Lucy shook her head. She felt as though she had just tumbled into the wrong story. The prince had proposed to the goose girl, but the goose girl wasn’t a princess in disguise; she was an entirely different sort of imposter. “There’s a great deal you don’t know about me.”
Philip turned his cup around on its chipped saucer. “I know that you speak your mind, even when it might be easier to remain silent. I know that you won’t let me—oh, sit on a shelf and collect dust like some trophy. You challenge me. You make me a better person. A better lawyer, too.” When Lucy didn’t respond to his smile with one of her own, he said simply, “I want to be the man you see in me.”
Was that how he saw her? Purely as a mirror for his own better self? In that case, he was due to be disappointed when he stopped to look more closely and realized that his mirror was cracked, that she had lied to him, just as John Ravenel had lied to her.
It was time to have it all out, every last bit of it. What more, after all, did she stand to lose?
Taking a deep breath, Lucy said, “I’m afraid you’ve been deceived in me. I’m—not what I’ve said I am. I’ve been lying to you.”
“Are you the lost princess of Austrovia? I’ve always rather fancied myself as prince consort.”
He would make a lovely prince consort, all shiny braid and polished buttons. Lucy shook her head. “My ancestral home is a bakery in Brooklyn. My real name isn’t Young—it’s Jungmann.”
She looked defiantly at Philip Schuyler, waiting for the condemnation to follow.
“Is that all?” Philip leaned back in his chair, relief written in his posture. “My maternal grandfather was named Hochstatter. From Hamburg, or thereabouts. He changed it to Howland when he brought the family shipping business over to America. You Anglicized your name. It’s been done before.”
“There’s more.” Her name was the least of it. “I wasn’t entirely frank about my reasons for wanting employment at Cromwell, Polk and Moore. I wanted access. To the Pratt papers.” In a rush, Lucy said, “No one could ever understand why my mother married my father. She was a lady—a Van Alan. And my father was just a greengrocer. But my grandmother said—I think Harry Pratt might be my father.”
“Oh.” To his credit, after the first stunned moment, Philip took the announcement in stride. His lean face was thoughtful. “Harry . . . He was the younger twin. He disappeared, right before Prunella married my father. There was something of a stink about it. That would have been in ’ninety-three.”
“The year I was born,” said Lucy quietly. “I was born in November of 1893.”
“I see.” Philip cocked his head. “That would make you my—what? Stepcousin? I think we can get a dispensation.”
He was joking again, always joking. “You don’t understand. I lied to you. I came to work for you under false pretenses.” She blurted out the worst of it. “When you weren’t in the office, I went through your files.”
“You’re my secretary. It’s your job to go through my files.” When Lucy didn’t crack a smile, Philip leaned forward, taking her hands in his. “I think it’s very gallant of you to come clean. But none of this makes a difference. Not to me. It wasn’t as though you were trying to embezzle money from the firm. You just wanted to know about your heritage. And who wouldn’t?”
Lucy bit her lip, torn by his kindness. “I’m beginning to think I shouldn’t. Nothing I hear about the Pratts makes them sound terribly likable.”
Philip was still holding her hands, his grip loose, undemanding. “If it helps,” he said, “Harry was the best of the lot of them. I was a snotty boy of eight. I can’t have been much of a joy to have around. But Harry—he saw me sitting there by myself at the back of the room. I’d been told to sit still and mind my manners. No speaking until spoken to and all that. But he came over to me. He drew a picture for me.”
“A picture?” A little shiver ran down Lucy’s spine. A goose walked over my grave, her mother would say.
A faint, reminiscent smile curved Philip’s lips. “I’d nearly forgotten that day. I can’t remember quite what he said—something about guessing that I wished I were outside, doing anything but sitting in that room. Because he wished he was anywhere but in that room. And right there, just like that, he whipped out a sketch pad and drew me flying a kite in Central Park. It was a very good likeness, too.”
Lucy thought of her mother, of the mural on Lucy’s bedroom wall. Mine is only a secondhand talent. “He was an artist?”
Philip shrugged. “Artistic, at any rate. His family wasn’t the type to encourage that sort of talent. They were . . . grubby. Moneygrubbing,” he clarified, with the easy arrogance of generations of inherited wealth. “Old Henry August Pratt didn’t approve of anything that didn’t translate into dollars and cents. But Harry—he was different.” Glancing up at Lucy, he added, “I might still have that sketch somewhere, if you’d like it.”