Olive wanted to say that she wasn’t showing herself to him, not at all. That this nobility he saw was just an illusion, a hallucination of his own making, because Olive happened to look like a girl he saw in his dreams.
But she couldn’t say the words. His eyes reflected her image, white and clean against the blue irises, and maybe it was just possible, while she was here with him, in this room where nobody knew her, that she could be that girl. The snowy white girl reflected in Harry Pratt’s eyes.
The girl, perhaps, her father wanted her to be.
“You see?” Harry said.
He rose to his feet, picked up his charcoal, and began to sketch.
Twelve
JULY 1920
Lucy
“Your eyes are blue,” John Ravenel said.
At first Lucy thought she must have misheard him. Not Hello, how are you. Not How do you do, but Your eyes are blue. It sounded almost like an accusation.
What color were her eyes meant to be? Of course they were blue. They’d always been blue. And why were they talking about eyes anyway?
“Mr. Ravenel?” Lucy withdrew her hand, assuming her most forbidding expression. “It is Mr. Ravenel, isn’t it?”
He had to be drunk. There was no other explanation. Drunk or mad. The man in front of Lucy wore a conventional suit, but there was something about him that made her think of bandits and brigands, highwaymen and pirates. It might have been his hair, black and soft, not parted and slicked down as fashion commanded. Or it might have been his skin, browned by the sun to the color of well-crisped toast. His eyes—since they appeared to be commenting upon eyes—were a deep, velvety brown.
Right now, they were staring at her as though she were a ghost instead of a woman in a cheap dinner dress, disheveled from her sprint across town.
Mr. Ravenel blinked, and said, unevenly, “Yes, ma’am. Forgive me—I wasn’t expecting—”
His voice was different from the voices she was accustomed to, deep and slow. He took his time with his words, letting them spin out like syrup from a jug.
“Lucy Young,” said Lucy briskly. “From Cromwell, Polk and Moore. Mr. Schuyler was unavoidably detained. He sent me in his place.”
“From Cromwell, Polk and Moore,” Mr. Ravenel echoed, as if the words didn’t quite make sense. Mr. Ravenel’s eyes dropped to the pendant at her neck. A strange expression crossed his face. Calculating. Wary. “Mr. Schuyler sent you?”
“He sends his apologies,” Lucy lied.
And wasn’t that just like Philip Schuyler, to wiggle out of the disagreeable tasks and foist them onto someone else. He might have warned her that Mr. Ravenel was what her mother would have charitably termed “simple.” Her grandmother used rather less charitable terms, in her native German.
No wonder Mr. Ravenel needed to be entertained on his visit to New York. Mr. Cromwell was probably afraid he would wander off if left unattended, Lucy thought tartly.
The waiter was holding her chair for her, waiting for her to sit.
Have a steak, Philip Schuyler had said. Lucy decided she deserved one, right on Philip Schuyler’s tab. No, not a steak. Lobster. And champagne and all the most expensive things on the menu.
“Thank you,” Lucy said to the silent waiter, and sat, fixing Mr. Ravenel with her most forbidding stare. “Good evening, Mr. Ravenel.”
“Shall we start again?” Instead of sitting, he took her hand with a courtly gesture that was more an homage than a shake. “I am honored to make your acquaintance, Miss Young.”
There were callouses on his thumbs. Lucy wondered how it was that an art dealer came to have such muscular arms. Hauling canvases? Art dealer, it seemed, might be a very broad term.
What had Mr. Schuyler said about him? Something about his father being a famous artist. Lucy had seen it often enough at home, sons who weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer being taken into the family business.
“Thank you, Mr. Ravenel.” Lucy crossed her legs at the ankle, sitting primly on the edge of her chair. “I understand that you were expecting Mr. Schuyler.”
Mr. Ravenel seated himself on the other side of the table, moving with the easy grace of a sportsman. “And instead I see a vision in blue.”
Or just a vision. He had looked like a skeptic who had seen a statue of a saint weeping, a rationalist who saw a blurry face in a window of a deserted house, a man confronted with an impossibility that had become possible.
“I trust you had a comfortable trip?” said Lucy, determined to make polite conversation if it killed her. Open a gallery in New York? The man would be lucky if he could cross the street by himself.
“Not so very bad,” allowed Mr. Ravenel, drawling out the words so that the sound was as thick as the scent of wisteria from the flowers twining around the trellis on the walls.
Lucy reached for her napkin. The waiter whisked it away, shaking it out over her lap, leaving Lucy grasping at air.
Amusement glinted in Mr. Ravenel’s brown eyes.
Perhaps he wasn’t so simple, after all.
Lucy seized on her water glass to hide her confusion, taking a prim sip. “Is this your first time in New York, Mr. Ravenel?”