Hall of Secrets (A Benedict Hall Novel) Page 5

  While Ruby unpacked Allison’s trunk and stowed her things in the drawers of a massive oak wardrobe, she complained steadily, in a resentful monotone, about having to share a floor with Leona and her twin, Loena. Ruby had her own bedroom, but they all shared a bath, and the twins trotted in and out of her room without asking, as if it didn’t even have a door. “They chatter at me all the time, and I can’t even tell them apart,” Ruby droned, all the while folding chemises and shirtwaists and pairs of stockings. “They’re as alike as two peas in the same pod. I swear if you put ’em side by side even their freckles would match. And they’re just housemaids, besides. There’s no lady’s maid in the house, not a real one. Who am I going to talk to?”

  “Maybe Seattle ladies don’t have lady’s maids,” Allison said absently. It wasn’t an issue she cared about in the least. If Ruby decided she didn’t like living in Benedict Hall, Allison would happily put her on the train back to San Francisco. She could fold her own clothes, surely. She couldn’t mend them, or iron them, but she would get by. She had managed perfectly well on Berengaria, when Ruby was lying in her bunk in Third Class, clutching her stomach and moaning.

  Now, Allison was seated at the vanity mirror, coaxing the sides of her hair into spit curls to frame her cheeks, the way the film star Louise Brooks wore her hair. Of course, Louise Brooks’s hair was dark and Allison’s was so fair it was almost colorless, but she thought the style flattered her small face and pointed chin. The trick was to get the curls to stay. She dipped a fingertip into the tin of pomade, delicately stroked it on, then turned her head this way and that, assessing it.

  “You could be a hairdresser,” Ruby said, standing behind her. “Monsieur Antoine couldn’t do any better.”

  “Oh, he could,” Allison said, pursing her lips. “He invented the bob, after all. And the finger wave.”

  Ruby pushed a strand of her own dull brown hair back from her face and scowled over Allison’s shoulder. “I’d like to bob my hair, too,” she said. “But who knows what the barbers in Seattle are like?”

  “Cousin Ramona must know one. She has a perfect finger wave. Do you want me to ask her?”

  Ruby shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” She turned to shake the wrinkles out of Allison’s pink georgette crepe, and Allison let the matter rest. Ruby often longed for this or that new thing, but when push came to shove, she was a coward. She still wore her hair pinned up in rolls. She would probably go to her coffin that way.

  Allison added a touch of rouge to her cheeks, so subtle she thought only Cousin Ramona would notice. All the debs this year had worn a bit of makeup. She sparingly touched her mouth with color from a Levy Tube, then pressed her lips with a handkerchief so she wouldn’t stain the table napkins. She gave her head a shake to be certain the spit curls would hold. She decided the look was good. Not as vivid as Louise Brooks, of course, but every bit as chic as the women she had seen in Paris.

  Unfortunately, there was no one to appreciate her achievement except this house full of relatives. She had been here two whole stultifying days! Since her arrival at Benedict Hall, she hadn’t been out of the house once, and it was too wet outside to just take a walk.

  Her bedroom was very nice, though, with lace curtains at the window and more lace dangling from the vanity chair. A plump pink comforter filled the bed, and a pretty china basin and ewer rested on the bedside stand, even though she had an entire bathroom to herself. She wondered who had arranged everything.

  It couldn’t have been Aunt Edith. Such an effort was obviously beyond her. She was eerily silent and alarmingly vague in her movements.

  Cousin Ramona was sweet, looking after Aunt Edith, asking in a distracted way if Allison had everything she needed. Uncle Dickson was brusque, but kind enough. Dick seemed a nice sort, but he was always talking with Ramona or going off to work with Uncle Dickson. Allison hadn’t seen Cousin Margot once. She wondered if that was done on purpose, if Cousin Margot was avoiding her.

  Allison took a last look in the mirror before she rose from the dressing table and held out her arms for Ruby to slip her dress over her head. She heard the door open down the corridor and her aunt’s light, uncertain step on the stair. She would have to sit next to her again, she supposed. At least Aunt Edith paid no attention to what she ate. Or didn’t.

