The House of Velvet and Glass (16 page)

Lan Allston just folded his arms.

For a moment nothing happened. Sibyl turned to face her father, looking for her own shock to be reflected in his weathered face.

But he only frowned, and said, “Frankly, I’m surprised she had the nerve to come here.”

Interlude

North Atlantic Ocean
Outward Bound
April 14, 1912

Eulah Allston glanced back over her shoulder as Harry Widener steered her deeper into the throng of dancers at the end of the gallery. Her mother was stretching up in her chair, hands clasped in her lap, eyebrows raised, watching them go. Eulah rolled her eyes. She wished Helen wouldn’t look so eager all the time. With her neck stretched up like that Eulah thought she looked like a chicken, her wattle quivering, all eager and watchful. Not that Eulah had much experience with chickens. But her mother sometimes had the ridiculousness and vanity of a chicken, her dyed hair teased like glistening feathers on top of her head. Annoyed, she let Harry’s pressure at her waist carry her behind a sheltering screen of other dancers. She tossed her head back and looked up at him with lidded eyes, smiling.

“You were telling me about that book,” she prompted, wishing to impress him with her seriousness. “
Le Sang de Morphée
.”

In her quick observations of Harry Widener, Eulah had already concluded that he would be most drawn to a woman who could keep up with his interests. Some men enjoyed being given private windows into the world of women—hearing about dress fittings, maybe, or gossiping about people known in common. They liked to see into women, while staying separate from them. But Harry, she could tell, was different. Frippery would not suffice. Harry might indulge a woman, but he would never find an indulged woman interesting.

“Oh, that,” he said. “It’s a kind of storybook. Very rare. Remarkable engravings. A travelogue, something like Coleridge, or the story of the lotus-eaters in the
Odyssey.
Terribly sordid. A proper girl like you would never like it.”

She grinned, enjoying that he would tell her about his prized discovery. Eulah had never been able to talk books with any real authority. Not the way Sibyl could, anyway. In fact, Sibyl could talk books entirely too much for most men. Her older sister had never learned what came to Eulah by instinct, which was that the surest way to convince a man that you were a fascinating creature was to ask him all about himself.

At the thought of Sibyl, Eulah felt a twinge of guilt. Sibyl had so wanted to come with them on the tour. And in a way, Eulah had wanted her to come, too. She felt more confident when Sibyl was there. She managed to be both more reasonable than their mother, and more adventuresome, too. Sibyl would have gone to the cafés with her, no matter how late the hour, and would have loved the carriage rides through the Bois as much as she did. But the money, it really was outrageous. She had overheard her parents discussing the matter—not arguing, as one didn’t argue in the Allston house—late at night, after their children were assumed to be asleep. Eulah, nervous and excited to learn her father’s decision, had crept to her mother’s bedroom door and pressed her ear to the keyhole, listening.

“Have you any idea what four thousand dollars can buy?” her father thundered. “Why, I’d just as soon marry her to a lawyer and build the two of them a house, for that price. And a pretty fine one, for that matter.”

“Now, Lannie,” her mother countered, in her most reasonable tone. “Don’t be so hasty. Just consider who she’d be likely to meet, though. Just once in a lifetime will so many quality people be all gathered together like that. It’ll be in all the papers. Wouldn’t it be worth the expense, to see her settled?”

“Hmmph,” Lan Allston grunted.

“You can afford it, if you set your mind to it.”

“Afford!” he protested. “And even if I could, why wouldn’t we spend the money on Sibyl? She’s the eldest. Don’t you think she might like to see Paris?”

“My dear, I know how you feel about it. But you must acknowledge,” his wife insisted, dropping her voice to show she was serious. “Eulah’s got the best chance.”

When Eulah heard that, she knew with a sinking in her stomach that Sibyl’s fate was sealed. Her sister’s moment was past. Sibyl’d had such a good opportunity, too. For a time, in 1911, even
Town Topics
had whispered in its circumspect way that an engagement was imminent. Opinions differed on the likeliest candidate, but the gossip magazine cast the most popular lot: “Which hyphenated shipping company is likely to have to change its name before the year is out? Maybe they’ll get a break on the new letterhead if they order the invitations there, too.”

All that year Eulah had watched Sibyl’s comings and goings with mounting excitement, waiting poised behind potted palmettos at dances and peering over staircase banisters, not wanting to miss it when it happened. There were a few others, Leonard Coombs most notably, but after a time he receded, and they were always together, Benton and Sibyl, always whispering and laughing. And then Eulah noticed that Lydia Pusey girl loitering on the periphery, with her fragile skin and that tubercular pallor that some men find appealing. She played the part of the romantic invalid with great aplomb, but Eulah wasn’t fooled. She saw the mechanism turning in the girl’s eye.

Damn that Lydia.

“Don’t you think she’s around an awful lot?” Eulah ventured to Sibyl in their lavatory one night, each girl wiping cream under her eyes. “I never used to see her at all, and then suddenly she’s everywhere.”

