He tugged on her hand. “Come back. Just another moment.”
She almost obeyed him. God help her, she almost gave in. But crawling back into Harry’s embrace meant making love to him again, as inevitably as light poured from the sun, and she couldn’t do that to him. It would be like telling him a lie, and she didn’t want to end it with a lie.
She bent down and kissed his forehead instead. “Go back to sleep.”
Harry closed his eyes, and his hand fell back into the blankets.
Olive’s body was exhausted, aching, but her mind remained painfully alert. She gathered up her scattered garments and put them on again, one by one, struggling a little with the corset, even though it was designed for a woman in service, who had no servant of her own. For women like her. She pinned her hair back in its usual sedate knot, but she shoved her white cap in the pocket of her pinafore apron.
When she was done, when there was not a single excuse for remaining, she stood by the door and allowed her gaze to travel along the brick walls, along the floor stacked with canvases, to the easel, to the drawings and paintings leaning against every possible vertical surface, to the careless bits and pieces of the artist’s trade strewn about. (She had tried to tidy it up for him once, but he had only laughed and told her to stop, because he wouldn’t be able to find anything if she put it all away.) Her gaze fell at last on the unfinished study for his mural, the one of Saint George, every line of which was sewn into her memory, and for an instant, she saw it as a stranger might: a visitor off the street outside, unfamiliar with the artist and his studio and his work. She thought, in wonder, My God, he has such an immense talent, such a boundless imagination. And her chest hurt, because she saw his future spreading out before him, grand and ambitious and full of color, and she had no place in it.
She turned away, without looking at the man sprawled over the cushions near the dressing screen, his beautiful limbs covered by blankets that smelled faintly of turpentine and human love.
The pain in her chest was already too great to bear.
Harry was right: nobody stirred in the great house as she crept down to the nunnery and changed into an ordinary dress, shivering as the chill air of her bedroom struck her bare arms. Outside the small window, Manhattan lay in cold and dirty quadrangles, shrouded in smoke from a million coal fires, so that you couldn’t tell who was rich and who was poor. Which block contained a single breathtaking Beaux Arts mansion and which contained a row of cramped and narrow brownstones. Sprawling, striving, charcoal-dusted Manhattan. How she hated it. How she loved it.
She gathered up her petty belongings and put them into the small valise with which she had arrived here, two months ago, on a November morning that now seemed like another lifetime. She settled her threadbare wool coat over her back and wrapped her muffler over the collar, and still she shivered a little. Maybe the cold wasn’t on the outside, after all.
As she slipped down the staircase, she caught sight of the handsome Louis Quatorze commode that stood near the study door, and she paused. The empty wineglass had already been removed by some industrious housemaid. Poor Prunella, she thought, and the words surprised her. Poor Prunella? But it was true. The fury in Olive’s heart last night had ebbed into pity. Poor Prunella, trapped in her pretty gilded body, behind her pretty gilded face, with no way to break free from herself. No possibility of finding happiness, even for a day, even for a single night. No possibility of redemption.
Olive had come to a stop, standing there in the landing, staring at the priceless piece of furniture before her. The rich golden detail was almost invisible in the smoky dawn that filtered from the dome at the top of the staircase. How perfectly silent the house lay! Each chair and beam and tendon, each square of marble and inch of plaster, seemed to hold its breath, as if waiting for some extraordinary turn of destiny.
Another thought came to her through the stillness: that it was in her power, just now, to perform an act of grace.
The study door was closed, but Olive opened it without hesitation. She was surprised to see that the room had not been attended to; each paper lay exactly where she had left it last night. She arranged everything back in its neat leather portfolio and put the portfolio back in its place, and when she was done, and the desk was tidy once more, she opened the topmost drawer with her key and took out a sheet of fine ecru stationery and a black fountain pen.
If a man is wise, he will sell his assets in the P&R at the earliest opportunity.
From a Well-Wisher
She left the paper on the desk, in the center of the leather blotter.