Philip—Philip would recover, thought Lucy wildly, clinging to the sheets of John’s letter, Prunella’s veil crumpled, forgotten, on the floor. There would be other women. He was so urbane, so charming. He thought he wanted Lucy; he called her his talisman, his touchstone, but it was nonsense, really. He could find someone from his own world, someone who would adore him as he deserved to be adored.
Train tickets . . . How far to Charleston? When she got there, a hotel, she supposed. John hadn’t said anything about where she would stay.
He hadn’t said anything about anything.
Lucy fell back to earth with a thump. Slowly, she sat down on the bed and scanned the letter again, looking for the practicalities, the bread and butter of where and how they were to live. There was nothing about a divorce. Nothing about Annabelle. Words of love, beautiful, yes, but utterly insubstantial, like dining on meringues and champagne and rising from the table with a headache and an aching stomach from eating sugar and air.
Come to me, be with me, live with me, love me. Yes, yes, all that, but how?
Lucy pressed her palms to her aching eyes, loving John and hating him all at the same time. Didn’t he know that the knight was supposed to ride up and sweep the princess away, not leave her to make her own way out of the castle? The dragons were still there, unslain. Annabelle, Cooper, John’s mother, his sister—who was Annabelle’s friend.
And then there was Philip. He’d defied his own people for her—whether she had wanted him to or not, thought Lucy shrewishly, and then chided herself for it. She’d run to Philip, had used him as a shield. She was as guilty as he. And, having used him as a shield, she could hardly abandon him now, leave him at the altar to be whispered at by all those carping society matrons, those twittering friends of Didi who would be only too delighted to see him get his comeuppance for daring to choose a secretary over one of their own.
Slowly, Lucy shuffled the pages of the letter back together. Just the touch of the paper felt like a forbidden indulgence, this paper that had touched John’s hands and now touched her own, a thin thread tying her to him.
For a moment, Lucy’s hands tightened on the pages. She wanted him still, loved him still.
But the cost was too high.
Do you want to make the same mistake our parents made . . . ?
Lucy waited until the sounds of activity had faded from the hallway, everyone tucked away for the night. In the darkness, she felt her way down the hall to the abandoned staircase. It felt different at night, narrower, steeper. The stairs seemed to stretch on forever, the door, without John’s strong hand, stuck before releasing with an audible creak.
Moonlight poured through the skylight, turning the studio ebony and silver. There. There John had kissed her. There. There John had told her about his wife.
He must have tidied after she left. The sketches were gone from the floor, the Chinese cabinet closed, the bricks in their place above the mantel.
She half expected the mechanism to fail, but it didn’t. When she pushed on the knight’s shield, the bricks of the wall swung out as easily and soundlessly as though they had been waiting for her. Inside, she could see the sad remains of her mother’s affair with Harry Pratt: the detective’s report, his letter.
Before she could think better of it, Lucy thrust John’s letter on top of the pile.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she murmured to the empty room. “Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, does it?”
Moonlight glinted off the knight’s shield, just as it had, in those long-ago evenings, off the mural in her room.
There are consolations. From very far away, Lucy heard her mother’s voice, felt her arm around her, sitting with her, late at night, in a small bed a borough away. Life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect, but there are consolations.
For a moment, Lucy thought she smelled lavender, heard the crinkle of her mother’s long, starched skirts, but then it was gone, and the room, once again, was still, its secrets hidden beneath a silver wash of moonlight.
“Good-bye,” Lucy said to no one in particular, and, closing the door, went downstairs to face the dawn.
Thirty-one
SEPTEMBER 1944
Kate
“Kate?”
I looked up when I realized that my name had been called more than twice. I blinked, trying to remember where I was and why, and with whom. Not that any of it mattered. Not that anything seemed to matter anymore.
“Kate, would you like another cigarette?”
I blinked again, trying to remember Dr. Greeley’s first name, but couldn’t. He’d probably be flattered if I called him Doctor even outside the hospital, so I didn’t try very hard to recall it. I tapped my fingers on the top of his desk, then took a final drag on my cigarette before stabbing it out in a glass ashtray. “No. Thank you. I should be getting back to my patients.”
His hand slid up my arm and I didn’t move away. Not that I had any intention of following through with any of his innuendoes, but I simply didn’t have the energy to push his hand off me any more than I had the energy to eat or return Margie’s calls.