On the plus side, thought Lucy, staring tight-lipped at the impeccable countenance of Miss Didi Shippen, it might be a very short dinner.
And she had the office to herself.
The week had been such a blur of work that she hadn’t even had time to think of her own private quest, much less pursue it. Mr. Schuyler might have grumbled, but he had been there, right along with her, from dawn to dusk. He’d even taken his lunch at his desk—sandwiches and coffee from the deli down the block. Lucy had made sure that the man at the deli remembered to leave off the mustard and put two sugars and cream in the coffee, and she’d always brought a piece of something sweet as well, coffee cake or cookies that were hard and flavorless compared to the ones her grandmother made, but which Mr. Schuyler received with exaggerated exclamations of gratitude.
Just as he would for Meg, Lucy reminded herself. He was charming, and he wasn’t quite the dilettante he appeared, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a means to an end, and there wasn’t the least reason she should feel guilty about using him to get to the Pratt files. Not that she did feel guilty.
Or maybe just a little. She could feel those dollar bills burning a hole in her purse. It felt wrong taking money from him.
She knew what her grandmother would say.
Like mother, like daughter.
Enough. Lucy walked briskly to the file cabinet. To anyone watching, there was nothing amiss, nothing at all. Just a secretary working late.
For all her other shortcomings, Meg did keep the files in order, everything sternly alphabetized, not a letter out of place. N . . . O . . . P was all the way down on the bottom of the third rank of cabinets. Lucy had to kneel down on the worn carpet to scrabble through the files. She could feel the wool of the carpet prickling through her stockings, leaving marks on her knees. But there it was, just where it was meant to be. Pratt.
The file was a substantial one. The papers didn’t spill over—Meg had been too well organized for that—but they strained against the cardboard confines.
Lucy resisted the urge to sit back on her haunches and scour through it then and there. That would look odd if Miss Meechum or one of the junior associates were to pop their heads around the door. Instead, she carried it over to the desk, turning it carefully so that the label faced away from the door. One folder looked just like another.
Oh, just the correspondence relating to the Merola contract, she imagined herself saying. Mr. Schuyler wanted me to find the draft language for the third rider.
But the door remained chastely closed.
Quickly, quickly. Hands shaking, Lucy drew the papers out of their cardboard casing. Invoices and accountings, that was what most of it seemed to be, and none of it older than—she flipped hastily through the pile—1912. The Pratt trust paid out monies quarterly to Prunella Schuyler, nee Pratt. The correspondence consisted largely of bills from tradesmen, demanding payment from the Pratt trust, and formal letters from Mrs. Schuyler, demanding advances on next quarter’s payment. Mrs. Schuyler, it seemed, lived considerably outside her income.
It was an income that would have kept Lucy in stockings and carfare for a very long time, but, judging from the documentation, Mrs. Schuyler hadn’t the least problem blazing through an entire quarter’s allowance in one visit to Cartier.
Fascinating, in its way, but none of her affair. Tearing herself away from descriptions of diamond clips and sapphire and emerald brooches, Lucy set the pile relating to the Pratt trust aside. Which didn’t leave terribly much. There were papers concerning the sale of the house, all of the proceeds from which had gone into the Pratt trust.
Well, what had she expected? Henry August Pratt’s personal diary? Letters to his lawyer? Dear Mr. Cromwell: My wastrel son has impregnated a guest in our home . . .
Had her mother been a guest? She must have been. She knew the house too well, had described it too fully, to have been a mere visitor.
But who was she? Strange to be asking that about one’s own mother. Lucy knew her mother as a brush of serge, as her small hands clutched her mother’s skirt; she knew her as the scent of lavender; as a low, sweet voice singing lullabies, and later, much later, as a quiet, withdrawn presence, the sound of pages in a book being turned, a darkened room, a cough that wouldn’t go away.
Sometimes, Lucy wondered if the mother she had known was only a shadow, if the real woman had been left somewhere, across the bridge in Manhattan. There had been a hint of something vital about her, but only a hint, like the impression of a flower in an old book, long after the actual petals had faded and crumbled away.
Her mother loved her; she had said so, time and again. But Lucy had never been able to shake the feeling that there was someone her mother loved more, someone who had taken the best of her, leaving only a husk for Lucy and her father.