  She tugged her dress down over her hips and slid her feet into a pair of low-heeled slippers. She would go downstairs, sit in her assigned place at the dining table, make polite conversation, and pretend to eat dinner. She would serve her sentence here in Seattle, because she had no choice in the matter.

  But, she promised herself, she would never, ever forgive Cousin Margot for making her do it.

  Margot stood on the bare oak floor of the space that would soon be her reception room. She turned in a slow circle, admiring the new windows and the built-in shelves Frank had recommended. The shelves were already planed, ready for a coat of varnish. Her father had insisted on giving her a reception desk from his office that he swore no one was using. It sat under a dustcover off to the side, ready to be placed once the floor was sanded and polished. The glaziers were done, and the outside, despite the rainy season, was fully painted in an inviting shade of cream. Her sign, the one Frank had repaired for her, lay just inside the door, ready to hang. Tomorrow the Chinese gardener, recommended by the family of one of her patients, would come to start plantings in the small space between the clinic and the street.

  She could begin organizing her small office, too. The floor there was finished, and her supply of books waited in cartons near a new rolltop desk. It was hard to tear herself away from that project, but she had missed dinner the past two nights, caught up in a rush of flu cases at the hospital. It wasn’t anything like the epidemic of 1918, but enough to keep everyone busy late into the evening. She had assisted at an aspiration for an influenza patient with a sudden pleural effusion and rather dramatic cyanosis. She hadn’t done that before, and she learned a lot from the procedure.

  Tonight, though, she must get home in time, especially because, as her father reminded her, she hadn’t yet greeted Cousin Allison. Undoubtedly, Ramona and Allison would have far more in common than she and Allison would—clothes and makeup and society, all the things to which Margot was indifferent. Still, her cousin was a guest at Benedict Hall. She didn’t want to seem ungracious.

  Margot shrugged into her coat, settled her hat on her head, and pulled on her gloves. As she picked up her umbrella and started out of the clinic, she wondered again what it was that Allison had done on the crossing. Margot knew all too well the real trouble a nineteen-year-old girl could get into, the kind of trouble that made a family send her away as quickly as they could. She hoped with all her heart Allison wasn’t pregnant. That was one problem that would most certainly be hers to solve.

  Allison watched from her window as Cousin Margot’s tall figure, sheltered by an umbrella and encased in a long brown overcoat with a drooping collar of some kind of fur, crossed the lawn behind the house and disappeared into the garage. Such an odd choice, to live over the garage, in an apartment all by herself. Allison hadn’t been in the apartment, but she could imagine it. It had been the butler’s rooms, after all. It couldn’t offer much in the way of comfort or elegance. Cousin Ramona said the best thing about it was the telephone Uncle Dickson had installed there, so Margot’s late-night calls from the hospital didn’t disturb the family.

  Of course, Cousin Margot had the advantage of solitude, and Allison could see the appeal of that. There was hardly any in Benedict Hall. The two maids, Loena and Leona, were forever dashing about upstairs and downstairs, cleaning, dusting, polishing. Hattie, the cook, pottered between the kitchen and the dining room, offering to make tea or a sandwich. Allison’s bedroom could have been a refuge, but Ruby spent far too much time there on trumped-up tasks—a shirtwaist with a tear, a skirt needing pressing, a woolen coat in need of brushing.

  Allison turned from the window to face her maid. “
Ruby, can’t you make friends with the twins? They seem all right to me.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like up there, Miss Allison,” Ruby said sullenly. She smoothed the panels of the wool crepe frock Allison was going to wear for dinner and held it out to her.

  Allison stepped into it, tucking her silk slip down inside, turning for Ruby to manage the fastenings. “How bad can it be, really?” she said. “We’re stuck here all winter. You can’t spend all these months in my room.”

  “They come in and out of my bedroom like it was their own,” Ruby said. “Always wanting to talk about this and that, show me some bit of frippery one of the family gave them, ask me all about San Francisco.”

  “Well, tell them,” Allison said. “It’s not like they get to travel. As you have done, remember.” She turned back to the mirror, twitched the wool crepe into place, and touched her hair one more time.

