The Off-Season at the Grand

• Chapter 1 Dust Sheets and Debutantes
• Chapter 2 The Brass Key
• Chapter 3 Cold Marble, Calloused Hands
• Chapter 4 Pearls in the Service Elevator
• Chapter 5 Inventory of a Gilded Age
• Chapter 6 Rumors in the Pantry
• Chapter 7 Polishing the Silver
• Chapter 8 Ghosts of the Ballroom
• Chapter 9 Salt Air and Stolen Apples
• Chapter 10 The Rotunda Echo
• Chapter 11 Scratched Mahogany
• Chapter 12 Midnight at the Switchboard
• Chapter 13 The Winter Tide
• Chapter 14 Steps in the Dark
• Chapter 15 A Broken Chandelier
• Chapter 16 Tea Caddies and Tarnished Pride
• Chapter 17 Telegram from the City
• Chapter 18 The Rooftop Solarium
• Chapter 19 Smoke Behind the Boiler
• Chapter 20 Unraveling the Velvet
• Chapter 21 The Master Clock
• Chapter 22 Scullery Secrets
• Chapter 23 The Gathering Storm
• Chapter 24 Dress Rehearsal
• Chapter 25 Unlocking the Revolving Doors
• Chapter 26 The First Guest Arrives

The Packard touring car smelled of damp leather, wet salt air, and catastrophe. Through the rain-slicked windscreen, the Atlantic appeared less like a body of water and more like an enormous sheet of corrugated zinc, gray and relentless, chewing away at the New Jersey shoreline. Sitting in the back seat with her ankles crossed and her back stiff as an ivory shoehorn, Clara Montgomery adjusted the brim of her cloche hat and pretended she was somewhere else entirely.

She might have pretended she was at the Ritz in Paris, or taking lemon squash on a terrace in Palm Beach, or even suffering through Sunday dinner at her grandmother’s brownstone on Fifty-Seventh Street, where the soup was always tepid but the mahogany dining chairs were, at the very least, stationary. Instead, she was on the desolate fringe of Cape May, five miles from the nearest town with an operating telephone exchange, being deposited like an unwanted steamer trunk at the entrance of the Grand Hotel.

"It will build character, Clara," her father had said three days ago in Manhattan, not looking up from the sheaf of stock tickers spread across his desk. The ticker tape had been spilling out of the wastebasket like unraveling mummy linen. "The board is demanding a presence on site. We need to assess the winter damage before the syndicate inspects the property in April. You’ve had three seasons of cotillions, four proposals from men who spend their afternoons drinking gin out of teacups, and last Saturday you managed to drive a roadster into the fountain at the Plaza. Your mother has taken to her bed with a vinegar compress. You will go south. You will represent the family interest. You will report to Mr. Fletcher, and you will learn what it costs to maintain an empire."

The Packard came to a halt with a sodden crunch of gravel.

Outside the car window, the Grand Hotel rose out of the mist like a Victorian dreadnought run aground on a sandbank. It was monstrously large. Built in the late nineties, when rich men measured their dignity by the acre, the hotel possessed four sprawling stories of clapboard and yellow pine, topped by a mansard roof bristling with lightning rods and turret rooms. A covered colonnade stretched three hundred feet along the oceanfront, wrapped in gray winter canvas that flapped and groaned against the gale like the sails of a dying clipper.

"End of the line, Miss Montgomery," said Higgins, the chauffeur. He did not sound entirely unsympathetic, but there was an unmistakable note of relief in his voice at the prospect of driving back to New York without her. He stepped out into the drizzle, his trench coat snapping in the wind, and opened the rear door.

Clara took a breath, smoothed her fox-fur collar, and descended to the wet gravel. The cold ocean wind immediately found every seam in her wool coat, biting through to her silk-stockinged knees. She had packed for a seaside retreat—heavy knit sweaters from Abercrombie & Fitch, pleated flannel skirts, two evening dresses on the off chance someone knew how to play a gramophone, and three pairs of French kidskin shoes. Standing in the gravel, watching Higgins heave her two enormous brass-bound leather trunks onto the bottom step of the porch, she had a sudden, sinking suspicion that French kidskin was entirely inadequate for the reality before her.

