A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies by Ellen Cooney

which only came out in verses. Or maybe it was his wife! “She doesn’t receive.” The woman in that photo could certainly be a poet. She had a dreamy, pensive air. But it might have been the dress. Was there a secret printing press in the hotel basement and they were turning out pages and pages of vice? What sort? Pictures? Books of photographs? Stories?
    No, it couldn’t be. She would have smelled the ink and the solutions, even if they were locked away behind a thick door.
    “Charlotte, are you listening to me?”
    She realized he’d been talking and she hadn’t paid attention. “Perhaps,” he said patiently, “you can tell me the names of the two ladies who left already today.”
    She was about to say, “Someone named Mrs. Moberly, and my aunt,” when something stopped her: the dimly recalled words of Aunt Lily, which didn’t come back exactly, but were significant in their hint at secrecy. The family. “I’ll let them know you’re with me at my apartment.”
    Something else had been nagging at her, too, and now she got it. “Dickie,” she said, “why did you say, when I told you I’m Mrs. Heath now, Oh, so you married him?”
    “We’re to be official.”
    “This is official.”
    “Because,” he answered, carefully picking his words, and shifting around on the chair, and looking out the window at the snow, as if he’d only now seen that it was storming, “I saw you one day with him, here.” He pointed out the window vaguely. “Walking in the Garden, by the Pond. It was summer and your dress was blue. You were watching the swans.”
    “You know my husband?”
    “I don’t, personally, but I would know who he was because an uncle of his had an office above one of the banks. I was in private security then. I was twenty.”
    “If you saw me, why not speak?”
    “Because,” he said, “I thought I would have embarrassed you.”
    “Dickie! You would not!”
    “Then I saw an announcement of your marriage somewhere.”
    “Are you married, Dickie?”
    “I am.”
    “Do you have children?”
    “Two. Two sons. Babies still, the pair of them. And you?”
    She shook her head no, dismissively, with no explanation, and he said, “Odd that there would have been rumors of men as guests here, don’t you think?”
    “The tearoom is open to the public,” said Charlotte. She suddenly remembered that fact, from Mrs. Petty’s letters.
    “This would be at night.”
    “There’re servants,” said Charlotte. She forced herself to not think for even one second about the angelic young man of last night in his nightshirt. She willed her brain to conclude she must have dreamed him, and this was not a good time to remember a dream, as much as she would have loved to, just to picture his face, his hair, his skin. If she didn’t think about him as an actual person, it wasn’t a lie.
    “These men didn’t strike anyone as servants. Have you ever seen a young man or two upstairs, which truthfully, Charlotte, is no crime? The quicker I get rid of this business, the quicker I’ll be happy. A woman in a hotel has the perfect right to have visitors. This is not the Middle Ages.”
    “This is Boston, though,” said Charlotte quickly.
    “Do you know the city well?”
    “Moderately.”
    “Odd I’ve not seen you before, as you say you’re a regular visitor here, and I live…” Again he gestured out the window, again vaguely. “Close by, on Lilac Street, in the direction of the Dome. Surely as a regular guest, you’ve been by it.”
    “Lilac Street,” she said. “I don’t know it. I don’t know names of streets.”
    He sat forward, eagerly, smiling at her. “But I’m sure you must have passed my house, without my noticing. Passing by each other unawares seems to be something we have in common.”
    She felt bad about disappointing him. He seemed to want so badly to establish this other connection with her—an image to take away of her, out for a stroll on Beacon Hill, glancing up at window that was