The House of Velvet and Glass (20 page)

“
Changsan
deserve respect. These”—he flicked his fingertips at a woman of indeterminate years leaning in a doorway, one sallow shoulder peeking out from within folds of silk—“these, you just pay. Not for us. And anyway, there’s your jaw to think of.”

Lannie brought a hand up to his cheek at the mention of it, abashed that his injury wasn’t escaping notice. His lip felt pulpy, and the sharp pain had receded, leaving a throbbing ache. Some whiskey would help. Did they drink whiskey in the old quarter of Shanghai?

He was on the point of posing this question when Johnny stopped before a low wooden door, hung overhead with a prettily lettered banner. The scholar caught Lannie by the shoulder.

“Here,” Johnny said. “A
huayanjian
. Good for your jaw, good for your mind.” He wagged a cautionary finger under the boy’s nose. “There’ll be girls here, too. But I don’t recommend it. That’s not why we came.”

Lannie swallowed, uncertain. The door looked like the mouth of a cavern leading into subterranean worlds. He felt as if he were standing aside, observing himself. He’d had the same disembodied sensation when being photographed at the new studio on Tremont, buttoned into his school suit, conscious that he must not move a muscle, driven to distraction by roaming itches that appeared first in an eyebrow, then under his chin. He’d posed before the Roman ruin backdrop, powerless to act, and gradually he pulled away from his body, observing himself. Here was this young man, this Lan Allston, who was him, and yet not him, half a globe away from everything that he knew.

“What does
huayanjian
mean, Johnny?” he heard himself ask.

The scholar arched one eyebrow at Lannie and smiled.

“It means ‘chamber of smoke and flowers,’ ” came the answer. As he spoke the door opened, into a blackness that Lannie’s eyes could not penetrate. And he watched himself step inside.

Chapter Ten

The Back Bay
Boston, Massachusetts
April 17, 1915

The light behind Sibyl’s eyelids turned rosy pink, and though she could no longer deny that she was awake, she pulled the needlepoint coverlet up under her chin, resisting the intrusion of day. Stubborn, she nestled deeper into the feather mattress, as if she could will herself to stay asleep. Her muscles tightened from the effort, her eyes screwing shut.

She was not awake yet. She was asleep.

She waited, poised in the hope that she might fool herself.

A minute ticked by.

Two.

Sibyl brought the heels of her hands to her forehead with a groan, pressing into the ache that still gripped her skull from the previous night. It was no use. She was awake. The world outside awaited her, or more immediately, the world downstairs. Sibyl rolled onto her side, a beam of sunlight falling across her cheek, warming her skin as she bunched the coverlet to her chest. She closed her eyes against the daybreak, resenting it.

Sibyl felt as though she had been asleep for only fifteen minutes. Her arms were leaden with fatigue, her fists balled under her chin. Even the soles of her feet were tired. Steeling herself, she drew her body up amid her nest of linens. She gazed, eyes puffy, through the leaded glass of the bay window, out over the winking surface of the Charles River.

Her feet pressed to the floor as she struggled into her dressing gown, tangling one arm in a filmy sleeve, a few strands of hair hanging into her face. She could scarcely remember what time they’d gotten home. Before first light, but only just. As she stumped through the rear entrance of the house behind her father, she had heard the first tittering of the sparrows who nested in the ivy on the face of the town house. A few of their tiny bodies fluttered under ivy leaves and burst forth to swoop through the darkness, protesting the opening of the back door.

“The sound of morning,” her father murmured to himself before closing the door behind them.

Sibyl shuffled into the lavatory that she used to share with Eulah, bent over the claw-footed bathtub that Helen had chosen, and twisted the hot water tap. How had Helen been so certain that she would have daughters, who would need a claw-footed bathtub? It was as though their mother had willed Sibyl and Eulah into being, because the existence of such a fine lavatory required it.

Steam began to rise off the porcelain, filling the room with a fragrant cloud, and Sibyl leaned against the marble vanity, peering at herself. In the thin morning light Sibyl’s skin looked older, more papery, her eyes ringed in shadow from the previous night.

She squeezed her eyes closed, thinking about the policemen with their questions and scribbling pencils. Harley hadn’t been able to say anything of use, of course.

“Should be a quick recovery,” the dapper young doctor assured her and her father as Dovie loitered within hearing range. “I should say the rib’s merely cracked, rather than fully broken, and I think you’ll find that his youth and vigor will set him to rights sooner than you might expect. We’ll keep him for a few days, just for observation. We’re in a better position to keep him comfortable.”

