A Room of Other People's Plans

How it begins

Rose Porter found the first room under a carpet nobody had lifted since the war.

It was a drawing, not a real room, though for a moment she forgot the distinction. Two windows faced a garden. A narrow bed stood beside a writing desk. The door had a lock on the inside.

She knelt on the bare boards with the rolled carpet against her knee and looked at the lock longer than anything else.

At the bottom of the sheet, somebody had written FOR MYSELF.

The boarding house was being sold in three weeks. Rose had been paid to clean it thoroughly, a phrase that usually meant discovering how much dirt people could pretend belonged to someone else.

She carried the drawing downstairs. Frances Bell stood in the hall measuring a doorway for the buyer's survey. A pencil rested behind her ear.

'Is this yours?' Rose asked.

Frances took the sheet and stopped breathing for half a second.

'No.'

'You know it?'

'I know the hand.'

She placed it flat on a trunk. Her own measurements, Rose noticed, were written on the backs of printed forms. The drawing used good paper. Whoever made it had spent something.

'An architect?'

'A woman who wanted to be one.'

Rose looked toward the staircase. Six rooms above them, each furnished to encourage a lodger to take up as little space as possible. She had cleaned them for nine years.

'Was she allowed to build it?'

Frances traced the garden wall without touching the ink.

'I've never seen a photograph.'

That afternoon, under the carpet in the next room, Rose found a second plan. This one showed a workshop and a wide table. Its door also locked from the inside.

By evening she had four drawings and a new understanding of what the house had been keeping under everyone's feet.