A side door near the service entrance screeched open on rusted hinges. A figure emerged onto the verandah, huddled inside an oversized wool jacket with brass buttons that had long since lost their polish. The boy—or young man, Clara could not quite tell from thirty feet away—was chewing the corner of a matchstick. He had a shock of dark brown hair that had surrendered to the damp wind, and he carried a heavy iron key ring that clanked against his thigh with every step.

He stopped at the top of the stairs, squinted through the rain at the glistening Packard, then shifted his gaze down to Clara. His eyes were pale gray, sharp, and entirely unimpressed.

"You the Montgomery girl?" he asked. His voice had the flat, clipped cadence of South Philadelphia, unaffected by the presence of a five-hundred-dollar traveling coat.

Clara lifted her chin half an inch. "I am Miss Montgomery. And you, I presume, are the porter?"

The boy took the matchstick from his mouth, studied the chewed end for a second, and put it back. "I'm the bellhop, the boiler-tender, the night watchman, and the fellow who has to haul those two coffins up three flights of stairs because the service elevator’s cable is sitting in six inches of brackish water down in the sump pit. Name’s Arthur. Welcome to paradise."

"Is Mr. Fletcher not here to receive me?" Clara asked, ignoring both the sarcasm and the casual dismissal of her luggage.

"Mr. Fletcher’s in town arguing with the coal merchant," Arthur said, coming down the steps two at a time. His trousers were frayed at the cuffs, and he wore heavy work boots with leather so cracked it looked like dry mud. "Credit’s tight. Nobody wants to haul ten tons of anthracite out to the cape without seeing cash first. Fletcher said if you showed up before he got back, I was to let you in and tell you not to touch anything that looks like it might fall over."

He reached for the largest trunk, grabbed the leather handle, and gave it an experimental heave. His eyebrows went up. "What’s in here? Anvil collection?"

"My personal effects," Clara said coolly.

"Right. Personal effects made of lead." Arthur set the trunk down with a thud and looked at Higgins, who was already retreating toward the driver's side of the Packard with shameful haste. "Hey, New York! A little help here?"

Higgins pretended the roar of the wind drowned out the request. He tipped his cap once to Clara through the window, put the car into gear, and spun the rear wheels in the loose stones, spraying gravel across the bottom steps before rumbling back down the long cedar-lined driveway toward the main road.

Arthur watched the red taillights vanish into the fog, then turned his gaze back to Clara. "Charming fellow. Very loyal."

"He has instructions to return to the city," Clara said, though she could not quite suppress the prickle of panic that climbed up the back of her neck as the sound of the engine died away. The silence that rushed in to fill the void was deafening. There was only the rumble of the ocean, the whistling wind through the eaves, and the hollow flapping of the storm canvases. "Now, Arthur, if you would be so good as to take my things inside, I should like to see my room. It has been a very long drive."

Arthur looked at the two trunks, then at Clara’s pale kidskin shoes, and then back at the double oak doors at the top of the porch. "Nobody’s slept on the guest floors since the middle of October. You’re in room twelve on the mezzanine, behind the accounts office. It’s the only room with a stove pipe that doesn't draw smoke back into the carpet. Grab your vanity case, Miss Montgomery. If you leave it on the porch, the gulls will have the latches off in ten minutes."

He bent his knees, hoisted the heavier trunk onto his shoulder with a grunt of genuine effort that strained the seams of his brass-buttoned coat, and started up the stairs. Clara had no choice but to pick up her small leather case and follow him into the cavernous belly of the Grand.

Stepping through the main doors was like walking into a cathedral that had been drowned and then drained.

The air was bitterly cold—colder, somehow, than the raw damp of the outdoors, because here the cold was trapped, stagnant, and steeped in the scent of lemon wax, dried lavender, and decaying horsehair plaster. The vast entrance rotunda stretched away into murky shadows. Overhead, an enormous crystal chandelier hung like an inverted mountain of ice, completely encased in a shroud of gray cheesecloth that billowed gently in the draft from the front doors.

Every piece of furniture in the lobby was draped in white sheets. Sofas, wingback chairs, side tables, and divans sat like huddled, frozen ghosts across an ocean of green-veined marble flooring. Down the center of the hall, long rolls of brown butcher paper had been laid out and taped down with gummed kraft paper to protect the stone from grit, creating a narrow, winding runway through the gloom.

