The Forgotten Room (2 page)

D
ECEMBER 1892

Olive

On the night Olive Van Alan discovered what lay at the top of the mansion on East Sixty-ninth Street, she was planning a different kind of mischief altogether. But that was how these things happened, wasn't it? You were always too busy looking in the wrong direction.

So there Olive lay in her narrow bed, turning over her plans, as blind as a mole in the darkened room. If she felt any foreboding at all, it was focused on the housekeeper, who was making her usual final inspection down the corridor—petticoats rustling starchily against her rumored legs, knuckles rapping against the doors, each crisp
Good night, Mona
and
Good night, Ellen
followed by the automatic
Good night, Mrs. Keane—
before she locked the vestibule behind her.

The lock, Olive had been told, was for her own protection. Mrs. Keane came from England—apparently it was a prestigious thing, in these circles, to have an English housekeeper—and she had explained, in her voice like the cracking of eggs, that the girls were not being
locked
in
, goodness no, but rather the outside world and particularly its base male appetites locked
out
.

Olive, as she went about her daily business, encountering males in every corner, had wondered where these base appetites were hidden, and why their owners could not be expected to control them without the support of a stout Yale dead bolt lock—apparently these were nocturnal appetites, as well as base—but she hadn't dared to ask Mrs. Keane outright.
Don't be cheeky,
Mrs. Keane would say, cheekiness being classified among the most subversive and therefore the most dangerous crimes among a domestic staff run along strict English lines.

Mrs. Keane would then crinkle her brow in suspicion and take perhaps a closer look at Olive's well-tended face and soft hands, her careful voice and quick eyes, and that was the last thing Olive needed.

So the lock remained on its guard, and the row of identical little rooms on the sixth floor of the Pratt mansion on Sixty-ninth Street remained about as pregnable to the base male appetite as Miss Ellis's Academy for Young Ladies, where Olive had been sent for her education in a lifetime lived long ago. Then as now, Olive spent those dark hours between lockdown and sleep plotting her escape, like a cat brooding in a window. She counted the minutes that passed since the careful click of Mrs. Keane's shoes had receded down the stairs and out of hearing. She listened to the creak of bedsprings as her fellow housemaids tossed themselves to sleep. She fought the inevitable tide of languor that stole over her like a kind of drunkenness—yes, that was it!—she was plain stone
drunk
on the long day's labor, scrubbing and polishing and making beds and fetching, fetching, fetching, on the double, up and down the enormous marble staircase that wound past seven floors to the stained glass dome at the top of the mansion. The temptation of sleep was like the temptation of oxygen.

So tempting, in fact, that she had given in the previous four nights.
She had woken up bemused and defeated to the unlocking of the vestibule door and the brisk summons from Mrs. Keane.

Olive slid one hand across her body, under the blanket, and pinched her opposite arm, from shoulder to elbow, until the tears started out from her eyes and her mind sprang into a fragile alertness.

The bedsprings were quiet now. The house was quiet, too, so quiet Olive could now pick out the few outside noises: the hum of a gentle rain against the glass dome, a distant argument in someone's garden. The Pratt mansion stood in a residential street, far from the hurly-burly of downtown, but there seemed to be more noise every day, more commerce, and if Olive lay absolutely still, she could feel the creep of the metropolis reaching the Pratt doorstep, reaching rapaciously all the way to the tip of Manhattan island and beyond. New York was a boomtown, New York was where everybody lived or wanted to live, and its lust for fashionable new buildings—unlike the base male appetites—couldn't be contained by any old lock on a vestibule door. Already more superb houses were rising around the Pratt mansion, which itself was only a year old, and which stood on land that had formed part of James Lenox's farm only a decade or so before that. Poor Mr. Lenox: Even before he sold his land in building lots, it had appeared on maps with the proposed grid of streets overlaid eagerly on its hilly fields, a foregone conclusion, the ambitious blueprint for a Manhattan paved over in orderly rectangles of houses and shops.

It was a good time to be a builder in Manhattan. It was a good time to be an architect, or so Olive's father had believed, in that lifetime ago. A year ago.

Many minutes had now passed since the last bedspring had squeaked, since the last pipe had trickled and groaned. The floorboards were still too new to creak. Olive pinched herself again, waited another five minutes, and rose so carefully from her bed that she didn't disturb a single coil.

Her flannel dressing gown lay over the wooden chair. She slid her feet into her slippers and eased the robe over her shoulders and arms.

Mrs. Keane was right: The Pratt family housemaids weren't locked in. Olive's own father had, toward the dusty end of construction, insisted that the newly hung vestibule door should operate a dead bolt from the inside, because—my God!—think of the plight of the poor housemaids if, heaven forbid, a fire should tear through the house in the middle of the night! The scandal would be enormous, the headlines thick and torrid and accusatory. They would brand Mr. Henry August Pratt a heartless slayer of the innocent lower classes, a Dickensian villain of the worst sort: in short, a real prat. Possibly he might face criminal charges. So, thanks to her father's indignant intervention, the dead bolt lifted and the new brass knob turned easily under Olive's hand, and before she closed the door again she slid her Bible into the crack between portal and frame, a trick she'd learned at Miss Ellis's.

Outside the housemaids' corridor, the air was almost fresh. The grand staircase, winding like a great marble ribbon up the center of the house, had been built not so much for ornamentation, Olive's father had told her, running his finger along the neat architectural drawings before them, though ornamentation—eye-watering, breath-snatching, jaw-weakening—drove Mr. Pratt's approval of the design. That thick vertical column of empty space, soaring into the dome, created a vital circulation of healthful air. No cramped and stuffy corridors, no atmosphere allowed to fester in place. In the summer, when the vents were opened and the rising hot molecules were allowed to escape harmlessly into the Manhattan sky, why, you might almost call it bearable. You might not even want to flee to your cottage in Newport or East Hampton or Rumson.