“I think it’s nice people are including her,” Sibyl said brightly. “She never used to be well enough to go to parties, you know.”

“Hmmm,” Eulah said, looking at Sibyl out of the corner of her eye. Her sister. Always too trusting. And not forthright enough. Did Benton even know how much she doted on him? Eulah would never play it so coy.

And then, nothing. Invitations for Sibyl dwindled. Eulah saw the disappointment in their mother’s face, which quickly morphed into fresh, anxious attention paid to Eulah. Suddenly Helen was after her about her hats, was discovered rummaging through her wardrobe and flinging away outmoded things. And something seemed to change in Sibyl, too. Some of the verve seemed to go out of her. But not even in the late confidential hours with the two of them alone, Eulah brushing out the waves in Sibyl’s hair, had Sibyl let slip what fatal mistake she had made that had condemned herself to spinsterhood.

Eulah felt a little strange, or disloyal, being the focal point of all of Helen’s aspirations. She supposed her siblings’ paths were already well plotted out, though. Harlan, just starting college, would finish with undistinguished grades but with some good social contacts, and would step into a position of responsibility in their father’s shipping company. He’d marry, eventually, maybe one of those small-town horsey girls from out west who’d taken to showing up at fashionable eastern watering places, looking to merge their new money with a respectable old name. Sibyl would stay at home, caring for their parents as they aged, gradually assuming the running of the household. Probably even staying on in that role when Harley’s equine-faced wife proved too absorbed in her committee work and charity amusements to be bothered with things like keeping the house going, or raising the children.

And Eulah herself ? She sighed. Well, she supposed her mother had her plans. Eulah’d never really been one for plans herself. She could push aside the schemes her mother was weaving around her, the moves she was no doubt masterminding back at the dining table next to Harry’s mother. Eulah was here now. The music was exquisite. Through her feet she felt the ship’s mighty engines rumbling under the deck of the ocean liner, felt the warmth of Harry’s hand on her body. She leaned her weight deeper onto his shoulder, watching the bright dress of the women swaying near them, brushing against them, and the flickering of the candlelight. Around her, laughter and music merged into a splendid cacophony of pleasure.

“You’re a marvelous dancer,” Harry said, breaking into her reverie, and she felt his voice vibrate deep in his chest as he pressed her nearer to him.

“I’d better be.” She grinned. “All those cotillions. If I weren’t, you can bet Mother’d want her money back.”

Harry laughed, moving his hand from her waist to the small of her back. He was a pretty good dancer himself, actually. Better than she expected. Bookworms usually weren’t much in the dance department. She cast an appraising look up at his face from under the netting of her hat, which he affected not to notice. Better-looking than your usual bookworm, too. She hesitated, and then rested her cheek back against his shoulder, letting him lead.

Inside his chest, she could feel him humming in tune with the music.

“Are you melancholy?” he asked.

“Me? Why, no. Quite the opposite, in fact. Why do you ask?” she murmured.

“The tune,” he said. “I wonder if you could be my melancholy baby.” He sang softly along with the music as they swayed, and she felt his voice deep in his throat as he held her.

A wave of pleasure began at the top of her head, washing down her body in cascades. Her arms broke out in goose bumps, and she shivered. “Perhaps.” She sighed, smiling into his dinner jacket. “Perhaps I could be.”

Eulah let her eyes drift closed and tried to pretend that her mother wasn’t surveilling them from across the room.

Chapter Eight

Massachusetts General Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts
April 17, 1915

The first sensation was pain. Vague and difficult to locate or explain, but pain it was, and Harley met it with a strange detachment. It suffused his body like a heat, or—because heat wasn’t quite right—encompassed him as though the pain were a pool of salt water, wrapping around his body, supporting it, moving along him in waves. Harley could not ascertain where his physical self ended and the pain began. Harley heard someone whimper, a frightened animal sound, and to his horror realized that the whimper emanated from his own mouth.

He tried to shift and found that his body ended after all, met by the pressure of a cot with a thin, sagging mattress. Each point of contact brought him closer to consciousness as the pain fractured apart, concentrated first down the side of his ribs, inserted into his flesh like a railroad spike, next stretching in a web across his face. Harlan attempted to open his eyes. A tiny crack of light penetrated the darkness, and Harlan winced, realizing that his eyes were open as much as they were able. The flesh of his face was swollen, his eyelashes glued together with a dried crust of blood.

Harley groaned, letting the sound pour out of him in a shuddering wave. The stabbing in his side twisted deeper, and Harley’s groan deepened out of shame.

“Shhhhhh,” a soft female voice soothed, and Harley felt a cooling sensation on his swollen eyes as someone placed a moist cloth over his face. Discovering that he wasn’t alone with his weakness and failure, Harley felt the shame tighten its grip. Another groan fought to come out, but he clenched his jaw against it. The cool cloth passed over his eyelids and then wiped gently along his cheeks and jaw. It brushed his lip, sending a jolt of fresh pain through the muscles of his face.