"Mind the runner," Arthur called back over his shoulder, not breaking stride as the trunk rattled against a doorframe. "If you scuff the wax off the marble, Fletcher makes you buff it with raw linseed oil and a flannel rag until your knuckles bleed. Ask me how I know."

Clara stopped in the center of the rotunda, her boots clicking sharply on the uncovered marble border. She looked up at the mezzanine balcony that circled the hall like the gallery of an opera house. In the summer of 1921, she had come here with her aunt for the midsummer regatta. She remembered brass bands on the lawn, the scent of expensive cigars drifting through French doors, women in peach-colored chiffon carrying lace parasols, and trays of iced champagne appearing as if by magic whenever one paused near a pillar. The hotel had seemed then like an eternal, glowing palace of pleasure, invulnerable to time or season.

Now, stripped of its music and its people, it was simply an enormous wooden box decaying by the sea.

"Are there no lights?" she asked, her voice sounding thin and unnaturally loud in the vast space.

"Generator’s down," Arthur said, his boots thudding against the carpeted stairs leading to the mezzanine. "Bearing seized up last Tuesday. Fletcher’s got a man coming from Atlantic City to look at it, but until then, it’s kerosene lanterns and candles after five o’clock. Don't leave any burning when you leave a room, either. This whole place is eighty thousand board feet of dried hemlock. If it catches, you won't even have time to put your hat on before you’re an ash heap."

He dropped the trunk with an echoing crash outside a door marked Private at the far end of the mezzanine corridor. Clara caught up with him, trying not to look as winded as she felt after climbing the stairs in her tight-skirted traveling suit.

Arthur drew a long brass key from his pocket, shoved it into the lock of number twelve, and shoulder-barged the door open. It yielded with a shriek of brass and a puff of dust that smelled faintly of cinnamon and mothballs.

The room was small, square, and utilitarian. A narrow iron bedstead occupied one wall, stripped down to a ticking mattress rolled up like an omelet. A cast-iron potbelly stove sat in the corner on a square of zinc sheeting, cold and black. On the dresser, a chipped porcelain washbasin and a water pitcher with a dried ring of sediment at the bottom stood under a mirror clouded with silver rot.

"Home sweet home," Arthur said. He set his hands on his hips and blew a strand of dark hair out of his eyes. "Sheets are in the cedar press down the hall. Stove takes soft coal, which is in the bin under the back stairs. Don't touch the flue damper unless you want the place smelling like a locomotive roundhouse. I’ll bring the other trunk up when I get around to it."

Clara stood in the doorway, her hands clenched tightly inside her leather gloves. "This is a servant’s room."

Arthur gave her a slow, measured look. "This is the manager’s winter annex. Mr. Fletcher’s room is across the hall. My cot is down in the laundry room next to the boilers, because the laundry room has steam pipes running through the ceiling and I prefer not waking up with frost on my eyelashes. If you want the Presidential Suite on the fourth floor, you’re welcome to it. Only three of the windows are blown out, and there’s an owl living in the wardrobe. Just let me know so I don't waste my back carrying the second trunk up here."

"I am a guest," Clara said, her voice dropping to that smooth, dangerous tone her mother used when addressing incompetent florists. "More to the point, my father is the majority shareholder of the Atlantic Coast Realty Corporation, which owns this building, the land it sits upon, and, Arthur, your immediate future."

Arthur didn't flinch. He didn't even look mildly contrite. Instead, he reached into his pocket, took out a tin of tobacco, and began rolling a cigarette with practiced, one-handed efficiency.

"Your father’s five hundred miles away in a warm office, Miss Montgomery," he said, smoothing the paper with his thumb. "And out here, the Atlantic Coast Realty Corporation doesn't shovel the coal, it doesn't salt the steps when the spray freezes, and it doesn't know how to keep the pipes on the third floor from bursting when the wind turns north-northeast. That would be Mr. Fletcher and me. If you want to sleep on the bare mattress, suit yourself. If you want sheets, they're down the hall."

