by Karen White
Miss Prunella’s room lay only a single floor down from the nunnery but it occupied a different universe: high of ceiling, deep and intricate of molding, lavish of decoration. Olive knocked on the door and pretended not to notice that the entrance to Harry’s room beckoned only a few feet away. He had left his door carelessly ajar. If she craned her neck, she could peek through the few inches of space and spy his bookshelf, the corner of his bed.
But the summons from Miss Prunella came at once, sharp and annoyed, and Olive had no time to waste on sightseeing. She put her hand on the knob and pushed open the heavy wooden door.
Olive had never entered Miss Prunella’s room while its owner lounged inside, and she was surprised by the way the Pratt presence transformed the space: from tranquil sanctuary, upholstered in pleasing shades of green and yellow, to a bristling silk-strewn hive, dominated by an enormous cheval mirror and the tiny young woman who stood before it, dressed in her underclothes.
“There you are!” Miss Prunella spun around, hands on hips, in a white vortex of lace and satin. “Where have you been?”
Engaged in passion with your brother, in the attic stairwell.
“My duties,” Olive mumbled.
“Well, help Mona here with my dress. She’s so simple, she can’t tell one end from another.” Prunella spun back to the more agreeable contemplation of herself in the mirror, and for the first time Olive noticed Mona cowering in the corner, huge-eyed, next to a chaise longue that bore the holy of all holies: Prunella’s engagement gown.
“It’s that heavy,” she whispered to Olive, lifting one scrap of a sleeve, and Olive sighed and slid her arms under the voluminous skirt. The gown was of cream-colored satin, embroidered with tiny pale-pink flowers, and trimmed at the neck and sleeves with satin rosettes that must have cost the Pratts’ dressmaker weeks to create. All for a single night, for the care and feeding of Prunella Pratt’s vanity.
With Mona’s help, Olive bore the dress toward the mirror. “Don’t let it touch the floor!” snapped Prunella, and Olive whispered to Mona to bring over the stool. She climbed atop and settled the satin folds carefully over Miss Prunella’s elegant little head, fitting each delicate sleeve over an uplifted ivory arm, while Mona guided the delivery down below. Miss Prunella’s corset had already been squeezed into an impossible circumference. Olive found the buttonhook amid the jumble of ribbons and jewelry on the bureau and fastened each satin-covered button, until the dress lay snug against Miss Prunella’s artfully manufactured figure.
She climbed down from the stool and stepped back. “There we are.”
“Now the shoes.”
Olive followed Miss Prunella’s pointing finger and discovered a pair of miniature slippers, lying on the rug near the hissing fireplace. The satin was warm, whether by design or accident, and Olive carried them over to the young lady’s waiting feet.
As she knelt and lifted the hem of the dress, she felt Miss Prunella’s eyes upon the top of her head, the white cap that had come loose as she and Harry had tangled greedily on the stairs, trying to reach the attic door and not succeeding. Succumbing where they stood, because it had been hours, hours since breakfast, when they had come together last in their nest in the studio (Olive was supposed to be hanging garlands from the railing in the stairway), and hours then since the night before.
(Oh, the night before!)
“Mona,” said Miss Prunella, “you may leave.”
Olive looked up into a pair of blazing blue eyes, which were fixed on the space between her throat and her collarbone.
“Yes, Miss Prunella,” gasped Mona, and an instant later the door clicked shut.
Olive started to rise.
“Where did you get that?” said Miss Prunella.
Olive’s hand went to the gold filigree chain at her neck. “Get what?”
“You know what I mean. That necklace.”
“I—I don’t—”
“Oh, yes, you do. I know that necklace. There’s a ruby pendant on it, isn’t there? That was my necklace.”
“Your necklace?” Olive stepped back.
“I recognize the chain. My mother gave it to me to wear on New Year’s Eve last year, for my debut, and the next morning it was gone from my dressing table.”
“I don’t know anything about that. This is my necklace.”
“Let me see it.”
