The House of Velvet and Glass (15 page)

“I know it,” Sibyl said, resigned. “Though I’m hoping it’ll shake out soon enough.”

“Shake out!” he father barked, lowering the paper just enough for her to catch his cool eye, flashing under a graying fringe of eyebrow. “With nothing holding down the western front but a sorry lot of colonials? And
Belgians
?”

“Oh,” Sibyl said, recovering herself. She turned away from the eye gazing at her over the paper and pretended to busy herself with the parrot. “No, of course not,” she said, her back to him, abashed that she had misunderstood. “I suppose you’re right.”

Her father lowered the newspaper farther to reveal the other icy eye. “You’re referring to something different, I take it,” he stated. Usually conversations between Lan and Sibyl began in the middle, both being aware what the other was thinking.

Sibyl sighed and moved to the armchair opposite him. He was seated in his Greek revival seat, its sturdy wooden swoops seemingly designed with Lan’s specific body in mind. His legs were stretched out toward the fire. When she glanced at her father’s face, Sibyl found that he was wearing the cordial expression of a man who is not easily surprised. She didn’t see that face very often anymore.

“How was supper?” she asked, lamely.

“Bah,” he said, bringing the paper to eye level again with a rustle. “Stopped in to Locke-Ober. I fancied some proper lobster bisque.” He arched his eyebrow at his daughter, who chuckled in recognition.

“I’m not sure Betty’ll ever forgive you,” she remarked, leaning back into the armchair and letting her head rest against its wing. Some years ago, near the beginning of her tenure at 138½ Beacon Street, Betty Gallagher, wishing to impress her new employers with her skill and economy, made a lobster bisque from shellfish given to her, Sibyl discovered later during a confidential, weepy moment in the kitchen garden, by a young man she met at a dance hall. A present, he’d said, though she hadn’t known where he had gotten it, as the man himself had not been a lobsterman. Betty claimed he told her it had fallen off the back of a truck.

Sibyl always enjoyed hearing what little Betty would share of her evening exploits, which consisted of making the rounds of moving picture shows, vaudeville revues, and the occasional night out dancing with other young women who, Sibyl gathered, Betty knew from her parish. Betty’s origins were mysterious, to the Allstons at least. Sibyl knew that their young cook lived a complex and multipeopled life outside of the kitchen garden, though its specific contours were kept well obscured—certainly from Lan, and they had been from Helen as well. At any event, the lobster turned out to have been relieved by the dance hall boy from the castoffs of a local restaurant, and Betty was too besotted by his handsome, well-made face to care. Betty had an unfortunate tendency to let beautiful male faces distract her from her better judgment. Her error, in this case, had sent the entire household to bed for three days with what Lan persisted in calling “the bloody flux,” to her mother’s horror.

Helen responded to the crisis with decisiveness, placing an unequivocal ban on all future lobster dishes, which she insisted was preferable anyway, as lobster was common, and none of the good people ate it anymore. Helen used to carry in her mind the judgments of an invisible panel of social approval, to which she was in the habit of submitting everyday household decisions. Lobster failed. The family caved to her decree, to Lan’s dismay, for lobster simply prepared with drawn butter and rice was one of his favorite dishes. Though Helen herself was vanished from the household, her dictum remained, and Lan could satisfy his longing for lobster only through subterfuge.

“What about you?” her father asked, folding his newspaper and laying it to the side. “Did you manage to scratch something together for your own supper? Here I was worried about leaving you alone, and instead I find you’ve been out on some mysterious business of your own design. We’re risking upsetting the staff, you know.” He gazed on her with indulgent kindness, and Sibyl smiled.

“Not at all mysterious,” Sibyl said, sidestepping the question of her own supper, whatever it might have been. Or whether it had been at all. “I was repaying some calls, and lost myself so thoroughly in conversation that the hour quite escaped me.”

“Hmmmm,” Lan Allston said, leaning a weathered cheek on one fist.

The firelight played over his sparkling eyes, long nose like her own, grayed overlong sideburns, narrow mouth, and for a moment Sibyl could see the outline of the face her father must have had as a young man. The angle of the shadows in the inner drawing room made Lan look as if the youth he had been was still locked somewhere inside the form of the worthy gentleman who was her father. A smile played about his mouth, as though he were about to call her out on something, as he used to do when she was a child. No, the candles weren’t being stolen by thieves in the night—they were being burned by a young girl up late reading novels. No, Helen’s scarf wasn’t lost—it was stained with ink from a young girl’s blotting a letter. Sibyl sometimes forgot how well her father could see past her subterfuges. She twisted her hands together in her lap, failing to elaborate on her whereabouts. He watched her, and she knew that he was weighing whether or not to press her further.

