The House of Velvet and Glass (11 page)

“I’m sure you do your level best.” They looked at each other, and Sibyl felt a heavy thud in her chest. She breathed deeply, trying to push her nerves aside. She wanted to bring her hand to her cheek, to toy with the hair at her temple. But she didn’t. “He seems very smart, your Professor Friend,” she ventured. “I’m afraid I don’t see why he bothers you so much. If science can reveal new truths about the human condition, how can that be bad?”

Benton sighed heavily. “Oh, he is, he is.” He paused in turn, mouth contorted as he chewed the inside of his cheek. “I didn’t know you were going to séances,” he said finally. It wasn’t an apology, exactly. But it almost was.

“I never used to. Well, that’s not true. Mother would take me, from time to time. When I was younger. They were always interesting, you know, in an amusing sort of way. But, then, since it happened. Well. I’ve found it’s been rather . . .” She trailed off, unsure how to explain.

A pained look crossed Benton’s face. “I have no wish to upset you,” he said, a little formally. “But you know, if the loss of Eulah and your mother pains you, there are ways of addressing that.”

“Oh. Yes, well.” Her words were vacant, deliberately so, for she wished to move the conversation away from such abrupt intimacies. There had been a time, perhaps, when she could have imagined telling Benton these things. One time.

“But how long have you been teaching? The last we heard from you, you were in Italy,” Sibyl said, giving little thought to her choice of words in her haste to change the conversation’s direction. Immediately she wished she had said nothing.

“Yes,” Benton said, voice vague.

Perhaps they could maneuver around it, Sibyl thought, watching Benton’s face. A shadow passed through his gray eyes, but it didn’t linger.

He pressed his lips together and then smiled gamely. “About two years. Since I’ve been back. They’ve been very good to me. Gave me a cupboard of my very own.” He swept a hand out, indicating his minuscule office.

Two years. But then, after Lydia died, no one had expected him to come back at all. Sibyl’s eyes flicked down to observe his hands and saw that he still wore a gold band on his left ring finger. She brought her eyes back to his face, hoping that he hadn’t noticed.

“How nice, to have important work to keep you busy,” Sibyl remarked.

As she spoke, she heard how inane the words sounded. She had been trained from girlhood to smooth over uncomfortable silence with platitudes. She slipped into this rhythm without thinking about it, like a clock that moved its hands without knowing why. She leveled her eyes at Benton, his features at once familiar, as known to her as her own brother’s, and yet changed, nearly unrecognizable. Time had pressed itself onto Benton’s massive shoulders and into the skin of his face, time and care. She wished that she could reach forward and cup his cheek in her hand. She imagined the texture of his skin, him closing his eyes at her touch. Sometimes she wished she lived in a world that would let her do the things she imagined.

Impatient with her own restraint, Sibyl spoke. “Do tell me the reason for your call, Ben, pleasant though it is to see your cupboard. Something happened with Harley?”

He widened his eyes and leaned back, surprised at her pointed inquiry. His expression betrayed a man who had assumed he must conduct a further twenty minutes of discourse on the changing seasons, or on upcoming charity amusements to benefit displaced Belgian orphans, or starving Russian widows, or conscripted Italian peasants that they both might attend. Sibyl found that she enjoyed seeing him surprised.

“Well,” he said, one hand reaching for a nub of cigarette in the ashtray, “I’m afraid you’re right.”

“He’s come home from school. I suppose you know that,” she ventured.

“I didn’t, not officially. But I bumped into him coming out of the club rather late last night. Not usual to see undergraduates away from campus this time of year.” Benton watched her.

Sibyl sighed. “Of course. We rather thought he’d gone there. He skipped out on supper. And we hadn’t even known to expect him yesterday.”

Benton smiled. “I imagine that didn’t sit well with Captain Allston.”

A groan of exasperation slipped between Sibyl’s lips before she was able to stop herself. “You have no idea. Papa was in a terrible state all evening. His nerves, you know. A worser attack of rheumatism than I’ve ever seen. We had to use nearly double his usual amount of tonic.”