He struck a match on the doorframe, touched it to the end of the cigarette, and blew a thin stream of gray smoke toward the high ceiling.

Before Clara could deliver the blistering rebuke she had spent eighteen years of finishing school perfecting, a sharp, metallic clang echoed from the ground floor, followed by the heavy thumping of boots on the butcher-paper runner.

"Arthur!" a voice bellowed from the rotunda. It was a dry, rasping bark, like dry gravel sliding down a chute. "Arthur, where the devil are you? Did the coal wagon come?"

Arthur took a drag from his cigarette and glanced toward the open door. "That’ll be Fletcher. He didn't get the coal."

Clara turned on her heel and walked out onto the mezzanine balustrade, peering over the rail.

Below, standing in the center of the shrouded rotunda with a water-spotted bowler hat pushed to the back of his graying head, was a man who looked as though he had been carved out of salt-cured cod. He wore a heavy wool overcoat with an ink-stained collar, an enormous pair of leather mittens, and spectacles that were fogged entirely white from the change in temperature. He was carrying an armful of ledgers bound in buckram, and he looked thoroughly, utterly exhausted.

"Mr. Fletcher?" Clara called down.

The manager froze. He slowly pulled off his fogged spectacles, wiped them on the sleeve of his coat, and squinted up into the shadows of the mezzanine.

"God above," Fletcher muttered, his voice carrying clearly in the hollow hall. "They actually sent her."

He dropped the ledgers onto a sheeted sofa with a puff of dust that danced in the gray light filtering through the fanlight, took off his hat, and smoothed back three strands of iron-gray hair.

"Miss Montgomery," he said, walking to the foot of the grand staircase. "I received your father’s telegram this morning. He neglected to mention you would be arriving on the noon train. Or that you would be arriving at all, until two hours ago."

"My father felt my presence would be beneficial to the inspection committee," Clara said, descending the stairs with as much dignity as her narrow skirt allowed, keeping one gloved hand lightly on the cold mahogany rail.

Fletcher watched her descend with the expression of a captain watching a torpedo track toward his hull. "Beneficial," he repeated. "The Atlantic Coast syndicate wants to turn this place into a year-round sanatorium and casino by June. They’re arriving on April fifteenth to see if the structure is sound. We have five weeks to repair sixty feet of damaged seawall, replace four hundred panes of window glass, flush eighteen miles of plumbing, repaint the ballroom ceiling where the roof leaked in January, and inventory thirty thousand dollars' worth of hotel linen that’s currently hosting three different colonies of field mice. And your father sent me a schoolgirl."

"I am nineteen," Clara said, reaching the bottom step and drawing herself up to her full height. "And I am not here to be an ornament, Mr. Fletcher. My father expects a full, independent accounting of the hotel’s readiness before the board releases the emergency capital."

"Accounting?" Fletcher gave a dry, humorless bark of laughter. He looked at Arthur, who had drifted down the stairs behind Clara and was leaning against the balustrade, watching the exchange with obvious entertainment. "Did you hear that, Arthur? She’s going to do an accounting."

"I heard, Mr. Fletcher," Arthur said. "She wants to know why we don't have electric lights."

"Because the Atlantic Coast Realty Corporation hasn't honored a voucher since November," Fletcher snapped, turning back to Clara. "The power company cut the service line at the highway on Thanksgiving. The local tradesmen won't deliver a single nail without cash on the barrel, because your father’s board is sixty days late on the winter maintenance retainers. The butcher won't sell us salt pork, the grocer won't give us beans, and the only reason Arthur and I aren't eating boiled kelp is because we’ve been trading oysters Arthur digs out of the marsh for eggs from the Miller farm."

Clara blinked. Her father had said there were minor administrative difficulties. He had spoken of streamlining the budget. He had not mentioned that the staff of the Grand Hotel had been reduced to the status of shoreline foragers.

"The vouchers will be honored," Clara said, though her voice lacked its earlier authority. "I can write to my father’s comptroller—"

"You can write to the King of Siam if it amuses you, Miss Montgomery," Fletcher said, pulling a massive silver pocket watch from his waistcoat and checking the face. "The mail stage runs twice a week, assuming the road through the cedar swamp isn't washed out by the tide. In the meantime, this hotel opens in five weeks or it doesn't open at all. If the board decides the restoration is too expensive, they’ll sell the parcel to the railroad, the Grand will be pulled down for scrap timber, and you will have to explain to your father why his winter resort is a stack of salvage pine on a flatcar."

