This time, they hadn’t even made it as far as the attic. The shame of it.
Sorry, Harry gasped into her ear, but she hardly heard him over the noise of her own blood, the thump of her own heart. Sorry: How could he be sorry? Olive wasn’t. She wasn’t sorry for anything, not the hardness of the wall against her back, not the dampness of Harry’s forehead against her cheek, not the stairwell railing that pressed into her hip. Not for Harry’s hands, which held her in place like a double-headed anchor, so that she didn’t float right off into kingdom come.
Not for all the times they had come together this week, just like this, furtive and beautiful and primeval, like a pair of lovers resurrected from legend. Like Tristan and Isolde, like Lancelot and Guinevere: the kind of tale with which Olive, as a budding young lady, had always become impatient. Why would any sane woman give up everything for an object so chimerical as passion? But now she knew. She would give up anything for this. It frightened her, what risks she would take, what price she would pay, what conventions she would ignore, for this instant of joy in Harry’s arms.
An instant of true happiness, before she returned to reality.
She tightened her fingers around his hair and whispered, “I have to go back. Someone’s going to come looking for me.”
“But not here. No one ever comes here, except us.” His thumbs moved against her bottom. “One more minute.”
“Why? You’ve had what you wanted.”
“Not yet.” He kissed her neck. “This is what I really wanted, Olive. This is what I can’t get enough of.”
“Harry—”
“Just be still, won’t you? Don’t spoil it. Trust me, for once.”
Olive relaxed against the wall, against Harry’s sturdy hands, and closed her eyes. Just for a minute. Because he was right, wasn’t he? Harry was always right. This was the best part. This was what she couldn’t get enough of, not if she lived forever: Harry on her skin, Harry’s grateful kisses on her neck, Harry and Olive, teeming and sated, brimming over with each other, as if this house and this world had been built by God’s hands for their love alone.
But they weren’t, not really. The world was more practical than that. Two minutes later she was hurrying back down the staircase, legs atremble, smoothing her rumpled skirt, to burst onto the fifth-floor landing and the maelstrom of preparation for the evening’s festivities.
If anything, she thought, the house and the world had been built for Prunella Pratt’s engagement ball.
A curl brushed against her cheek. Olive put her hands to the sides of her head and realized that her hair was damp and loose, that the pins had been dragged from the knot at the base of her neck: a natural consequence of repeated ecstatic abrasion against a plaster wall. She turned in horror to the gilded mirror that hung at the end of the landing, right where the winding staircase reached the floor, and began jabbing the pins in place.
“Olive! What’s the matter? You’re blushed to the gills!”
Olive spun around. It was Bitsy, one of the parlormaids, a quiet girl with a lilting Irish accent.
“Nothing! I was just fetching something, and the stairs . . .” She shrugged helplessly.
Bitsy rolled her eyes. “Well, you’d best clean yourself up right quick. Ellen’s burned her hand on the curling tongs, the old galoot, and there’s no one else to help Miss Prunella dress.”
“But I’m not a lady’s maid!”
“Seems you are now. I’d hop to it, if I was you.”
Bitsy turned and hurried back down the stairs, without another glance, until she rounded the curve and disappeared. But her voice floated up in her absence: “Mind you straighten your cap, now, Olive!”
Olive turned back in horror to her reflection. Bitsy was right: She was flushed, and her cap sagged shamefully to the left. Upstairs, Harry had ducked into the studio to reconstruct himself back on orderly lines, but Olive had no such luxury, did she? She forced her fingers to stop their shaking and put each pin back in place. She drew in a long and steadying breath and straightened her white cap. There was nothing she could do about the blush. She had earned it, fair and square.
Miss Prunella’s room lay only a single floor down from the nunnery but it occupied a different universe: high of ceiling, deep and intricate of molding, lavish of decoration. Olive knocked on the door and pretended not to notice that the entrance to Harry’s room beckoned only a few feet away. He had left his door carelessly ajar. If she craned her neck, she could peek through the few inches of space and spy his bookshelf, the corner of his bed.