The House of Velvet and Glass (19 page)

“Oh!” Sibyl gasped, turning in her seat. She was met with the sleep-rumpled face of Benton Derby. His tie was askew, as though pulled on and knotted in the dark, and his suit jacket was a subtly different pattern of tweed from his pants, donned without a second look to see if they matched. His cheeks were shadowed with stubble, and his hair stood up in bristles, giving him the comic aspect of an awakened hedgehog. Without meaning to Sibyl smiled, both in pleasure at his presence and at seeing the junior professor in an unguarded moment, a window through his reserve into what she imagined his private self might look like.

“Had the damnedest time getting a cab,” he grumbled, hand still resting on her shoulder. “I would’ve been here sooner, otherwise.”

“But it’s so good of you to come,” she countered, smiling up at him with relief. He moved to take the seat next to her, hand traveling with a light touch down her sleeve to rest on her forearm. The gesture surprised her with its intimacy. Sibyl was aware of Dovie watching their exchange from behind her cigarette. She crossed her legs at the knee, bobbing a foot, saying nothing.

“And may I present Miss Whistler, Harley’s . . . that is, she was . . .” Sibyl trailed off, gesturing to Dovie with a helpless hand.

“Of course. How do you do.” Benton nodded in the girl’s direction, too casually, without bothering to stand. Dovie accepted the acknowledgment with a nod, an impression of a polite smile flitting across her face and then vanishing. The cigarette found her mouth, and her eyes narrowed as she drew the smoke into her lungs.

“I came directly here,” he continued, as if the introduction had not taken place. “So I haven’t had a chance to make inquiries yet. Is there any news?”

Sibyl shook her head. “Papa’s in with him now, but I’m not sure he’s awake enough to talk. We still don’t know what really happened.”

“Well, he’ll have to be soon enough.” A shadow crossed Benton’s face as he glanced at his pocket watch before tucking it back into his vest pocket. Sibyl noticed that the vest was of another competing pattern of tweed, and wrinkled enough to suggest that it had been retrieved off the back of a chair. Her mouth twisted into a smile before she quashed it with an expression of seriousness sufficient to the situation.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “He needs to rest. He could’ve been killed.”

“Just so,” Benton agreed. “All the more reason he’ll have to give a full account of what happened to the police.”

“Police!” Dovie burst. Sibyl and Benton swiveled their eyes in her direction, watching her, but rather than adding anything to her outburst she pulled her gaze away, busying herself with the folds of her dress.

“But of course,” Sibyl said after a pause. “I didn’t think.”

“I phoned them before leaving my rooms,” Benton continued. “They’ll be here within the hour. In fact, I thought they might even beat me here.”

Without warning Dovie stood, wandering back to the casement windows. The darkness outside meant that all she could see in the glass would be the multipaned reflections of her own ravaged face. Benton’s and Sibyl’s eyes followed her as she moved, and then turned wordlessly to each other.

His eyebrows knit together in inquiry. Sibyl shook her head and then gave the barest hint of a shrug.

Later
, Benton mouthed. Sibyl nodded.

They sat that way for a while longer, Sibyl couldn’t quite be sure how long, though her fingers twitched for the enameled watch at her waist. Voices came and went in the hallway. Dovie loitered by the window, back vibrating with tension, not making any further attempt to engage them in conversation. Sibyl’s gaze traveled from the point of baby-fine hair at the nape of Dovie’s neck, along the tiled waiting room floor, up the tweed pant legs extended from the chair next to her, to Benton’s hands folded in his lap, one of his thumbs toying with the skin of the back of the opposite hand. There were short hairs on his knuckles, and Sibyl’s eyes settled there, absorbed in the texture of his skin.

Time trickled to a stop while they waited.

Without turning around, Dovie sighed and said, “He was so gentle with Harley, you know? Your father. I wasn’t sure if coming to get him was the right thing to do. But he was so kind, when he came with me back to the boardinghouse. I was out of my mind, I was so afraid. So much blood. But he held Harley in his arms, smoothing his hair, telling him it would be all right while we waited for the ambulance.
Don’t be afraid
, he said.
You’ll be all right this time
. I knew it was the right thing. Coming to you all.”