Fletcher picked up his ledgers from the sofa. "Arthur."

"Yeah, Mr. Fletcher?"

"Put her to work."

Clara’s mouth fell open. "I beg your pardon?"

"You said you weren't an ornament," Fletcher said, already turning his back and heading toward the dark corridor that led to the manager's office. "We don't keep boarders in the winter. If you eat our salt pork and burn our coal, you work. Arthur knows what needs doing. Start in the rotunda. The north storm canvas has torn loose from the colonnade, and the rain is driving under the sill of the French doors. If that floor buckles, we might as well light the match ourselves."

The door to the manager's office clicked shut behind him, the sound sharp and final as a gunshot.

Clara stood in the vast, shadowed hall, surrounded by furniture that looked like the tombstones of a dead summer. The cold was beginning to settle deep into her bones, creeping up from the green marble through the thin soles of her shoes.

Beside her, Arthur flipped his cigarette butt into an empty cast-iron umbrella stand, where it died with a tiny hiss.

"Well, Miss Montgomery," he said, reaching behind a nearby pillar and producing a heavy wooden bucket and two stiff, yellow-bristle scrub brushes that smelled strongly of lye. "Shall we start with your independent accounting, or do you want to learn how to keep three hundred gallons of salt water from rotting the wainscoting?"

Clara looked at the gray, lye-stained bucket, then at her pristine kidskin gloves, and then out through the salt-fogged glass of the rotunda toward the dark, wild Atlantic, which seemed very large, very cold, and entirely indifferent to the Montgomery name.

"Show me the canvas, Arthur," she said, her teeth clenched so hard her jaw ached.

"Right this way, Duchess," Arthur said, handing her a brush. "Try not to get it on your fur."

The gale off the Atlantic was not merely cold; it possessed a personal, spiteful malice that seemed directed entirely at Clara’s ankles. On the north colonnade, the wind tore through the loose corner of the heavy sailcloth canvas with a sound like pistol fire, lashing rain across thirty feet of covered veranda and sending a steady, yellowish river of brine sloshing beneath the mahogany French doors into the rotunda.

Arthur did not offer to take her coat. He did not suggest she wait inside while he wrestled with the ropes. He merely hauled an iron cleat and a rusted mallet out of an old wooden sea-chest, dropped a coil of stiff, tarred manila hemp into her arms, and climbed onto the veranda railing like an oversized, coat-wearing spider.

"Hold the slack," he yelled over the booming surf, his knuckles white as he reached out into the empty air to grab the flailing hem of the canvas. "When I catch the grommet, thread the line through and loop it twice around the stay. If you drop the rope, it’s going into the surf, and I’m not swimming out after it."

Clara stood in the driving sleet, her kidskin gloves instantly soaked to the texture of cold tripe. Her fox-fur collar had absorbed enough ocean spray to weigh ten pounds, dragging her neck down with the pungent, gamey reek of a drowned animal. For three agonizing seconds, she considered throwing the coil at his head, marching back into the manager's office, and demanding a motorcar back to the Philadelphia terminal. But behind the sting of the salt water was a stubborn, searing humiliation. If she ran, she would return to Manhattan not as an emissary of the board, but as a frightened child who had been routed by a loose piece of cloth and a sarcastic boy from the slums. Her father would not even look up from his ticker tape; he would simply sign the papers assigning her to her great-aunt’s stifling villa in Saratoga.

She clamped her jaw shut, gathered the sodden, coarse hemp in her numb fingers, and leaned against the rail.

When Arthur snared the whipping canvas, the wind nearly tore him from his perch. The canvas snapped taut with the force of an unbroken colt, wrenching his shoulder forward. Clara did not think. She lunged, caught the iron ring dangling from the canvas hem with both hands, and threw her entire body weight backward. The rough brass bit into her palms, but the grommet held.

Arthur shot her a look of sheer, unvarnished astonishment. It vanished in half a second, replaced by his usual sardonic squint. "Don't just hang there like a side of beef, Duchess! Thread the rope!"

