The House of Velvet and Glass (13 page)

The spoiled sot.

The thought burst behind Sibyl’s eyes, anger flooding her chest and mind and mouth. She thrust her ungloved fist up to her mouth, pressing her teeth into the groove between her knuckles, keeping a scream of rage locked inside. What excuse could Harley possibly have, for gambling so recklessly? For worrying her? For drawing trouble to himself like this? Where was he?

Without warning the cab bounced over a hole of missing bricks in the road, rattling Sibyl in the backseat. The jolt caused her skin to tear on her teeth, and a coppery taste of blood touched her tongue. She scrambled to keep upright, hands hunting for purchase on the slick leather.

“Sorry, miss,” said the driver in the front seat, the cab’s progress smoothing.

Sibyl sagged against the backrest in the cab. She knew the strain was just from worry, rather than any physical exertion, but her energy drained away anyway, as though someone had opened a tap in one of her toes. The blood ebbed from her face, and the oily black haze rolled into the far corners of her vision again. Her mouth went dry, and Sibyl pressed a hand to her cheek to maintain consciousness.

“Excuse me,” she managed to say, voice thick with effort.

“Yes, miss?” drawled the driver, cocking an ear over his shoulder to catch her instructions.

“I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong address,” Sibyl said, pronouncing each word with care. The man nodded as she gave him a new house number, and then she reached up, unpinned her hat, and allowed her head to loll back against the seat, her eyes closed against the darkness.

The cab rolled up to the house on Beacon Hill, and the cabbie leaped out, leaving the engine running, to open the car door. Sibyl looked up at him, wan and grateful, and he helped her out of the car with surprising gentleness. She stood, unsteady, fingertips touching the roof of the car for balance.

“All right, then?” he asked, his face furrowing with concern. Sibyl was taken aback by this stranger’s noticing of her, his interest and concern. What was she, to him, beyond another anonymous face attached to a pocketbook?

“How kind of you,” Sibyl said, a phrase that fell often from her mouth, usually without much meaning behind it. Today, however, was different. “I’m perfectly well. Thank you.”

The man accepted his fare without another word, but tipped his hat as he withdrew.

Sibyl mounted the stairs of the town house where she had been—was it really only a day earlier? Impossible, but true. The door already stood open, the same butler standing motionless in the entry, as though carved out of wood and cunningly painted to imitate life.

Sibyl’s father found the keeping of a butler to be pretentious.
Stinks of New Yorkism
, he had remarked to her once. Sibyl wasn’t so sure; in a way, she thought it lent the house a certain continental panache. Helen certainly thought so. More than once Sibyl’s mother lobbied Lan that they should have a man to open the door.

“It’s so much nicer,” Helen insisted, in her usual opening salvo in the drawing room after supper. The last time Sibyl remembered them discussing it was the November before Helen’s fatal voyage with Eulah. The house in those days was seized by a months-long festival of preparation for Eulah’s debut, a heady blur of dress fittings, decoration, redecoration, calls paid and repaid. At night Sibyl more than once came across her little sister brushing her teeth in their shared lavatory, her feet moving automatically through the dance steps that were likely to be called at her cotillion, head nodding to imaginary music. Sibyl hadn’t practiced half so much, as Helen rarely failed to point out.

“Nicer than what?” Lan grumbled.

“Oh, you know,” Helen simpered, looking at her husband from under her lashes as her busy hands worked at their needlepoint. “It says something. About one’s standing.”

“I can stand just fine on my own, thank you very much.” At that point, Lan rose from his armchair by the fire and strode without another word to the inner drawing room. As he went, leaving behind his chuckling wife, her head shaking with resignation, he dug in his pocket for some crumbs to tempt Baiji, perched like a blue gnome on his hat rack. Sibyl had never known a man who could end conversations like her father.

Full of hope and trepidation, she looked up into the graven face of Mrs. Dee’s butler, whose name she still did not know, and wondered if he would admit her. These were not usual visiting hours, and she was not expected. Her card was already in her hand, ready to substitute for an audience with the medium if necessary. The butler’s eyes traveled down his nose and rested on Sibyl’s upturned, taut face. Without a word he stepped into the shadows of the entry hall, holding the door ajar.

