Free A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney Page A

satisfied with the skimpy little meals—a tree would take root in your intestines, and it would grow through your lungs, through your throat, with branches poking out from your ears, obliterating you, like girls in the old Greek stories who did not obey the gods and were enchanted.
    Guilt was like that. Guilt was like an acorn.
    Charlotte hadn’t thought about Miss Stanfield since the day she left the house with all her things in one trunk, but now she could think of nothing else, with a burning rush of remorse. She found herself trying to pray, which she hadn’t done since school; she’d completely lost the ability. She couldn’t remember the words to a single prayer. The hotel maid was bearing in on her, edging toward the bed.
    I wish I didn’t have a conscience, thought Charlotte, and she remembered the black blindfold, and how Miss Stanfield sat so rigidly in a chair by the parlor fire, relieved of all duties, and saying, “Please will someone tell me why I must have a white bandage on my eyes when I would so much prefer a dark one.”
    “Excuse me, missus, please.”
    “I am very, hugely sorry,” said Charlotte. She had bowed her head, without meaning to. She looked up at the little maid. “What’s your name?”
    “Eunice, missus.”
    “You’re very young.”
    “Sixteen last summer.”
    “You made an excellent fire.”
    “Thank you, but please, they want to know.”
    Charlotte held up a hand to interrupt her. The chair that had been piled with clothing last night was bare.
    “I want my aunt.”
    “Would that be the doctor?”
    “It would.”
    “She has left. Someone from the hospital came with a wide-runner sleigh early on, like what they use for dire-straits patients, as it’s bad out.”
    “Do you know if she left for a funeral?”
    “I believe she was meant to, as I had seen them in the drying room, putting the iron to a dress for her what was black, for mourning. But it may happen she will stay at the hospital today and go nowhere.”
    “Is my aunt here often?”
    “Please, we’re not to answer questions such as that from a guest.”
    “There was a man in this room last night and I wonder, who might he be?”
    The maid showed no sign of emotion or hesitance; young as she was, she’d been carefully trained. “We’re not to answer questions.”
    “But he could not be a guest, as I know the guests are ladies, and he is a male.”
    “We’re not to answer questions of who would visit.”
    “Surely he was not visiting. He was wearing bedclothes.”
    “We are not to answer questions of who works here.”
    “He
works
here?”
    “I didn’t say so, missus. I was only saying what the rules are.”
    “He works here doing what?” It couldn’t be playing piano, as a hired musician for the guests’ entertainment. Even though she’d complimented him, it was obvious that he didn’t know the first thing about actual music.
    “Please,” said the maid, “if I can say what I am meant to, they want to know in the morning room. It snowed something terrible in the night, and Mr. Alcorn said, at the stable, they will not let out the horses, and would you mind going home in the Moberly sleigh, as Mrs. Moberly likes the weather and has a dog at home she is attached to, a spaniel, she said, very prized, which is to have its litter, its first one, and she said—Mrs. Moberly—she couldn’t live with herself if she missed it. She wouldn’t mind the company though you’re strangers to each other, but your towns are side by side, and please hurry, as she is anxious to go.”
    The maid paused, flushed with exertion, and Charlotte said, “Is this room near the top of the house?”
    She had a sense of being high up. The wind was blowing hard, with a whistling, and the windowpanes seemed to sigh and turn even whiter. She was used to sleeping a lot closer to the ground.
    “This is the third story,” said the maid, as if a guest of the hotel would not be thought odd if she didn’t know where she