“Oh, no. Do come in, Nurse. I believe Captain Ravenel needs some water.”
The woman’s voice was slow and rich like honey, but I also imagined it was full of bees waiting to sting. I paused with my hand on the doorknob. “Actually, I’m Dr. Schuyler. But I see all is taken care of here . . .”
“Dr. Schuyler, please. Come in.” Cooper’s voice held an unfamiliar note to it, something that sounded a little bit like panic. “I’d like you to meet Caroline Middleton. My fiancée.”
The news that somebody had come for him should have made me happy enough to kick up my heels and brush my hands together. But instead, my feet felt leaden, taking all of my effort to cross the room to greet this woman. The whole time the ruby seemed to burn my skin where it lay under my dress.
She placed cool fingers in my hand, not bothering to stand as she greeted me. “The pleasure is all mine, I’m sure. Dr. Greeley here was mentioning how you helped a little with my fiancée’s recovery.”
I looked at Dr. Greeley and could see Nurse Hathaway behind his shoulders, rolling her eyes. “Yes,” I said. “I helped.” The necklace quivered against my skin as I turned to Cooper and then back to the ice queen in confusion. “Your name isn’t Victorine?”
She threw back her head and laughed, the sound low and throaty. “Oh, no, my dear. Victorine is the name of the artist Manet’s muse, a woman he dearly loved.” She turned her attention back to Cooper. “Just like yours is Caroline, isn’t it, darling?”
I grabbed the empty water pitcher by the side of the bed, said a hasty good-bye while avoiding Cooper’s gaze, then left the room. I was halfway down the steps before I thought to wonder why the woman he called out for in his dreams wasn’t Caroline.
Fourteen
CHRISTMAS EVE 1892
Olive
When Olive first set foot in the kitchen of the Pratt mansion, her jaw had fallen straight to the floor.
Of course, she’d already seen the plan in her father’s architectural drawings, so she shouldn’t have been shocked at all. Her fingers had once slid lovingly along the generous dimensions, lingering on the cupboards and counters, the massive oven—or rather ovens, for there were two of them—the larder, the silver closet, the wine cellar. Wondering what it might be like, to command a kitchen like that, so modern and large and efficient, lit and ventilated by special windows and shafts, so that you hardly noticed you were in the basement of a New York City town house at all.
But it was one thing to sigh over a set of two-dimensional drawings, and quite another to don apron and cap and walk through the doorway into the enormous and bustling three-dimensional room, presided over by a cook who might have sent Genghis Khan to the devil. In a household that revolved around the precise and formal succession of splendid meals, the kitchen was the pulsing center, the steam engine driving the propeller that was Pratt family life. (Or was Pratt family life the steamship itself, and the food the propeller?) Regardless, just presenting herself in the doorway each morning, apron crisp and cap pinned in place, was enough to make Olive’s heart fail at the magnitude of the work looming before her, the same damned Sisyphean boulder she would have to push up the hill yet again, just as she had the day before, and the one before that, unto (so it seemed, anyway, at five o’clock in the bleak winter morning) eternity.
The task seemed especially impossible this morning, which happened to be both Christmas Eve (more work!) and the day after last night: a night that had concluded only three hours ago, as Olive tiptoed down the back staircase to the nunnery, slipped her Bible from the doorjamb, and crept into her cold bed. Except she hadn’t noticed it was cold, had she, because she was aglow, aglow, dizzy with the promising adoration in Harry’s eyes, the warmth of his smile, the understanding that filled the attic room in the sizzle of the coal fire. The smell of oil paint and human skin. The scratch of pencil, the rumble of laughter that moved her heart against her ribs. As she laid her head on her early-morning pillow, she had never felt warmer. She had never felt more alive.
It was only upon waking, a few scant hours later, that Olive found the cold.
“Having trouble sleeping, are you?” snapped the cook.
“I beg your pardon?”