“You don’t mind, do you?” said Harry, brushing past her to busy himself at the other end of the room.
Olive turned in a circle, coated in moonlight from the long Palladian windows. The brick walls—they were like a secret garden. She gazed upward at a beautiful dome, a smaller version of the one at the top of the staircase, except this one was paned in clear glass, suspending her in the center of a velvet star-flecked Manhattan night. A beautiful and unexpected gift. Thank you, Papa. “Mind what?”
“If I sketch you.”
Olive whirled around. “Sketch me?”
“Please?”
He stood near the wall, dangling a white rectangle from one hand and a short dark pencil from the other. His hair spilled onto his forehead, and his eyes were winsome. She took in his white shirt, which was unbuttoned to a point just below the hollow of his throat, and his loose pajama trousers, and she thought, Good God, I shouldn’t be here. This is quite wrong.
She swallowed. “Of course not. This is quite wrong. I should return to bed immediately.”
She began to turn away, and as quick as a June bug, Harry darted around her and stood akimbo before the door. “I said please.”
“I don’t know what sort of girl you think I am, Mr. Pratt . . .”
“The very best sort. I promise, I won’t touch you. It’s just your face. You look exactly like the woman I’ve been wanting to imagine, and I couldn’t quite see you until now, and if I lose you at this moment, the moment of invention . . .”
His voice trailed away, and his expression was so contrite and beseeching, she wavered, just an inch or two, physically wavered there in the moonlight.
“Please,” he said again, more softly.
“How long will it take? Mrs. Keane might come back upstairs to check on us.”
“No, she won’t. She never does. Trust me, I’ve spent enough nights up here, and in the attic I used in the old house.” He held up the sketchbook. “I just need to make a study of you, and then I can paint you in from the sketch.”
“Paint me in what?”
His eyebrows lifted, indicating the rest of the room, and Olive, who had been so transfixed by the architecture—the multitude of windows, the glass dome, the bricks, the beautiful tin ceiling—saw for the first time that the walls were stacked with canvases.
“Oh,” she said, a little faintly, and she turned in another circle, aiming her gaze lower. She couldn’t see the details, not in this pale wash of moonlight, but she saw the images: men on horseback, intricate landscapes, strange creatures. Behind her, Harry busied himself. She heard the crisp strike of a match, the sudden yellow glow of a lamp, and the color jumped away from the paintings, blues and reds and greens, like a handful of jewels. She gasped. “They’re beautiful!”
“They’re junk, mostly. Practice. I’m working on something, this idea of an idea, and I can’t seem to get it right. I can’t hold it in my head long enough. But I know it’s there, waiting for me to find it. Like you.”
“Like me?”
“Your face, I mean.” He laughed. “I don’t know you, of course. But your face is just how I imagined it, even if I couldn’t quite see it until now. Does that make any sense?”
Of course she turned back to him then. He stood there holding the kerosene lamp, smiling from the corner of his mouth, almost apologetic, and the light turned his hair into gold. The smile smoothed slowly away. “My God,” he whispered. “Please. Just thirty minutes, I swear it.”
Olive touched her face, her ordinary face. Except that it wasn’t ordinary anymore, was it? It was now, apparently, extraordinary. In the eyes of Harry Pratt.
“Very well,” she said. “Where do you want me to sit?”
He moved so quickly, he was like a dervish. “Right here,” he said, clearing away a pile of papers from a wooden chair. He set the lamp on a small table.
Olive sank into the chair and looked up at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you mind—I assure you I don’t mean to be indelicate—but if you could perhaps loosen your dressing gown?”
Olive looked down at the thick and ungainly folds of her robe. “Certainly not.”
“Miss Olive, I’m an artist. A professional. There’s nothing improper, I assure you. All for the sake of art.”
She squashed her lips together. “Is it necessary?”
“Not necessary, exactly. But the nightgown is closer to the effect I hope to achieve.”
Olive considered the white flannel nightgown beneath the robe, a plain, high-necked affair, almost matronly. “I suppose it won’t make any difference, since you have me in your clutches already.”
“There’s the spirit.” He grinned and plopped himself in the opposite chair, a respectable five yards away, and crossed one leg high over the other. He leaned the sketchbook against his raised knee and poised his pencil, while Olive undid the belt of her dressing gown and let it slip a careful few inches below her flannel shoulders.
“Is that enough?”
“Perfect. Thank you.” He touched his pencil to the paper and began to frown in concentration. “Loosen your hair a bit, could you?”