“You know,” her father remarked, never taking his eyes from his daughter, “I was always sorry we didn’t see too much of Benton Derby after his marriage.”

Sibyl’s mouth twitched into an involuntary smile of its own and settled down again. “Well, they traveled abroad so soon after,” she remarked, not meeting his gaze. “For her health.”

“Mmmmmm. So they did.”

She waited.

“You saw quite a bit of him, for a while there, if I remember correctly,” he ventured.

“I suppose so,” Sibyl said, giving away nothing. Her father watched her.

“I was always glad to’ve been in business with his father. They’re sober people,” he tried again.

“They are,” Sibyl agreed.

Silence settled between the two sober Allstons. The fire popped.

“He seemed most concerned about your brother, when he telephoned today,” Lan continued, watching for her reaction.

“Yes,” she said, her voice coming out almost as a squeak, but not quite. “As a matter of fact, he’s one of the friends on whom I called today. For that very reason.”

“So he mentioned,” Lan said, smiling out of one side of his mouth. She was caught. “I’d like to have called on him myself, as a matter of fact. No idea he’d even returned from Italy.”

“I may have heard something from Harley,” Sibyl said, wrapping her hands around her opposite elbows to hide her embarrassment at being seen through. “That Benton was back.”

“And how is he? A professor now, he said.”

She paused, considering. “He looks older.”

Her father nodded, his cheek resting on his fist. “Widower, can have that effect, you know,” he murmured, gazing into the hearth under lidded eyes.

In the corner, on the hat rack, Baiji stretched his wings out like a well-fed hawk and then settled them along his back.

For a time the two sat in quiet, each thinking his and her own private thoughts. Sibyl wondered what Benton had said to her father. Perhaps he had found out from the school why Harlan was asked to leave before the semester was over. She sensed the moment she set foot in the house that her brother hadn’t returned from wherever it was that he had fled after St. Swithin’s. The town house was too quiet, too dull, too lacking in the thrumming energy that emanated from Harlan.

She glanced at her father and saw a scintilla of pain contort Lan’s features for a passing moment, before melting back into his skin. He didn’t move, but the residue of pain was palpable in his expression. She frowned.

“Did you have your medicine today?” she asked, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees. He sometimes forgot. More rarely, he might refuse. Lan could be stubborn.
Pigheaded
was Helen’s word when she was cross with him. His rheumatism was more acute when the seasons changed. His doctor kept them supplied with a tonic for the pain and nerves, but every few years he would try to go without it.

“Hm?” he grunted. “Oh, yes. Earlier.”

She folded her arms over her chest, doubtful. But his eyes were lowering under the warmth of the hearth fire, drowsing. It was hardly worth the argument. Sibyl settled back into the armchair, turning her face to the fire.

“It’s good, you go to those things,” her father’s voice whispered. “Good for you, I think. I worry. Sometimes.”

Surprised, Sibyl smiled, but said nothing.

The mantel clock ground out a sigh before it began to chime midnight, its tones sweet and jewel-like in the silent house. One. Two. Three . . .

Sibyl counted each chime as it passed, reflecting that in doing so she could feel the slippage of time as it drifted away from her like a paper boat on a slow river. The clock chimed, and she felt herself floating as well, borne along on the heavy wave of time as she sat in the comfortable inner drawing room of her father’s town house.

On the eighth
pling
of the mantel clock, Sibyl and Lan both started bolt upright in their chairs. Voices burst into the front hallway—an argument. Baiji let out a protesting squawk at the commotion. Shouting. A door slammed.

In an instant Sibyl was on her feet and pulling aside the pocket doors with a rattle of lacquered wood against metal. The toe of her boot snagged the velvet carpet while she dashed through the front parlor, and she stumbled, catching herself with a barked elbow on the credenza. At the collision a crystal candlestick on top of the credenza wavered, wavered, wavered, and tumbled over in an exploding starburst of shattered glass.

