But what of it? If her grandmother was to be believed, she had no more right to Jungmann than to Young.
Lucy raised her head high. “It’s Young. Lucy Young. And yes, it is acceptable.”
“In that case, Miss Young”—Matron held out a hand—“welcome to Stornaway House.”
“Stornaway House?” Lucy couldn’t quite hide her quick look of surprise. “I thought this house belonged to the Pratt family.”
She had done her research, thumbing through back issues of the World, the Sun, and the Herald, in which the Pratts were frequently featured, richly garbed, attending the opera, departing for Newport, returning from Newport, playing tennis, creating scandal. Even the house itself had been notorious, a nasty squabble between Mr. Pratt and his architect that dragged through the papers, and led, it seemed, to the suicide of the architect.
A house born in blood, one paper had dramatically termed the house on East Sixty-ninth Street, and so it would seem, given all that had happened after.
Lucy had snuck out from her work in the stenographic pool at Sterling Bates, squinting at old papers in the library, putting the pieces together.
All except the one piece she needed.
“It used to belong to the Pratts,” said Matron placidly, closing and locking the door of the room behind her with one of the many keys she wore at her waist. She ushered Lucy to the back stair. “The house was bought by Mr. Stornaway five years ago, and dedicated for use as a home for respectable women.”
Was it Lucy’s imagination, or was there just a hint of emphasis on those last words?
Lucy held carefully to the banister as she picked her way down the steep, narrow stairs. Aside from the matter of her birth, she was as respectable as they came. She had no beaux; the boys back home found her too hoity-toity.
If by hoity-toity they meant that she wanted something other than to bear their children, to live from payday to payday, to pretend she didn’t smell the beer on their breath or know what went on in the pool hall down the street, well, then, yes, she was hoity-toity. And she wasn’t ashamed to admit it.
“Fortunately for me,” she said. “When may I move in?”
“The room is available for immediate occupancy.” Matron led Lucy out of the servants’ stair on the fifth floor, to the grand circular stair that spiraled through the main floors.
Lucy could feel her lungs expanding here, in the quiet of marble and polish, with the sun casting multicolored flecks of light through the stained glass dome high above. Off the staircase hall, heavy oaken doors led to grand bedrooms, bedrooms with high ceilings and long, sashed windows, nothing like the little cubby upstairs for which she was to have the privilege of handing over more than half her weekly pay packet.
But it was done. She was in. Where she slept was immaterial. What mattered was that she was here.
A little voice in the back of her head whispered that this was folly, that there was nothing she could hope to learn here, but Lucy silenced it. She had come too far down this particular path to turn back now. Her belongings, such as they were, were contained in an ancient carpetbag and a cardboard box in her friend Sylvia’s apartment. She had given up her job of four years at Sterling Bates and the prospect of advancement for a junior position at Cromwell, Polk and Moore.
Cromwell, Polk and Moore, among other, larger accounts, handled the affairs of the Pratt family.
They liked to keep the family in the family, did the Pratts. The junior partner in charge of the Pratt estate was the stepson of the notorious Prunella Pratt—the last remaining member of the once-thriving Pratt family.
The last remaining acknowledged member.
“My parlor is down that hall,” said Matron, and Lucy nodded obediently, turning her head in the indicated direction.
And stopped.
There was a terra-cotta bas-relief set into the wall. Against a stylized background, a dragon cowered at the feet of a knight on a plunging charger.
Not just any knight. Her knight.
Her dragon.
“Excuse me,” Lucy said, and had to clear her throat to get the words out. “But what is that on the wall?”
“Oh, that?” Matron looked at the mural incuriously, and Lucy wondered how she hadn’t realized that the temperature in the hallway had dropped at least thirty degrees, the world frozen around them. “I believe it is Saint George. The Pratts appear to have been rather fond of him. He appears in various forms throughout the building.”
Lucy made a noncommittal reply.
She remembered, very long ago, her father praising her mother’s painting. Her father had always praised her mother, her elegance, her grace, her cleverness, perpetually in awe that she had chosen him, married him.
To say that her mother had tolerated his praise was too harsh, too unkind. It was more that she deflected it, gently and kindly.