But that, reflected Olive, as she turned the corner and found the back staircase with her foot, just in time to avoid tumbling down it, had been her father's problem all along. He hadn't understood that, to men
like Mr. Pratt, the healthful aspects of his beautiful soaring staircase didn't matter. It didn't matter that Mr. Pratt and his wife and children
could
stay in Manhattan in the summer, instead of spending money on an entirely different mansion in an entirely different town. The point was to show off, to demonstrate to your wealthy friends that—oh, yes—
you
could afford the finest, too. Even if you couldn't, really, or wouldn't. Even if you refused payment to your architect, after taking up two years of his undivided professional time, just because you could. Just because you'd been clever enough to seal your contract on a handshake and nothing else. A gentleman's agreement.

Now, that was a laugh, Olive thought. Mr. Henry August Pratt, a gentleman.

The lights were out, and Olive didn't dare light the candle she held in her left hand as she navigated the narrow little staircase, the poor cousin of the one so impressively occupying the center of the house. No, this was Olive's staircase, the service stairs, plain and honest, her new lot in life, and anyway it got her where she wanted to go, didn't it? Utility, that was the point. She could slip through quite unnoticed this way, without making any noise, without stirring the tremendous column of healthful air that fed into all the principal rooms of the Pratt mansion. She could enter Mr. Henry August Pratt's august library without anyone knowing at all.

Still, her pulse slammed against her throat as she pushed open the heavy door. She felt like a thief, even though she knew she was right. She was only correcting a great wrong; she was fighting for her father's justice, since he could no longer fight for himself. The
real
thief, she told herself, as her shaking fingers found the small box of safety matches in the pocket of her dressing gown, as she tried and failed to strike one alight against the edge of the box, was Mr. Pratt.

At last the tip of the match burst into light. The crisp sound of the flare, the acrid saltpeter scent, struck Olive's senses so forcibly that she
nearly gasped, certain that everyone in the house would hear and smell them, too. Her blood felt like ice as it pumped along the arteries of her body, down her limbs, up to her head, making her dizzy. My God, she was actually
here
. Actually standing here in Mr. Pratt's library, five feet away from his massive desk, holding a guilty candle in the middle of the night.

She had better get to it, hadn't she?

But where did one begin to find written evidence of a professional relationship that had never been properly formalized?
Just send me the bill,
Mr. Pratt had said indulgently, and her father had sent the bill, and it hadn't been paid. Had Mr. Pratt saved that bill? And if he had, was it proof enough that her father had been cheated of his rightful fees?

That Mr. Pratt had, by cheating her father, effectively destroyed his career, because who would employ an architect who gave such unsatisfactory service that his client wouldn't pay the bill? And who would employ an architect who dared to make any trouble about those unpaid bills?

That Mr. Pratt had, by destroying his career, effectively destroyed his life, because if her father wasn't an architect, he was nothing, a negation, an invisible column of empty space for whom no one was willing to pay?

Olive realized she was trembling, that the match had nearly gone out. She whipped the candle under the flame. The wick caught instantly, and she dropped the match onto the rug just as it singed her fingers.

She held still for a moment, while the taper flickered uncertainly in her hand. The room looked different by night, forbidding, almost Gothic in the ominous dim wavering of the candle flame. There were the bookcases she had polished so industriously that afternoon; there were the deep armchairs and the leather Chesterfield sofa near the fireplace. There was the liquor cabinet, the enormous sash windows now
enclosed by damask curtains, the paneled walls, and the long-necked brass floor lamps, one poised next to each armchair.

And the desk.

Of course, the huge brown desk, supported by curved legs and feet in the shape of lions' paws, covered by a red baize blotter and a small Chinese lamp and a sleek black enamel fountain pen perched in its sleek black enamel holder at the very top and center.

Olive picked up the spent match, placed it in the pocket of her dressing gown, and stepped carefully across the rug and around the corner of the desk, where the drawers lined up on either side of an immense leather chair. (Mr. Pratt was a large man to begin with, six feet tall and framed like a Cossack, and he had allowed a layer of prosperous fat to gather and thicken over that frame, steeped with smoke from the finest imported cigars, so that Olive imagined if he were slaughtered and brought to market, he would taste exactly like a well-cured side of bacon.) The chair was too large to fit between the drawers, so Olive had to pull it away. The wheels squeaked softly, and she froze for an instant, horrified, waiting for doors to bang and footsteps to drum along the stairs. Sleepwalk? She would pretend to be sleepwalking. It might work; you never knew.

But the house remained still. Olive counted the gentle ticks of the clock above the mantel, until her heartbeat slowed to match them. A curious dark spot appeared before the curtains, and another, and she realized she had stopped breathing. A silly thing to do.

She released her lungs and bent down to address the first drawer on the right.

It was locked.

Of course it was locked. My God. What had she been thinking? Even her father had locked up all his papers, and her father's papers consisted of nothing more than drawings and bills and technical correspondence. She rattled the drawer gently, hoping the lock might
somehow wake up and take pity on her, the way one took pity on the beggar children who inhabited the street corners downtown. But of course it didn't. How stupid. How disastrously stupid, to think she could just steal into Henry Pratt's library and find incriminating papers, hey presto, lying about unguarded. When even the housemaids' virtue was kept under lock and key in the Pratt mansion.