“I— No.” Olive straightened and allowed both hands to fall to her sides. “I won’t. The necklace belongs to me. It was given to me a week ago.”
“How dare you! Show me that necklace.”
“With all possible respect, Miss Prunella, you have no right. The necklace belongs to me.”
“No right? No right?” Prunella stamped her foot. She was shorter than Olive by several inches, and yet somehow, for an instant, she seemed to stand taller. No sign now of the dutiful daughter, the quiet and obedient flower of the house. What had Harry said? She’s seen me looking at you. The ruby burned against Olive’s skin.
“I am entitled, I believe, to a certain degree of privacy, even if I am a mere household employee.”
The field of scintillating fury began to dissolve from around Miss Prunella’s small body, replaced by something colder and far more dangerous. Olive took another step backward, unable to help herself.
“Ah, yes,” Prunella said, far too softly. “The maid who speaks like a lady. Do you think I don’t know who you are?”
Olive stared in horror at those chilly blue eyes, the exact same shade as Harry’s, except that on Prunella they reminded her of little chips of arctic ice. And her voice, frostbitten, hanging in the air. I know who you are.
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m Olive Jones, the housemaid.”
Miss Prunella leaned forward. “Jones, indeed. You’re the architect’s daughter, aren’t you? I recognize you, even if the others don’t. I used to watch him while he was at work. My goodness, he was handsome. You have that same peak in your hair, in the middle of your forehead, and your eyes are exactly alike.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I knew something was wrong about you, right from the beginning. The way you looked at us. And I turned it over and over in my head until I realized, watching you, that night at dinner, when my brother was so obviously in love with you . . .”
“That’s—that’s—”
“And your name. I remembered he had a daughter named Olive. He used to speak of you.”
Olive’s mouth opened without speech.
“Oh, I’ve kept it to myself, of course. Never fear. I’ve been waiting to see what you mean to do. And I suppose this is it, isn’t it? Seducing my brother, as if that would ruin us.” She laughed, a bitter sound. “As if disgraced housemaids aren’t already a regular occurrence around here.”
“That’s not true.”
Prunella didn’t reply, except with her eyes, which narrowed in frosty contemplation. She looked so unnervingly perfect, so incongruously innocent with her round face ending in a pointed chin, with her silky curls clustered girlishly around that alabaster forehead and those dainty spiraling ears. Her lips formed a sweet pink pout. Only her eyes were hard, calculating the sums that lay on the other side of Olive’s hot face, inside the nooks of her soul.
Until she laughed and turned away. “Fetch my gloves, Olive, and be quick. My father is waiting downstairs to lead me into the ball, my ball, where I will dance and laugh while you serve drinks to my guests and mop up the mess when they spill, because that’s what servants do. Isn’t it, Olive?”
“I—I—” Olive swallowed back the response that rose to her lips. What would Prunella do if she were crossed? Tell Harry? Of course she would. She would tell Harry, and Harry would know. He would look at her with bewildered eyes, a confusion that would turn to betrayal and then to hatred. “Yes, of course,” she whispered, and her hands turned into fists at he
r sides.
Prunella laughed again. “You’ll do whatever I say, won’t you? You haven’t any choice, because I know your secret.”
Olive felt sick. She stumbled to the dressing table and searched for the gloves, while Prunella went on behind her, in a voice high with triumph. “I am going to be married, don’t you know, into one of the oldest and best families in New York, right about the time you find yourself alone and abandoned, living in some miserable tenement downtown. Perhaps you’ll read about me in the papers sometime, Olive. The wedding’s in October. I’m sure the photographs will be everywhere.”
Olive stalked back toward Prunella and thrust the gloves toward her beautiful cream-satin chest, then walked without pause straight on to the door, eyes blurring, while Prunella’s vertiginous laugh rippled the air behind her.
The grand second-floor drawing room had been transformed into a ballroom, filled with all the glittering jewels of New York society, but Olive—balancing a dozen glasses of champagne on a single silver tray—saw only one man: Harry Pratt, who was dancing with the most beautiful girl in the world.
