. To have someone to share your troubles, to have someone who knew you intimately. You would quarrel and make up, and you would lie side by side on the attic floor on rainy days, sharing your dreams, sharing the silent space between them. And the missing piece of your heart—Olive had imagined it so many times—would simply fall into place, making you whole.
Well, maybe she’d had it all wrong about siblings, but lying on the cushions with Harry seemed a lot like she used to imagine, except more: more pulse, more life, more fullness in your chest until you almost couldn’t breathe, this beautiful warm burstiness that crowded everything else out. Her lips still tingled from his kisses, and her right hand was tucked in his left. His jacket had been tossed on the floor somewhere, and his waistcoat lay open, and it was all so natural and perfect, so exactly as they were meant to be.
Except they were not. Except there was that portfolio downstairs, marked VAN ALAN.
But she pushed the portfolio away, because it was Christmas, and because she could still taste Harry’s kisses and smell Harry’s breath, and the warmth of Harry’s shoulder merged into hers.
“We’ll be like two new people,” he was saying. “The real Harry and the real Olive. I can just see us, waking up in the sunshine. Not having to pretend anymore, not having to be nice to people you despise. There’s this fellow I know there, an old professor who moved to Fiesole last year. He’ll help us get started, I’m sure.”
“It sounds wonderful,” said Olive, wondering what Fiesole was.
Harry turned his head. “Does it, Olive? Do you really want it? Not just because I do, I mean, but because you want it for yourself.”
“I do. I do want it.” It was the truth. She thought about lying next to Harry’s warm body in a sunlit Italian attic, and her whole chest ached, her limbs pulled with longing. And then her practical mind whispered: What about marriage? What about children? He hadn’t mentioned those. But children would surely follow, wouldn’t they, and how would Harry feel about a squalling baby interrupting his artistic paradise? Would he still admire his darling nymph when her belly was swollen with child?
But that was why she loved him, wasn’t it? His dreams, his beautiful ideals, soaring so far away from what was real and possible. If she tried, she could hold him carefully moored to earth, just close enough that he didn’t fly away entirely. She squeezed his hand and said again: “I do want it. I want it so much, Harry.”
He lifted himself up on his elbow and grinned down at her. “Take off your clothes.”
“What?” (For the second time that evening.)
“I’m going to draw you, right now.”
“In the—in the—” She couldn’t say nude.
“Yes, all bare and true. With a sheet draped over you, of course.” Harry sprang to his feet. “Go on. I’ll avert my eyes, I promise. For now, anyway.”
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.
