A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies Read Free Page B

a reasonable time to try to set things at last on the course they were supposed to have taken.
    Death, she’d thought, would have a practical, logical application. But she didn’t go into Uncle Owen’s house on High Street for his wake. How could she, when Hays had just come out of it with the woman?
    She wondered if Hays was trying to remember the last time he’d seen her outdoors. She couldn’t even remember herself. A long time ago.
    Her length of time in a sickbed was ten months. But it seemed much longer: two years, five years, eight, nine. Her principal doctor felt that what was wrong was some form of brain disease. She had heard that often. “Charlotte, brain disease, it’s some form of brain disease, which I expect will go away. Probably.”
    The consultants, and there were many, believed it was a type of polio. They insisted on the “some type of” aspect, as if rubbing it in that her particular case was abnormal—as if she’d not got it right, as if it were one more thing not right, like not having children.
    Or even like the color of her hair, as though she’d had a say in it. She had hair the color of a pumpkin, a ripe one, and it was frizzy and wild and would never stay tucked in. She was no longer paralyzed from the disease, not in any part of her that showed.
    The polio theory was the one that made everyone more nervous; the Heaths didn’t want anyone outside the household to hear about it. It seemed less offensive to them to say, “Something is wrong with her brain,” which to Charlotte sounded horrible and embarrassing, and was a lie.
    The woman with Hays was as fit as Charlotte’s horses, all glowing, with that perfect lady’s hourglass figure. Perfect. Like a picture in a magazine. She looked like she’d never been sick, from anything, ever.
    One good thing that happened in the sickness was this: Charlotte was able to stay out of hospitals. The room she was kept in was off the front hall, at the top of the stairs that went down to the kitchen. The cook’s children had stayed close by her.
    The girl, Sophy, was nine now, and Momo, the boy, was six. There was also a baby, Edith. When Mrs. Petty came to the household for her interview with Hays’s parents, she’d come alone. The Heaths didn’t know about the children until they all moved in.
    Those children had loved it that Charlotte was still for all those months, with nothing to do, it seemed, but have her muscles rubbed, and talk to them, and allow them to climb all over her and brush her hair and use her bed as their playroom.
    The girl heard one of Hays’s sisters say that the story of Alice and her adventures in Wonderland was a blotch on the tradition of English culture, and a silly, ridiculous thing, as bad for the mind as a diet of maple candy, and nothing else, for the body. Sophy loved maple candy. She took about a month to have memorized a large portion of the story, and might have completed it all if she had not gone to Boston.
    She stole the book from neighbors who had a daughter her age. The neighbors used to let her and her brother play in their yard with their ponies and ducks, but there’d been trouble.
    One day Momo Petty went into the neighbors’ house by the front door instead of the rear. A child of a servant at a front door! When he was made to see his mistake, Sophy walked into a mud puddle (it was raining), slipped into the house, and allowed herself to place footprints of mud on the neighbors’ extremely expensive drawing room carpet. A vase was broken as well.
    Charlotte only had to think of Sophy and her brother ducking under her bed to hide from some trouble they’d been in—and the baby curled on a pillow, sometimes fussily, bubbling up oatmeal or milk—and she could hear that voice.
    “Alice shall have an adventure. There’s a big white rabbit. You must prepare yourself for things you would never expect,” she’d begin, as though no one had heard this before.
    “She is going to be sitting near a