A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney Read Free Book Online Page A

flickering candlelight, and the warm rich colors of the inside walls, and a scent of flowers. There was a vase of hothouse roses on a table.
    “You have the wrong place,” said a raspy male voice.
    “No, I think not.”
    “Your name.”
    The voice didn’t sound friendly, but still, she felt no sense of foreboding.
    She realized she hadn’t been able to tell if the figure was a man or a woman. It was the shape of a person in shadows dressed in a dark hooded cloak and holding a broom, which dripped with melting snow. Then she saw a ruddy face, stubbled at the chin and cheeks with a coarse gray sprinkling of beard, and a very large, bulbous, reddish nose, which looked as if it had been broken more than once.
    Somewhere inside someone was playing a piano, stopping and starting again unevenly, playing scales, picking out odd combinations of notes, lightly, without skimming off into a tune. She said her name. She said she was the friend of the cook, Mrs. Petty, from the household where Mrs. Petty had been employed; would Mrs. Petty please be told?
    A sound of grunting emerged from the man, and dragging his broom behind him he disappeared down the hall.
    She stepped farther inside. A door was at the right, and she knew instinctively it led downstairs to the kitchen, like the one at home, where her sickroom was. She liked the symmetry of that: every door toward every downstairs kitchen for the rest of her life, she felt, would remind her she was free.
    Do-re-mi, do-re-mi, do-re-mi went the piano: a sound of muffled laughter, a sound of wind at the windowpanes, a sound of creaking furniture overhead, a sound of crumbling logs in the little hall fireplace. Do-re-mi-fa-
so
.
    She could picture herself ten years ago at the piano in the long gallerylike room the Heaths called their conservatory. “We would love for you to be musical.”
    Her sisters-in-law played somber German compositions, hymns, songs about babbling streams and flowers, and lovers dying in moonlight in each other’s arms, all boring. Her mother-in-law would stand behind her at a lesson. “Charlotte, you make it seem a piano is an instrument of torture; you behave as though all your fingers are thumbs”—she didn’t know how accurate she was—while the stuffy fat teacher, beloved of the family, who affected an English accent but came from Vermont and had a mustache like walrus tusks, frowned harder and harder at her and tapped his hand on the piano in time to the horrible metronome, and she’d be filled with the desire to go out to the shed for the ax and chop up the whole thing, and all the furniture too, those pink-and-white chairs from France, those spindly tables, those portraits of dead Heaths in wood frames so thick, they would kill you if they fell on your head. Why had she married Hays Heath?
    Because saying no to him would have been like saying no to your own heart, that was why, if your heart could ask if you wanted it to keep ticking.
    Do-re-mi, do-re-mi-fa-so-
la
, then the sound of a trill, then a stillness. She felt that if she listened closely enough she might hear Sophy or Momo, calling to each other, or the baby crying, even though it was well past time for them to be in bed. A shiver of pleasure went through her: she thought of what their expressions would be like when they saw her. They would have grown, children grew fast; it had been almost six months since they’d left the household.
    There had not been an emotional farewell. There had been no leave-taking at all. One morning, late last fall, Charlotte woke from a troubled sleep to something that felt like a blanket thrown over her face: a blanket of stillness.
    The kitchen below her was as silent as stone. It was as if she’d gone deaf, as if deafness were one more manifestation of being sick. “I shall send up your breakfast myself, as the cook has been discharged,” said her mother-in-law, in the doorway. A bowl of ginger pudding arrived, left over from supper and warmed, with