Sibyl, surprised, was about to press Dovie further when the door to the waiting room opened and admitted the stooping form of Lan Allston.

Interlude

Outside the International Settlement
Shanghai
June 8, 1868

Lannie’s feet flopped at the end of his legs, the compress against his jaw warm and sticky with blood, trying to follow the dark shoulders of the young scholar, his queue swinging as he strode through the crowd. Lannie blinked, not clear where in the city he was, hurrying to catch up with the young man at an intersection thick with wheelbarrow pushers, carriages, and a cow.

“Hey,” Lannie said, attempting conversation. The scholar did not turn. Instead he bounded across the street, ducking around other pedestrians. Lannie scrambled behind him, desperate to keep up.

What should he do now? He didn’t speak the language, though it seemed that the
lingua franca
of Shanghai was broken English, scrambled grammar interspersed with words in Chinese. The neighborhood around them morphed into a sedate Second Empire quarter, with brick avenues and elegant shop fronts, and Lannie heard snatches of rapid-fire French.

As he trotted behind the scholar Lannie attempted to reason with himself. He could get along speaking good, clear English, if he had to. He felt in his coat pocket for the wad of bills secreted there. He’d grown up in a port town. He could make his way back, he felt certain. Find a place to berth for the night. Sort everything out.

The scholar, as if overhearing Lannie’s thoughts, glanced over his shoulder at the boy. “It hurt much?” he asked.

“As a matter of fact,” Lannie slurred through the congealing blood in his mouth, “it does. Like you wouldn’t believe.”

The young man laughed. “You’d be surprised what I’d believe,” he said, plucking at Lannie’s sleeve to get him moving.

“Where are we going?” Lannie asked.

“You’ll see,” the young man said. “Got to know where to go, or you’ll end up in some stinking sampan on the Huangpu, paying a trollop for a little
tangchai
that’d disgust even a sedan-chair carrier.”

Lannie recoiled until he saw that the scholar was smiling.

“Wait,” Lannie protested. “Tell me your name, at least.”

“I’d sooner cut out my tongue than hear my family name in a filthy barbarian mouth,” the scholar bellowed. But Lannie could tell he was being teased.

“Oh, come on,” Lannie protested. “I lost a tooth, for Christ’s sake.” The blasphemy felt good on his tongue. He grinned, knowing his teeth to be stained red.

The scholar shook his head. “Too hard for you. Unless you’ve got Shanghainese I don’t know about.” The young man paused. “Let’s say it’s Johnny. That’ll do.”

He stuck out a hand, in mimicry of hearty Americanism, and Lannie took it. The man’s grip was strong and dry.

“Lan,” he said, and their hands pumped once.

“
Lan
,” Johnny repeated, sarcastic. “I do speak English, you know. No need to make up some fake Chinese name on my account.”

“It’s a nickname,” Lannie replied, confused. “For Harlan. My father’s also called Harlan, so they gave me a nickname for simplicity’s sake.”

He felt foolish explaining, more so when he saw that Johnny, or whatever his name was, had immediately lost interest in the intricacies of New England naming traditions.

After a time, Lannie began to understand where they were headed. His knowledge of the city was schematic, assembled from anecdotes spun on shipboard as they neared port, and so skewed with hyperbole and misunderstanding. From those piecemeal accounts he knew that the old center of the city was shuttered with dense fortifications that once wound through the entire countryside. Now, at the end of a narrow alleyway festooned with lanterns and drying laundry, they met an imposing stone wall.

“Nanshi,” the scholar said. “The walled city. Come on.”

The trailing end of a drying sheet brushed over the top of Lannie’s head as he passed beneath it. The wall before them stretched up into the sky, as oblivious to the passage of time as a sheer cliff face, or as the ocean itself.

“Three hundred years old,” Johnny said proudly in response to Lannie’s wordless gape.

