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

was.
    “Is there food downstairs?”
    “Breakfast, in the morning room,” said the maid. “Bread and jam, boiled eggs, some rashers and potatoes, from what was in the kitchen already, as there’s to be no deliveries today, with the snow.”
    “Is Mrs. Petty in the kitchen?”
    “I have not seen her this morning.”
    “Then please come back with a tray for me,” said Charlotte.
    “But there is no time, please.”
    “There is always time for eating alone in one’s room if one desires. Is there water?”
    “What we have. There’s none running in the pipes as they are froze. What will I say to Mrs. Moberly by way of answer?”
    “Tell her thank you very much, but I never ride with strangers,” said Charlotte.
    “They won’t like that. She is well high thought of.”
    Well, so am I, Charlotte thought, going prickly all over, with a haughty and dangerous crankiness, which, she liked to think, was something picked up from the Heaths, but it wasn’t; it was all her own. She threw off the blankets and, carefully, warily, because she still wasn’t sure her legs would hold her up, she swung herself out of the bed and stood upright, wobbling a bit, but not falling. The little maid forgot about her errand and smiled in a cheering way, as if congratulating her; someone must have told her about the illness.
    “I had a cousin fourteen years old what had the paralysis,” said the maid. “He took down with a fever and his legs went stiff in one night, like two wood boards, then both his arms the next day.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “It was polio. He died.”
    The knock on the door was so gentle—a light tapping, with the tips of someone’s fingers—Charlotte might have missed it, but the maid jumped, startled, and opened the door and peered out.
    “Is she dressed?” Charlotte recognized the voice, though she’d only heard it once.
    “She is, Mr. Alcorn.”
    “Please ask if I may be allowed inside to speak with her.”
    Charlotte put her back up straight and allowed herself to consider that, whatever the morning room was, and whatever one did there, and whoever Mrs. Moberly was, they were trying to get rid of her. She needed to relieve herself—her bladder was nearly bursting—and she spotted a chamber pot under the bed. This must not have been the first time the plumbing had frozen.
    “Please ask Mr. Alcorn to give me a moment,” said Charlotte, and then added, tipping her head in the correct direction, “and yourself as well.” She was not about to pull down her drawers in front of a strange maid.
    “Oh,” said the maid. She went out to the hall, but first looked anxiously over her shoulder as if Charlotte, left alone, might try to escape out the cold white window. And when Harry Alcorn came in, he looked at her in much the same way. She hadn’t brushed her hair; she had never before presented herself to someone who wasn’t her husband or a maid, first thing in the morning, unwashed, but there was nothing to be done about it.
    You’d never know it was a snowstorm, or even winter, by the way he was dressed. His linen suit, the color of cream, was perfectly shaped; his white shirt was as crisp as paper. His necktie, silk, was a soft light tan, like milky tea, and just as liquidy. The vest beneath the jacket was his only concession to the weather; it was of fine white wool and fit him so elegantly—even with, Charlotte noticed, a slight bit of paunch in his stomach—it looked like an extra coating of skin, and she thought, as if this were the reason she’d run away, Now, why didn’t Hays take a little bit of interest in how he dressed, instead of covering himself, day in and day out, in dark, dreary things, all grays and blacks and browns, all shapeless, all dull, and as interesting to look at as mud?
    There wasn’t any good morning or how-did-you-sleep from Harry Alcorn, as one would expect from a hotelkeeper. He didn’t even ask her to sit down, as a gentleman would. She felt she knew what