  Ruby bent to the bottom of the wardrobe and produced the pumps with the low Cuban heels, and Allison made a face. “Not those,” she said. “The Louis heels, the pointed ones.”

  Ruby frowned at her. “Mrs. Adelaide says—”

  “Mother isn’t here, Ruby. She’s wrong, in any case. There’s nothing trampy about the Louis heels.”

  It was obvious Ruby had more to say on the subject, but Allison’s stormy expression evidently dissuaded her. She brought the Louis heels, set them down smartly on the vanity, and departed, pointedly shutting the door behind her. Allison made a face at the closed door, then sat down on the vanity stool to put on the shoes.

  She caught sight of herself in the mirror as she was adjusting the straps. The furrow between her eyebrows was hardly becoming, she thought. Her lips were pursed, making her look like a spoiled child. Or a sour old lady.

  “This has to stop, Allison Benedict,” she said sternly to her reflection. It wasn’t, after all, Ruby’s fault that she was dull. Nor was it her fault she was stuck here in a houseful of strangers. Allison sighed and rested her chin on her fist. It was all just so—so stultifying.

  She hadn’t wanted a maid in the first place. It had been her mother’s idea, and her father had concurred, mostly, Allison suspected, because he thought it looked grand for his debutante daughter to have a lady’s maid hovering around her. The two of them, Henry and Adelaide, insisted on quoting Emily Post at every opportunity, and Emily Post decried the sharing of maids between a mother and her debutante daughter.

  Even after only two days, it was clear to Allison that the Benedicts of Seattle had no need to consult Emily Post in order to do things properly. Despite Aunt Edith’s fragile state and the lack of a butler, the style and management of Benedict Hall was as effortless and elegant as any house Allison had seen. Nothing was ostentatious, but every piece of furniture, every bit of drapery, every decoration had been chosen with exquisite taste. The Seattle Benedicts wore their wealth easily, in a way that seemed vastly more sophisticated to Allison than her own family’s display.

  She had visited enough homes of the wealthy in the past year to understand that her parents’ home verged on the vulgar. Its rooms were crowded with velvet davenports and suites of club chairs. Etageres and occasional tables and Persian rugs filled every available space. Allison had protested, once, when some new piece of scrolled and carved furniture was delivered, and her mother had spat at her that she wasn’t going to live in an empty barn.

  She had been more successful in talking her mother out of putting Ruby in a uniform, probably because Papa didn’t want to have to pay for it. Allison had managed to head off the lace cap, pinafore apron, and black button-up dress by assuring her mother such a getup was much too old-fashioned. She hadn’t used the word pretentious, but it was in her arsenal if necessary.

  Looking at the servants’ attire at Benedict Hall, she knew she’d been right. The twin maids, Leona and Loena, wore simple print dresses with long utilitarian aprons over them. Like Ruby, they wore dark stockings and flat, serviceable shoes, or boots if they were going outside the house. Ruby clarified her higher position as a lady’s maid by wearing a white shirtwaist and a dark skirt that fell demurely to her ankles. She had a trim white apron to wear when she was doing wash or sewing or carrying trays.

  It had been a lucky thing that Ruby was able to sew new skirts for herself. She had gained at least ten pounds during Allison’s debutante season from sitting around in the kitchens of grand houses waiting for the parties to be over, drinking tea and eating leftovers as she gossiped with the other ladies’ maids.

  Papa remarked that it looked as if Ruby had gained all the weight Allison had lost that year. He supposed the excitement of being a debutante—photographers everywhere, dressmakers parading through the house, engraved invitations arriving in the mail—had made Allison lose her appetite. At meals she could feel his speculative gaze, assessing her hair and skin and figure as if she were a bale of dyed silk and he was trying to decide what price he could demand.

  If he knew what her mother had done, would he send Adelaide to Bella Vista Rest Home instead of her? It had crossed her mind to just spill it out to them, to Papa and that appalling Dr. Kinney, tell them the whole truth of the matter.

  They might not have believed her in any case, but more than that, it was part of her private struggle with her mother. To turn it over to someone else would be, in some obscure way, to give up. To surrender. Allison would never, ever surrender, even if she died.