Relieved of her coat and hat, Sibyl was shown into Mrs. Dee’s receiving room, where she held her Spiritualist meetings. It looked much the same, with its stuffed birds frozen in flight, their dead eyes watching. Sibyl moved, restless, knowing she should sit and wait with some composure, but helpless to keep still. The air was cloying, from years of incense seeping into the upholstery. Sibyl traced an idle finger along the sideboard, testing the texture of a pheasant wing, traveling through the dust on the walnut cabinet, creeping around delicate heaps of loose crystals. It stopped at the edge of a small box, open, lined with black velvet. The box cradled an opalescent orb of polished quartz, gleaming in the low light. Its smoothness invited Sibyl to pick it up.

“I’m not surprised you would be drawn to that,” a woman’s voice said from the parlor door, and Sibyl turned with a start.

There, her arms extended with hands resting on the doorjamb in an unusually sumptuous posture, stood Mrs. Dee, as small and stout as ever, clothed in a tapestry robe lined in ermine. A winter dressing gown, unseasonable and unfashionable, fastened all the way up to her round little chin. The medium brought her hands to toy with the fur at her throat as she moved into the room and seated herself in her Gothic throne.

Sibyl gawked before recovering herself. “I am so sorry to burst in on you like this,” she began, flustered by the woman’s taking her deliberately by surprise.

“It’s no trouble, for I knew you were coming,” Mrs. Dee interjected, raising her eyebrows with implied meaning. “I foresaw it.”

Pausing by the sideboard, Sibyl frowned against a glimmer of doubt. But Mrs. Dee looked so authoritative as she sat on her elevated armchair, hands folded in her lap.

“But I . . .” Sibyl started to protest, stopped by Mrs. Dee’s holding up of one bejeweled hand.

“Shhh. Come. Sit. Bring the orb, if you like.” She smiled and gestured with a sweep of her hand for Sibyl to take the armchair opposite her, by a low teak tea table.

Sibyl hesitated, then took up the small box and seated herself in the armchair indicated by the medium. She placed the box on the tea table, crossed her feet tight at her ankles, and straightened her posture. Sibyl wished for clarity with such keenness that it felt like an ache in her limbs. Speaking with Benton tied Sibyl up in knots, filling her with confusion and dread. She stared into the medium’s face, willing her to lift the horrible uncertainty away.

Mrs. Dee leaned forward and scooped the trinket out of the box, keeping it wrapped in its scrap of black velvet. She cradled the ball in her hands, a perfectly round egg in a nest of darkness. Mrs. Dee started to roll the ball to and fro, slowly at first, though the orb’s surface was so polished that it appeared motionless, its movement perceptible by the working of the medium’s hands, but not by any change along its surface.

“Now then,” Mrs. Dee began, her voice low. “You have nothing to worry about.”

Sibyl felt the skin of her face loosen. Mrs. Dee always knew what to say. Helen certainly thought so. Her mother consulted the medium on everything of import to their family. What day was best for Eulah’s first tea? Would everything go well with Lan’s latest investment? Helen always returned home from these conferences feeling more confident in whatever decision she had already made. Mrs. Dee’s signal strength, it seemed, was to reassure Helen that she was usually right. Sibyl felt herself settle into the embrace of the armchair, craving for her own sense of clarity to return.

“There,” Mrs. Dee suggested. “You’re much more comfortable now.”

Still the orb rolled in her palms, winking and beautiful. Sibyl yearned to touch it. She wished that Mrs. Dee would pass it to her. Sibyl’s eyes followed the ball, rolling, rolling, silent in the velvet.

“Perhaps you’d like to tell me what’s troubling you?” Mrs. Dee inquired.

Sibyl sighed with relief. She could never speak about her fears to anyone. Always, people observed her—her friends. Mrs. Doherty. Her father. Her brother. She had to perform for all of them, and none of them knew the dark corner of her heart, where her secret self dwelled afraid and alone. More alone now. Sibyl had taken the adventurous girl she had been and stuffed her into a box, hidden her away in a dark and cold place while her adult self bent to duty and expectation. She didn’t know where to begin. So many . . . There were . . . so . . .

Sibyl’s eyelids dropped halfway over her eyes, and she struggled to keep them from closing completely.

Blackness—they had closed after all.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Dee’s voice, insistent, breaking into Sibyl’s thoughts and wrenching her eyes open. “I sense that you are gravely worried.”

“Oh, Mrs. Dee, how right you are.” Sibyl sighed, her eyes traveling to the medium’s face.

