A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies Read Online Free

river with her sister, who is a very boring girl and she is going to
run fast and fall down a hole
.”
    There was a loose eye of pine in one of the floorboards, under a little brown rug, and the boy would lift the rug to reveal it. It would seem they’d fall down that hole just like Alice. Under them was the kitchen with its heat and steam and Mrs. Petty.
    The Alice part of their lives was a secret.
    People often remarked on the fact that the children did not resemble their mother, or each other; certainly none of them appeared to have shared a father. Mrs. Petty believed in keeping things discreet. She was a genius of a cook. Even Charlotte’s father-in-law had to admit she would never be matched in the household, although the new cook, a middle-aged widow, had trained in New York at well-known restaurants. There was no Mr. Petty.
    There were no other families they knew who allowed their servants to have children. It could not have lasted. One day Charlotte’s mother-in-law said simply, “I want to be rid of that woman,” and that was that.
    Mrs. Petty hadn’t asked for references, which she anyway didn’t need; you only had to put her into a kitchen with a chicken or some eggs and cheese, and you’d want never to eat the cooking of anyone else.
    Charlotte missed her and the children more than anyone knew. But she knew where they were. Mrs. Petty was the cook now in a private hotel for women, the Beechmont, on the back part of Beacon Hill, behind the Capitol with its glittering dome.
    “I’m going there,” she decided. “Now.”
    She didn’t know Boston well. She’d been to restaurants near the Common, the theaters and music halls of Tremont and Washington, the art museum, the library, the shops of Charles Street, the Garden, Park Street Church and Trinity, and a neighborhood on Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay, where her principal doctor had an office for consultations. Before they were married, Hays had a Commonwealth Avenue town house, but he’d given it up. Boston was only thirty miles from their town, but to Charlotte, since her illness, it could have been a city on the moon.
    If only a large talking rabbit would appear in the snow to lead the way. She would have appreciated it. She would have been grateful for the chance to tumble down a magic hole and find herself where she wanted to be, but there were practical matters to deal with. It was cold; the air was turning more frigid by the minute. It would be twilight soon enough. She had no lanterns, she had no bells. She had no money.
    She felt no panic, or even fear, but she had images of losing her way; of the horses complaining and giving her grief because they wanted to go home; of her limbs, encased as she was in wool and fur, turning frosty and blue, and hurting worse than they had hurt when she was sick.
    Thinking of the warmth she’d receive from her friends did not counteract reality. She realized she might not get far.
    There was a whole troop of Heaths gathered in one place nearby—she was not forgetting this. She was sure, at an alarm raised by her husband, four or five of his rowdy young cousins in their mourning suits would have been pleased to leave Uncle Owen, leap on horses like boys in the Wild West, and charge after her and catch her, although she would have given them a good run.
    She had learned the lessons of a sickbed very well. What strength you have, you are going to be careful of it; you are going to measure it; you are going to feel nervous about it. She felt that this was the way people must act when they are being released from jail, and first put on go-outdoors clothes, and feel the air on their faces—the real air, and real sun, and real wind.
    You can’t believe it’s true that you are free, and you’re terrified; and you cannot believe it’s not going to happen all over again that Fate will conspire against you and lock you up again, as if the worst of your fears is the one thing you can count on to happen.
    And