  She turned now before the mirror, noting with satisfaction that her breasts and hips were so flat she could have been a boy. She would have preferred being a boy, actually. Boys grew into men, and men were free. Men could choose what they wanted to do. Men had all the fun, men like Tommy Fellowes, late of Exeter College, Oxford.

  Allison bent to take a handkerchief from a drawer. When she stood up she had to pause, one hand braced against the wall, until the black dots faded from her vision. She supposed she had better be careful about that. It was getting to be a habit.

  Margot went up the back porch, leaving her umbrella to dry beside the kitchen door. She sidled carefully through the kitchen, apologizing for getting in the way of Hattie and the two maids, who were bustling between the stove and the counters, their hands full of spoons and spatulas and serving bowls. Hattie just smiled, and said, “Get yourself on in there, Miss Margot, and set down. Your mama gonna be glad to see you.”

  Margot doubted that, but she passed on through the kitchen and out into the hall, reaching it just as her cousin was descending the carpeted steps of the main staircase.

  Margot’s first thought was that Allison looked more like a thirteen-year-old girl than a young woman of nineteen. She was fair, and very pretty, but the bodice of her dress barely swelled over her bosom. The dropped waist made her lean hips look even narrower, and the points of her clavicle, revealed by the square neckline of her frock, stood out like those of an undernourished child. For a moment, Margot gazed at her in confusion, wondering why no one had mentioned Allison was ill.

  Allison looked back at her from shadowed eyes that seemed full of suspicion. They gazed at each other for a suspended moment, until the door to the small parlor opened, spilling the murmur of conversation into the silence. Ramona appeared in the doorway. “Oh, Margot, good!” she said. “You’re here. We were just about to go in to dinner.”

  With an effort, Margot recalled why she had made an effort to be present tonight. She took a step forward, and held out her hand to the thin girl standing on the lowest stair. “Cousin Allison,” she said. “It’s nice to see you. I’m glad you could come to stay at Benedict Hall for a time.”

  Allison shifted her handkerchief to her left hand. She extended her right, and Margot took it cautiously. Her bones looked as fragile as a bird’s, and her skin was cold to the touch. “Cousin Margot,” Allison said. “Thank you for”—there was the briefest pause before she finished, with deliberate inflection—“inviting me.”

  Margot heard the inflection without knowing whether it was intentional or inadvert
ent. She saw, though, the narrowing of the girl’s eyes, the flash of emotion in her blue gaze. She lifted an eyebrow. “And how are you?”

  It was a commonplace courtesy, a ritual question. For Margot, however, the query was not so simple as it was for most people. It had layers of meaning, elements of real significance. It was why she had chosen her profession, and the sight of this emaciated girl engaged both her interest and her concern.

  At the very least, there was no question of Allison Benedict being pregnant. With her body weight so low she was doubtless amenorrhoeic. Margot had observed the condition in malnourished daughters of Chinese laborers and occasionally the crib girls of the Tenderloin.

  Allison turned her face away and stepped down the last stair to follow Ramona toward the dining room. Over her shoulder, she said, in a brittle tone Margot thought was meant to be gay, “Oh, swell, Cousin Margot, thanks. I’m just swell.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Allison’s seat was on Aunt Edith’s left, at the foot of the table. At the head, Uncle Dickson settled into his chair with a slight grunt. Cousin Ramona and Cousin Dick sat together on Uncle Dickson’s left, the other side of the table from Allison, their faces all but obscured by a tall silver candelabra. Cousin Margot was on Allison’s left, and directly opposite her, at Aunt Edith’s right hand, one chair remained empty, though the place was set with a charger and a full complement of flatware and crystal.

  Allison knew what it was, because the twins had told Ruby, and Ruby, unusually animated by the tidbit of gossip, had whispered it to her before her first dinner at Benedict Hall. The empty chair had been Cousin Preston’s, set at his usual place at the table, on his mother’s right hand. When Uncle Dickson had asked the maids to remove it, Ruby reported, Aunt Edith had screamed and wept, and slapped at the maids’ hands until everyone was in tears.