Well, maybe the lady in question wasn’t quite that beautiful, not on objective study. But she seemed so, swirling about the room in the shelter of Harry’s arms, beaming and blushing at something he was saying to her, as if the glow of Harry’s attention contained magical properties that altered its object into something better and more perfect than it was before.
Like Olive herself.
Olive looked away, because the sight was too much to bear. The girl had light brown hair set with brilliants, and her dress was made of a filmy pink stuff, so pale it was almost white. Not the sort of girl who would allow Harry Pratt to have his way with her on an attic staircase: oh, no. That was Olive’s weakness, Olive’s shame, though it hadn’t felt like shame until this instant, when Harry danced with another girl. The sort of girl he was supposed to marry.
Harry had spoken often of Italy over the past week, and the eternal summer that awaited them there. But he hadn’t mentioned marriage. Of course he hadn’t. She had pretended not to notice the omission; she had perhaps convinced herself that the promise of marriage was implied in his offer.
But maybe it wasn’t. Probably it wasn’t. You ran off with housemaids, but there was no need to marry them, was there? No need to make it all legal and proper and binding. In case you changed your mind. In case you met another girl, a suitable girl.
Olive made her way along the edge of the crowd, bearing her champagne. A few hands reached out to pluck the glasses from her tray, without thanks, without recognition, without a single exchange of glances. And maybe this unexpected wound was the one that hurt the most: her invisibility. Once you donned a servant’s uniform, you became invisible, not even quite human. This was necessary, of course, for the entire system of human servility to operate without friction, but still it rankled. She wanted to scream, I’m just as good as you are! I speak French and I dance, I play the piano beautifully and recite poetry from memory and enunciate every consonant without flaw. A year ago, I was almost one of you!
But that didn’t matter, did it? If you fell, you fell.
On the other side of the room, along the windows, the crowd was thinning. Olive, stepping carefully so the bubbling glasses wouldn’t tilt onto the polished parquet floor, approached a pair of men, identical in portly middle-aged formal dress. They stood next to one of the grand French windows, heads bent together, smoking forbidden cigars, which they tipped out the open bottom sash in furtive gestures.
“. . . magnificent, to be sure, but it will all go to the receivers quick enough if even one of his damned railroads fails . . .”
Olive slowed her steps.
“. . . which ones . . . invest . . . ?”
The other man was speaking, the nearest one, who faced away from Olive’s line of approach. She couldn’t make out the words very well, but the lift in his voice suggested a question.
She was at his elbow now. She held out the tray, and both men, without a glance, without missing a single beat of their conversation, reached out in unison to swipe away two sizzling glasses of champagne.
“. . . but the chiefest part is held in the damned P and R. He’s up to his silly neck in it.”
The other man laughed. “Fool.”
“And so I told him, but he’s got all this confounded faith in McLeod, thinks the expansion will pay off before they run out of money—”
“And the patience of creditors—”
“Well, that too, of course—”
Olive was forced to step away now, because even invisible serving maids might attract attention if they lingered too long. But she moved slowly, as if taking extreme care for the safety of the crystal, as a good servant should.
“Well, between you and me, I don’t think the P and R lasts more than a week after Cleveland takes office.”
“. . . repeal . . . silver act . . .”
“Don’t matter. Stretched too far, and I hear Morgan’s about to pull the plug—”
The voice became muffled as the owner turned toward the window to knock away a length of ash from his guilty cigar. Olive’s heart thumped into her ribs, making her dizzy. There was a little draft from under the sash, and it fluttered coldly against her long black skirt.
The P&R. That was the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad; even Olive knew that. Everybody knew the P&R; it was one of the largest companies in the world, transporting infinite tons of rich Pennsylvania anthracite coal from the rural mines to the mid-Atlantic ports, and now it wanted to extend its tentacles into New England. Its expensive tentacles, of course. You didn’t build out a hundred miles of track without mountains of money. Railroads ate capital like Gus Pratt ate his breakfast bacon, and they were always one ill wind away from collapsing under the weight of their own debts.