“I know,” she soothed. Still the ball rolled, though Sibyl wasn’t watching it. Instead she searched Mrs. Dee’s impassive eyes, craving to be seen, to be shown how to unlock herself from the careworn woman that she had become.

“I don’t know what to do,” Sibyl said, voice catching in her throat.

“It’s a lot to bear,” Mrs. Dee agreed.

“I had no idea things were getting as bad with him as they seem to be,” she continued. “Because he never tells me anything. He used to, you know. When we were small. But he’s pulled away. First the problem at school, and there’s the question of debts. But then, Benton seems to think he understands what the trouble is.”

“And does he?” pressed Mrs. Dee, in a manner that seemed to suggest that she, herself, already knew, but was waiting for Sibyl to see it for herself.

“Perhaps. Perhaps he does. But I can’t believe it. Well, perhaps I can believe it, if I’m being truthful.” Sibyl brought a hand up to her forehead and massaged her eyebrow. Mrs. Dee waited.

“He’s been moving that way for some time. Even Papa sees it. But I’d have thought . . . that is, what Benton thinks, it can’t quite explain everything. Can it?”

Mrs. Dee fixed her with a small, knowing smile.

“Maybe,” the medium said after a time, “we can find out.” She nodded with authority to the butler, who had appeared in the parlor door at some point within the past several minutes, unobserved, and was lingering for instructions. He moved silently about the room, extinguishing lights, until just one old-fashioned oil lamp burned on the end table by Mrs. Dee’s well-upholstered elbow. Sibyl watched these preparations with a mixture of unease and excitement.

“Do you know what this is?” Mrs. Dee asked, holding the crystal, the pale color of skimmed milk, nestled in its velvet.

Sibyl wasn’t sure. It seemed as if it could only be what it was—a smallish, polished crystal ball, about the size of a chicken egg, if chicken eggs could ever be made perfectly round. And blue.

“I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” she said, feeling foolish, then adding, “It’s very pretty.” She still wished that Mrs. Dee would pass it to her. Her fingers craved its touch.

“This, my dear, is a very particular tool of mine. We use it to see pictures of things beyond the normal powers of vision. It’s especially adept at revealing the true nature of things within the past, and of unlocking the secrets of the human soul. It is, Miss Allston, a scrying glass.”

Sibyl had never encountered such a strange word before. It sounded to her like
crying
—a crying glass. At this unwelcome suggestion Sibyl felt a prickling sensation within her nose, the heated hard crumpling of her cheeks. No, she must push that feeling away. She couldn’t start weeping in Mrs. Dee’s parlor. Granted, in the years she had been attending the séances Sibyl had overheard much behavior that was not accepted in drawing rooms. But somehow that was different; they were all shielded by the darkness of the room, and by the assured silence of their collective weaknesses. She couldn’t bear to think she might break down in Mrs. Dee’s closely observing presence, alone.

“Why, Mrs. Dee,” Sibyl said, fighting through the prickling with a forced smile. “Whatever can you mean?”

“
Scry
is a rather outmoded word,” Mrs. Dee said, in the tone of a schoolteacher delivering a lesson. “We oftentimes find we must resort to older words, even to describe new phenomena, for our modern age sadly lacks the language necessary to speak of the world beyond normal perception. It’s a pity that the world of science fails to interest itself more fully in the work that we’re doing.”

Mrs. Dee shook her head, mourning over what a pity it was. Sibyl was confused; Professor Friend’s group had been active in Boston for some time, investigating human potential along scientific principles. Sibyl had assumed that Mrs. Dee knew this, and wished to keep herself a secret from them. But at least Mrs. Dee wouldn’t disapprove of her earlier indiscretion.

“It means,” Mrs. Dee continued, “to consult a reflective surface in hopes of revealing images beyond our ken. The reflective surface can be most anything. Some use mirrors, painted black. Some use little dishes of oil dropped in water. I’ve even heard that in earlier days, they’d break an egg into a glass of water, and use the egg white for divining. How clever of them, don’t you agree? But by far the most effective, all the books suggest, is a polished ball of pure crystal. Like this one.”

Sibyl returned her eyes to the beautiful toy in Mrs. Dee’s hands. Its surface shone almost mirrorlike, now that most of the lights had been extinguished. The orb caught the oil lamp’s glimmer, gathering the small light within itself, and returning the light to its surface in a smattering of spangles, like tiny stars in a miniature firmament.