She looped the tarred line through the eyelet, her fingers clumsy and bleeding through the ruined leather of her gloves, and wound it twice around the rusted deck stay. Together, straining until the sinews in Arthur’s scrawny neck stood out like bowstrings, they hauled the canvas flat against the colonnade stanchions and cleated it down.

The immediate roar of the storm ceased, muffled instantly by the heavy duck cloth into a dull, thumping rumble. The veranda fell into a sudden, eerie quiet, smelling of wet canvas, pitch, and their own ragged breath.

Clara let go of the line and slumped against the clapboard siding. Her skirt was soaked to the hip, plastered to her petticoats with icy salt water. Her breath came in ragged, white plumes.

Arthur dropped down to the deck with a light thud of his cracked boots. He stood wiping rain from his forehead with the back of his sleeve, looking down at her hands. The fine French kidskin was shredded at the knuckles, stained with black coal dust and tar.

"You’ve got decent grip for someone who lives on tea cakes," he remarked, picking up the mallet.

"Your compliments are as clumsy as your manners," Clara wheezed, trying to stand upright and failing to keep her knees from shaking. "Now, if we have concluded this nautical exercise, I intend to dry myself before I contract pneumonia."

"Nobody gets pneumonia here," Arthur said, turning back toward the service entrance. "Fletcher says it's forbidden by hotel regulations. Too much paperwork."

He didn't wait for her. He pushed through the heavy wooden door into the service corridor, leaving Clara to follow the sound of his squelching boots.

Inside, the utter lack of warmth hit harder than the wind outside. The Grand Hotel was an enormous icebox constructed to store ocean breezes during the dog days of August; in February, it trapped the Atlantic chill like an iron safe and guarded it jealously. The long hallway behind the front desk smelled of damp wallpaper paste, dead chimney soot, and the bitter tang of stale lye.

Arthur led her down the rear corridor toward the accounts office, stopping before a massive oak door reinforced with strap-iron hinges. Above the lintel, carved into a polished brass plate, were the words: Key Control and Timekeeper.

He unhooked a heavy ring from his belt, selected a stubby iron skeleton key, and worked it into the lock with a vicious, practiced jerk. The tumblers fell with a heavy, hollow click, and he pushed the door inward.

The room was dry, at least, though entirely unheated. One wall was dominated by a colossal wooden cabinet, five feet high and eight feet wide, containing hundreds of tiny brass hooks arranged in precise, numbered rows. Below each hook, a faded paper label bore a room number, from 101 to 480. Most of the hooks hung empty, their charges long since deposited into the heavy wooden bins on the floor below for winter inventory. But on the top row, hanging entirely alone from a tarnished copper peg labeled Executive Master, hung a single, massive key of solid brass.

It was nearly six inches long, with an elaborate fluted shaft and a clover-shaped bow stamped with the crest of the hotel—a sea eagle clutching an anchor. Unlike the dull iron implements Arthur carried on his belt, this key caught the gray afternoon light and held it, its edges worn butter-smooth by forty years of managers’ hands.

Clara stepped toward it instinctively. "The master key."

"Don't touch it," Arthur said, stepping between her and the cabinet.

"I need access to the accounts and the upper suites," she said, her voice recovering some of its natural crispness. "If I am to draft an inventory for the board, I cannot wait for you to unlock every linen cupboard between here and the attic."

"That isn't a linen key," Arthur said flatly. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his damp wool coat smelling strongly of wet sheep. "That’s the master brass. It opens every mortise lock in this building, including the strongroom in the cellar, the liquor vaults, the silver safe, and Fletcher’s private desk. It doesn't leave this board without Fletcher’s signature in the registry, and Fletcher doesn't sign that registry for anyone who hasn't been on the payroll for at least three seasons."

"I do not require a payroll slip, Arthur. My father—"

"Your father isn't on the payroll either," Arthur interrupted, leaning against the key rack. "Look around you, Miss Montgomery. Does this look like Manhattan? If you drop that key down the laundry chute or leave it in a room that gets broken into by the rum-runners who beach their skiffs on the south sandbar, Fletcher loses his license to manage. And if Fletcher loses his license, I don't have a job, which means I don't eat. So that key stays right there until Fletcher tells me different."

