Bertha lowered her voice. “He was known to be brutal to any workers who dared to go on strike. And get this, someone even tried to kill him. A mad Russian anarchist broke into his office, and he barely survived. He was shot and stabbed”—at this Bertha made the appropriate gestures and accompanying ghastly noises—“and yet he lived. They said it was a miracle. But that was decades ago. These days he’s better known as an art collector than a union buster.”
“What are you girls doing?”
Helen Frick stood at the end of the hallway, hands on hips, a pink flush quickly consuming her freckles.
“Sorry, Miss Helen,” said Bertha, going pale.
She’d been so friendly to Lillian, the first person to do so in some time, that Lillian hated the thought of her getting into trouble. “It’s my fault,” she said as Miss Helen approached. “I opened the door thinking it was your sitting room. Bertha was just guiding me out.”
“My sitting room is on the east side of the house. Over here.”
Bertha shot Lillian a look of thanks before scuttling past her employer. Lillian followed Miss Helen into the proper room, unnerved at how much she might have heard. The sitting room had several glass-doored bookcases and a desk angled in one corner, with a view out a window that ran almost from floor to ceiling. The morning sun poured in.
The bookcases were stuffed with the collected works of Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and more, the handsome leather bindings gleaming in the sunlight. Above the fireplace hung another portrait of the young girl with a ruddy complexion and strawberry-blonde hair—similar to the one in Mrs. Frick’s bedroom—which Lillian was now certain had to be Miss Helen as a child.
On the far wall was a massive portrait of an intimidating older man: Mr. Henry Clay Frick, the man who built this mansion, and Helen’s father. In fact, his visage was scattered throughout the entire room. A posed photograph was propped up on a bookcase shelf; another showed him golfing. On the desk sat a smaller portrait, drawn at a slightly different angle from the larger one, framed in silver. His likeness overwhelmed the room, like a Frick-faced hall of mirrors. In the paintings, his white whiskers and thick mustache were as bright as snow, his blue eyes pale and guarded; in the sepia photographs, they turned a ghostly gray.
“Now, Miss Lilly, I have to see Mother downstairs, so I’ve left you an article on the desk about the house and my family to familiarize yourself with.”
“Yes, Miss Helen.”
She took a seat at the desk. The article had been written in 1915, a year after the house was completed. It mentioned that the Frick mansion was built on the former site of the Lenox Library, before it had been folded into the Public Library on Forty-Second Street in 1911, and how Mr. Frick had hired the architect Thomas Hastings to build a simple, conservative home for his family and artworks. Mr. Frick, it said, had strong opinions on the matter of his new mansion, and wasn’t interested in competing with his neighbors in terms of size or ostentation. Mr. Frick desired a comfortable, well-arranged house, simple, in good taste, it read. The result was a long, bungalow-like residence with a fine picture gallery, with plenty of light and air.
If this palatial manse was a bungalow, Lillian was Marie Antoinette. She stared up at the figure looming over her from the gilt-framed painting and stuck out her tongue. Mr. Frick might be worth millions and millions of dollars, but she wasn’t about to let him—or his daughter—intimidate her.
“What are you doing?”
Miss Helen had silently reappeared.
“Nothing, miss.” She pointed to the article. “Very interesting.”
“You have a funny look on your face, Miss Lilly. Is there something you’d like to share with me?”
“Not at all, Miss Helen. I’m eager to get started.”
“So am I. If I could bother you so much as to come sit at my own desk, that would be very much appreciated.”
Lillian jumped up, hating that she was allowing Miss Helen to boss her around so. She rarely had to tolerate this kind of snippy self-importance from the artists she worked for. But it was only temporary. She’d get the first month’s pay and be out of there before anyone could blink. That would show Miss Helen what it meant to abuse her employees so. Not that the woman would notice. She’d simply hire another one to take Lillian’s place.
Only a month.
Miss Helen began with the day’s correspondence. “You shall open all of my mail for me before I arrive, and lay it neatly in the center of the blotter, in order of agreeable to disagreeable. If it’s marked Personal or Confidential, open it anyway. It’s usually some salesman or social climber putting on airs to try to get my attention. Go ahead.” She handed Lillian the stack of mail and a heavy silver letter opener, which probably cost more than Lillian’s monthly rent. “Begin.”