“Hmmm,” Benton said, brows furrowed. He didn’t comment further.

“We telephoned,” Sibyl continued. “But Harley wouldn’t take it. And he’s yet to be home today. It’s not like him, to stay out all night. Why, when you called I feared there’d been an accident.”

“Nnnooo.” He drew the word out, rubbing his brow with one hand. “Nothing like that. But he did his best to avoid speaking with me; he would’ve cut me dead if I hadn’t waylaid him. Even so he was most anxious to get away. And then when I arrived I found . . .” Benton paused, uncomfortable.

Sibyl leaned forward in her chair.

“Well, I’m afraid he owes some clubmen rather a lot of money,” he finished.

Sibyl sat back in her chair, confused. “But that’s impossible,” she said.

He watched her.

“No, there must be some mistake,” Sibyl insisted, getting to her feet, agitated. Benton rose when she pushed back her chair and stood with his arms crossed as she paced in the narrow room.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Why, because Harley’s got an allowance,” Sibyl said, blanching at the mention of money. “Ample for his needs. The income from his trust. Surely if he lost at cards he’d merely pay his debts.”

“Surely,” Benton agreed, his eyes tracking her movements across the room.

Sibyl stopped pacing and faced the professor. His gaze was neutral: decidedly so. She frowned, disliking her inability to read what he might be thinking.

“Well, of course he would!” she insisted, too loudly.

His expression stayed the same.

“I—” she started to say. “He—” She realized that she was sputtering. Sibyl felt her control slipping and knew that she must leave to avoid making a scene. She realized with surprise that she was angry—but at whom? At Benton? At her brother? She gathered her pocketbook and hat and stalked to the door.

“Sibyl—” Benton started, reaching out with one hand to stop her.

“Thank you, Benton,” she said, her voice newly chill with formality. “You are so kind to have brought this to my attention.”

“Wait,” he said, frustrated. He moved from behind his desk to meet her halfway out the door.

“It won’t be necessary to see me out,” Sibyl said. Her head buzzed with rage at her brother for putting her in this situation. For making her solve his problems, and for making her seem vulnerable in front of Benton. This layer of formality protected her from how she was feeling. But she knew she sounded haughty, and it annoyed her.

“No, listen.” Benton stopped her, taking hold of her elbow. She started at the familiar gesture, his warm fingers pressing into the firm flesh of her upper arm under layers of linen and wool. “That’s not even why I called. I mean, it is, but there’s something else, too. I have the distinct impression that Harley has been asked to leave school permanently.” Benton spoke quickly, with urgency.

“Leave?” Sibyl echoed, eyes wide.

“I can’t account for it any other way.”

“But why?” Her dark eyes searched his, but they betrayed no secret knowledge to her.

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I telephoned. He didn’t say anything to you?” Benton still held her elbow, more gently now that she wasn’t pulling away.

“He never says anything to me anymore,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

As Sibyl gazed up into Benton’s concerned eyes, she sank into a curious sense of déjà vu.

Harley, slow down!
she cried in her memory as a ten-year-old boy skidded through the drawing room, just missing a vase with his elbow. He was snagged, squirming, by a laughing man in his twenties, the son of her father’s business partner, his clear gray eyes shining with mischief.

Gotcha
. The young man grinned, wrestling the boy to the carpet and pinning him over sputtered protests.

What’re you thinking? Can’t you see what kind of damage you could cause? You should be more careful
, her sixteen-year-old self demanded of the wiggling boy as Benton held him firm, elbow on the boy’s back, laughing.
Ben, let him up before Papa sees.

Sibyl sighed, remembering. Things had seemed so much more straightforward, when they were younger. She wasn’t sure what had changed.

Benton’s eyes softened as he watched her. She looked up into his face.

“What I wouldn’t give,” she said, “to be able to know his mind.”