Yes, even Olive knew that.
And she also remembered the fat file in Mr. Pratt’s fat study, labeled PHILADELPHIA & READING.
The dancers blurred past, colorful and frenetic, whirling from prosperous and plentiful 1892 into the dazzling unknown riches of 1893. A handsome face winged before her and disappeared, and it was an instant or two before Olive realized that it was Harry. Harry, cradling his right arm around yet another beautiful girl, clasping her elegant gloved fingers with his left hand. He hadn’t noticed Olive at all.
Not until half past eleven o’clock did Olive find her opportunity to steal into the study upstairs. She had emptied another tray of champagne and made for the stairs to the kitchen, but instead of descending into the basement she had left the tray on the Chippendale lowboy and slipped upward and out of sight.
This time, no hesitation stayed her hands. She knew exactly what she was doing, exactly what she was looking for. The leather portfolios flipped beneath her experienced fingers, until the familiar words appeared once more in the minute glow of the candle: VAN ALAN.
Familiar, and yet foreign. The name hardly seemed to belong to her at all anymore; she felt as if she were no more than a disembodied Olive, belonging to no one and to no particular name. She had spent the last week in a kind of fairyland, knowing that it was a fairyland and entering into it anyway, and now that she was emerging back into the real and practical world, she found she didn’t have a place there, either. That she would never be the same Olive Van Alan as before. That she might never again know who Olive was, or should be.
She opened the portfolio, and the tactile sensation of the leather and the papers within brought her back to the task at hand. The truth: the only thing left to her.
There were perhaps thirty papers in all, arranged immaculately by date. Olive sifted through the early correspondence, detailing the Pratts’ specifications and her father’s tactful responses, referring to blueprints and drawings that must have been stored elsewhere. Then the requests for payment, each one neatly marked PAID in the sleek brown-black strokes
of a confident fountain pen. The sums were not large, which didn’t surprise Olive. According to Mrs. Van Alan, the bulk of her father’s fee had been due upon completion and inspection of the mansion, and the sum was large enough that he had agreed to this particular arrangement with a gentleman’s handshake.
Until she came to the last two pages. There was a letter from her father, dated the twentieth of December 1891, noting the successful inspection of the house on the first of December and requesting payment of the balance of his fee for architectural services: nine thousand dollars.
But scribbled at the bottom of this particular letter was not the customary word PAID, which appeared on all the other invoices, followed by a date. Instead, the word—black, in thick, angry block letters—was REFUSED. Dated the second of January 1892.
Her father had shot himself the next day.
“Well, well.”
Lost in contemplation of that single word, REFUSED, Olive had almost forgotten where she was. She started upward, knocking over the candle, righting it again. Hot wax spilled over her fingers.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” came the voice of Miss Prunella Pratt, followed by the young lady’s white figure, emerging from the shadowed doorway. “Am I disturbing you?”
Olive drew her spine straight, her shoulders back. “No,” she said.
Prunella stalked across the rug. She was holding a glass of wine in her hand, half-finished, and the reckless quality of her gait suggested it wasn’t her first of the evening. “You poor dear thing. Shall I guess what you’re doing?”
“I think it’s obvious what I’m doing.”
“Well, I guess it is, at that. Using your position in this household to find out why your poor, innocent father left this house in disgrace. Why those heartless Pratts turned him out in the cold and ruined his good name.” Prunella stopped on the other side of the desk, placed her wineglass on the edge, and leaned forward. “Dear Olive. I could have saved you the trouble. You won’t find it.”
“Won’t I?”
“Oh, no. My father, you see, was actually quite kind, I think, considering the provocation. He was kind enough not to let the world know the real reason he dismissed Mr. Van Alan without payment. Better the world should just think the man hadn’t designed this house to my family’s satisfaction.”