Lannie felt himself to have come from an old place. Salem was a long-memoried town, its streets stalked by ghosts. As a boy his mother told him of witches who liked to fillet disobedient children, and even though he knew she was spinning fairy stories he nevertheless grew up with the weight of past generations on his shoulders. He carried the burden of tradition with a mixture of pride and disquiet, or even resentment. Every choice bore the implied judgment of these ancestors he never knew, whose memory must not be sullied, whose expectations for him must not be let down. At times Lannie bristled that his future must be given over to maintaining the supposed honor of the past. At other times, that sense of honor provided him with welcome clarity.

Nothing in Salem approached this wall for age and majesty, which protected old Shanghai from the incursions of the new. There were a few old-fashioned houses, of course, inhabited by poorer people, crowded together in their darkness and dampness, the stench of two hundred years’ worth of mice and sweat and woodsmoke and whitewash. But when New England was still a wilderness, this wall was already over a hundred years old. Lannie felt small and insignificant before it, a passing rill on an otherwise unbroken stream of time.

“A model settlement!” Johnny exclaimed, a sarcastic echo of the British term for Shanghai. Behind the wall Lannie spied the silhouettes of peaked pagodas, curled at the corners like dried leaves.

“Now,” Johnny said. “We attend to your jaw.”

Lannie thought that he would just as soon present his shattered tooth to the ship’s surgeon than some strange doctor with foul-smelling herbs and terrifying needles. He smiled, trying to convince Johnny to forget it.

“It’s nothing. Really.”

“Ha, ha,” the scholar said, speaking the words rather than laughing them. “Come on.”

The two young men wended their way to the center of the walled city district. They passed a squatting row of artists executing placid, if nearly identical, landscapes. Lannie brightened, wondering if he should pick one up as a gift for his mother—a lark, maybe, or a mountain range. Then he remembered that a scroll rather like these, dried and yellowed, hung in the pantry of the house on Chestnut Street, a souvenir brought back by his father when he and Lannie’s mother were young.

“Johnny,” Lannie said.

“Mmmmm?” he answered without looking around.

“How is it you speak such good English?” Lannie asked.

The scholar glared over his shoulder, and Lannie backed away, attempting to cover his mistake. “I mean, that I would think . . . that is . . .”

“My profession.” The young man cut him off.

“But what’s your profession?”

Johnny stopped, rolled his eyes heavenward, and pinched the bridge of his nose between a forefinger and thumb. “I’m a translator,” he said. “If you think my English is good, you should hear my Latin.”

“Latin?” Lannie exclaimed. “Who do you translate for?”

“Anyone who’ll pay,” Johnny said. “But these days, the American Heritage Bible Mission.”

“You’re a Christian, then!” Lannie was surprised, and curious.

“Stupid,” the scholar muttered. But he didn’t answer.

Before long they arrived at a street that Johnny called Xuexiang Lane, a modest quarter of shop fronts and shuttered houses. The street crawled with painted women, leaning in doorways, beckoning, their eyes flat under the red lantern glow. Fingertips trailed over Lannie’s shoulders as he passed, and his hands thrust deeper into his pockets. He still hadn’t taken his coat off, despite the sheen of sweat at his hairline and on the downy fuzz of his upper lip. Inside his coat, he felt safer.

“How do you like the ten thousand flowers?” Johnny asked. “There aren’t really ten thousand of them, you know. Or at least, I don’t think there are.”

“Is that what you call this?” Lannie asked, his eyes sliding by an older, haggard woman sitting on a doorstep, her arms folded, meeting them with a glare as they passed.

“Pssshhh, this isn’t what we’re here for,” the scholar said, waving his hand in dismissal. “The
changsan
in Madam’s house would never stoop to address these
yao’er
.”

“Changsan?”
Lannie asked.

“Long three,” Johnny translated. Then, with a wicked smile, he added, “It’s from the mah-jongg tile.” He laughed, and Lannie, not understanding why this was funny, smiled and nodded his head.