Interlude

International Settlement
Shanghai
June 8, 1868

Shabby
, Lannie thought. He stood behind the shoulders of his shipmates, in a long, narrow room, lit by lanterns and smoking oil lamps. The furniture looked European, of medium quality, since cast off: heavy armchairs upholstered with threadbare silk, horsehair stuffing spilling out through their bellies. The walls were hung with landscape scrolls, illuminated by calligraphy that he was helpless to read. Lannie both recoiled from and felt attracted by the strangeness.

Along one side of the room stretched a bar, crowded with Western stools, on which a few men perched, backs hunched. Upstairs, a woman’s voice sang high and wailing, eerie, and to Lannie’s ear, tuneless. The room smelled musky, and Lannie fidgeted, too hot in his overcoat but unwilling to remove it. He dug his hands deeper in his pockets, balling his fists to give himself confidence that he didn’t otherwise feel.

A woman approached the knot of sailors, in her fifties, dressed in a hooped Western skirt and long corkscrew curls, brushed over her ears in a way that reminded Lannie of his mother. The woman’s hair was glossy black, shot through with ribbons of steel, and her face was locked closed. She wasn’t Chinese, exactly, though her eyes were narrow and glittered black in the lamplight. Lannie stared, unaware of his open mouth until one of the other men chucked him under the chin with a knuckle and a gruff laugh.

The woman rested a bony hand on the shoulder of their agreed ringleader, a merry fellow of about twenty-five named Richard Derby. He was a Salem Derby, but Lannie didn’t know where he hung on that august tree. None too high up, if he was shipping out himself. But Dick was a modest man, compact and well spoken, and Lannie trusted him.

Now Dick stood, eyes twinkling, his head bent in conference with the woman, letting her hand linger. Lannie could tell that negotiations were under way. At first there seemed to be disagreement, nothing too substantial, as she was smiling, mouth open to show her wolfish teeth, and Dick was laughing, flirting, or pretending to. Finally a bargain was struck. The woman patted his shoulder in a motherly way, and then barked a few words to an underling. The underling hollered up the stairs, clapping her hands. A rumbling of footsteps, and then Lannie felt his mouth fall open again.

Down the rickety staircase, hand balanced lightly on the banister, moving slowly, eyes lowered, strode a young woman—a girl, not much older than Lannie, though the paint on her face and the looped-up ropes of her hair made her look much older. She wore a loose silk robe, partway open in the front, and with each descending step he glimpsed a black-stockinged leg, ending in a silken high-heeled slipper. His eyes followed her, drinking in her porcelain skin, the rich dark mass of her hair, her downcast eyes. He felt a sickening lurch in his stomach, the nausea that resulted from a warring sense of propriety, offended by the spectacle of his base desire. Lannie swallowed.

Behind the girl followed an older woman, in a differently patterned robe lined with red ostrich feathers. This woman gazed straight out over the banister, unblinking, sizing up the band of Americans who clustered together under the frank challenge of her gaze. Some of the men muttered, making jokes to cover their embarrassment. The woman was tiny, less than five feet tall even in her high-heeled shoes, and so thin that she looked like she would weigh nothing at all. Lannie was amazed that such a minute creature could render his fellow sailors into squirming boys with only her gaze, shaming them with her raw power.

On the heels of the second woman strode a third, more coquettish, age impossible to determine, obscured as her features were by garish paint and lacquered curls. Her robe was splashily patterned, her giggling laughter high pitched and false. She moved with an artificial waggle that Lannie found distasteful, but he could tell that the woman’s baser charms worked a perverse magic on several other members of the crew. Some hooted, clapping louder with each dipping step she took down the stairs.

In the coquette’s wake strode a statuesque woman, her heaped-up hair a strange pale auburn, possibly the result of chemical intervention, though her features, like those of the woman in charge, seemed placeless, as though she were from everywhere and nowhere. She held her head in a haughty attitude, her nose high, neck sinewy, a rope of pearls—was that possible?—draping over her collarbones and disappearing into the folds of her black silk gown. Lannie’s eyes widened, entranced.