The voices grew louder, one of them Mrs. Doherty, agitated, protective, imperious, but Sibyl didn’t recognize the other one, the angry one, and she fumbled at the latch to the door separating the front parlor from the hall, her fingers clumsy with haste. She couldn’t see; the latch was engulfed in shadow, and her fingers tripped over the mechanism in the dark, refusing to obey. The lights in the front parlor were all extinguished, and Sibyl squinted in the darkness, bent over, her face lit in relief by the single bar of light from under the hall door.

“I will see them! You can’t stop me seeing them!” the unfamiliar voice insisted, shrill and panicky.

Sibyl swore under her breath as she jostled the door, trying to force the latch open. Finally the catch gave. She hauled the door open with a grunt and stood, arms splayed, her heart pressing into her ribs, a ribbon of hair loosened from her bun, her breath coming in short anxious bursts.

Sibyl’s eye fell first on Mrs. Doherty, the housekeeper’s face a taut confusion of panic, irises ringed in white, still in her black taffeta uniform, peaked hat thrown askew, hands thrust out. The front door was flung open, its yawning mouth breathing a blistering breeze from outside. Standing in the doorway, framed by the dim glow of the streetlights burning through the mist, arms raised to fend off the housemaid, was a woman Sibyl had never seen before in her life.

She was young, younger than Sibyl, but the youthful curves of her face had been roughened somehow. Her form was compact, small, slim, square shoulders, her face heart shaped, with a turned-up nose, a mouth reddened to the shape of a tiny bow, and hypnotic bottle green eyes. The skin under her eyes was purpled, and her eyelashes were damp. Her skin looked sallow, pale not only from lack of sun and air but also from ill use, for its texture was fragile where it should have been flush. Her hair formed a frizzy halo of pale blond, bobbed to her jawline, leaving exposed a creamy expanse of neck. She was dressed in a long, loose tunic of vermilion silk over a black silk underskirt, hemmed to midcalf, with elegant heeled black boots. The tunic hung from her shoulders in a luscious column, gathered at the waist with a black satin sash. But it wasn’t the woman’s dress that seized Sibyl’s attention.

It was the deep, browning splash of blood soaking into the silk.

In shock, Sibyl’s lips parted, but no sound came out. She registered that Mrs. Doherty’s mouth was moving, she was saying, “I tried not to let ’er in, I said she mustn’t—”

At the same time the strange woman herself was wailing, and before Sibyl could understand what was happening she had twisted free of Mrs. Doherty’s grasp, bounded across the room, and flung herself into Sibyl’s arms, clutching with her fingernails at Sibyl’s blouse and waist, her breath hot on Sibyl’s cheek. The woman—or girl, she was nearly still a girl—had a strange smell about her, something like the incense in Mrs. Dee’s parlor, but spicier, and Sibyl recoiled from her grasp.

“You must come, you must,” the crazed stranger insisted, twisting her fingers in the linen of Sibyl’s shirtwaist. Her grip was strong, wiry little arms under her yards of silk, and Sibyl felt their desperate pressure before Mrs. Doherty was there, wrenching her hands between the girl’s arms and Sibyl’s ribs, pulling, the three of them roiling while the girl screamed, “Listen to me! You must listen!”

“Enough!”

The word was bellowed from behind Sibyl, and the struggle ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The girl’s grip loosened, and Mrs. Doherty jerked her away from Sibyl by the shoulders, more roughly than would have seemed possible for the aging housekeeper. The girl stood, panting, gasping for breath, the bloodstain on her tunic deepening to a hideous burnt brown-black.

Lan Allston, drawn up to his full height, stepped out on deliberate feet from the shadows of the front drawing room. He cast a slow eye over his daughter, assessing for damage, and upon finding none turned to the struggling girl, Mrs. Doherty still holding her in an iron grip. The housekeeper’s face showed fear and motherly panic, and the girl was spitting and fighting like a cornered cat.

“You must listen!” the girl burst. “They’re going to kill him!”

Sibyl gasped, horrified. Benton said her brother owed money to some clubmen, more than he could pay. His debts must have been mounting for longer than she had imagined. Rather than tell their father, he must have borrowed from some street criminal. With his recent losses, he couldn’t repay the loan. So he hadn’t run away to hide from the family after all. He’d been waylaid and beaten within an inch of his life. The color drained from Sibyl’s cheeks as she realized the true depth of her brother’s depravity.