Clara stared at him. His jaw was set, and the easy cynicism in his pale eyes had hardened into something flinty and immovable. She realized, with a sudden shock that ran deeper than the chill in her bones, that her name was entirely worthless here. In New York, the name Montgomery opened bronze grilles at private banks and summoned headwaiters with snap-brim bows. Here, against the salt and the rot and the sheer mechanical indifference of forty tons of lumber, it purchased exactly nothing.

She took a slow, deliberate breath, pulled the ruined gloves from her hands, and stuffed them into her coat pockets. Her fingers were red, raw, and aching, but she kept her hands open and visible.

"Very well," she said, keeping her tone measured. "If the master remains here, how do you propose I enter the linen presses and the upper chambers to complete the damage tally?"

Arthur studied her for a moment, clearly surprised that she hadn't dissolved into tears or stamped her foot. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his tin of tobacco, remembered where he was, and shoved it back down.

"Fletcher has a duplicate set of brass floor-passes," Arthur said, turning to a lower drawer beneath the key board. He rummaged through a tangled mass of wire tags, wooden fobs, and rusty padlocks, finally producing three flat brass keys linked together on a piece of copper telephone wire. "Second, third, and fourth floors. They open the guest rooms and the service cupboards on the corridors, but they won't touch the offices, the vaults, or the roof hatch. If you lose them, you’re the one who explains to Fletcher why we have to pay a locksmith three dollars to re-pin the cylinders."

He held them out. Clara reached for them, but Arthur didn't immediately let go.

"One more thing, Duchess," he said, holding the wire taut between them. "The fourth floor has three guest rooms where the ocean-facing windows were blown out during the nor'easter back in December. We boarded up the sashes with crate lids, but the lath and plaster ceiling came down in the corridor. You don't walk under the central skylight. If you step on the middle of the floorboards outside room four-twelve, you’ll drop straight down into the third-floor parlor before you have time to scream. The timbers are punk-rotted from the leak."

"I am perfectly capable of looking where I walk," Clara said, tugging the keys firmly from his grasp. They were cold, heavy, and smelled of machine oil.

"Glad to hear it," Arthur said, turning back toward the door. "Because if you fall through, I’m the one who has to shovel you out, and I’ve already got two tons of oyster shells to move before sundown."

He walked out into the corridor, his boots dragging slightly in the gray half-light, leaving the door open behind him.

Clara stood alone in the small, stale room. The silent ranks of brass hooks watched her from the shadows like hundreds of tiny, unblinking eyes. High above them, the great master key hung motionless on its peg, solitary and authoritative. For an instant, she felt an almost overwhelming desire to reach up, snatch the brass key from its hook, and shove it into the pocket of her coat—not because she needed the silver safe or the manager’s ledger, but simply to prove to Arthur and Fletcher that she could.

Instead, she slipped the three floor-passes into her wool pocket, where they clinked dully against her compact, and stepped back out into the cavernous hallway.

The Grand Hotel had swallowed the afternoon whole. Outside the high, transom windows, the Atlantic sky had faded from slate-gray to the bruised, ink-stained purple of winter twilight. Without electric light, the shadows lengthened with alarming speed, pouring down the grand staircase and pooling across the shrouded expanse of the rotunda like rising water.

Clara made her way carefully through the gloom toward the foot of the stairs, her steps muffled by the paper runner. From the subterranean depths below the floorboards came the rhythmic, wheezing thud of a steam pump struggling against the tides, accompanied by the muffled metallic clatter of coal being shoveled into an iron hopper. Arthur was down in the dark, feeding the beast that kept the pipes from freezing.

She paused at the bottom of the staircase, looking up into the cavernous darkness of the upper floors. The air smelled of old dust, damp horsehair, and the vast, hollow emptiness of three hundred vacant rooms. In her pocket, the three brass keys felt heavy, hard, and colder than the ocean wind.

She turned away from the grand staircase and walked down the mezzanine corridor toward room twelve. The potbelly stove was waiting, cold and empty, and if she wanted a fire before the night set in, she would have to go down to the cellar bin and find the coal herself.