As the doctor spoke, the nurse shot her father a nasty look. Sibyl didn’t understand why. Lan seemed unperturbed by the nurse’s disapproval, agreeing to leave his son in their care. But not before the police were satisfied.

Sibyl sighed, opening her eyes and staring at the disheartening spectacle of her face.

With Harley slipping in and out of consciousness, unable, or unwilling, to articulate what had transpired, the two policemen determined there was little reason for them to be present at the hospital. Benton grew insistent, pushing himself into the policemen’s faces with all the righteous fury at his disposal.

“Can’t you see he’s been beaten?” the young professor insisted, too loudly. A few heads turned in the hallway, looking. “He’s lucky they didn’t do worse! He could’ve been killed. I fail to see how you’re going to find the men responsible if you don’t speak with him. I insist you try again.”

Sibyl observed the policemen’s response to Benton’s wrestler’s bluster. The two uniformed men (one of them, she noted, with a cauliflower ear, and probably not from wrestling, either) passed first through bemusement, then to placation, before finally growing angry and dismissive.

“Well, if the young man ain’t gonna tell us what happened, there tisn’t much to be done about it, then,” one of them said, tucking his pencil into his breast pocket with finality. “Sure, we understand, Professor Derby. You’re upset and all, but I’m afraid it can’t be helped. If the victim don’t want to complain, then there’s no complaint, is there? Unless the young lady wishes to make a statement?”

Dovie, her back to the group, face reflected in the multipaned window, held as still as if she had not been addressed at all. Sibyl’s eyes darkened behind the drifting steam in the lavatory at the memory. Well, what did she expect the girl to do? Just blurt out everything? Including why Harlan was in her rooms in the first place? Surely not. And did Sibyl want to hear it, if she did?

The policemen, Benton, Sibyl, and Lan all waited, watching the tension rippling down the girl’s back, which, with the rhythmic flick of her cigarette, was the only sign that she was a living thing, rather than some wax replica of herself. When she did not so much as shift her weight on her feet, much less speak, the group re-formed, closing her out. The policemen were disinclined to inquire about her relationship, whatever it might be, to Harlan. Perhaps they didn’t wish to embarrass the family. Or perhaps they just didn’t want to be bothered. Benton’s fists balled at his sides as each person in the group wondered what should happen next.

Finally, Lan Allston cleared his throat.

“It’s right good of you lads to be so concerned for my son’s welfare,” he said, sounding less the noble patriarch and more the genial sailor who has risen through the ranks. “Perhaps when the boy’s more himself would be a better time.”

Her father rested a rough palm on the shoulder of each policeman in turn, squeezing with seriousness, and shook each man’s hand, leveling his ice blue gaze square in the other men’s eyes. The policemen, shrugging, both ready for a long day to draw to a blessed close, minds on cold roast beef at kitchen tables and sleeping children at home, withdrew without argument, and with evident relief, laying the authority to resolve the situation at the feet of the aging sailor.

Draping her dressing gown over the back of a chair, Sibyl eased first one bare foot, then the other, into the scalding water in the bathtub. She lowered herself with care, her senses awakening from the mingled sensations of steaming water and chilled porcelain against her skin. Sibyl rested her head against the tub back, eyes drifting closed, feeling her aching limbs loosen.

In a few short days, they said, Harley could come home. He’d have to be tended to, of course—wounds cleaned, bandages washed and changed, food more tender than usual while his lip and jaw healed. There was the question of school. And the debts. Harley, a bundle of situations, as always. Sibyl slipped deeper into the tub, knees emerging from the soapsuds, water meeting her lips.

Her father had circumstances well in hand at the hospital. But it was fitting, and typical, for him to step forward in a moment of acute crisis. Once the crisis had passed, or rather shifted into the new shape of normal, the minor details of its resolution would be left to her. Sibyl folded her arms over her breasts, sliding down still farther, pulling away from the weight of her responsibilities. Her head slipped beneath the surface of the water and she was alone, suspended, listening to the movement of her blood in her body and the rhythmic pulse of her heart.

A bubble slipped out from one of her nostrils. Sibyl felt the tantalizing pull of nothingness, of warmth and vacancy, and she lingered in it. Another bubble slipped from her nose.

Without warning, a steely hand clamped over her upper arm and hauled upward. Sibyl gasped in surprise, breathing water into her nose and down her throat, tinged with the sour floral taste of lavender soap. Coughing and sputtering, Sibyl scrambled upright with a splash, wet hair plastered to her face as she heaved for breath, water running off her lips, her fingertips, her chin.

“Miss!” a voice exclaimed.

Sibyl looked up into the shocked and worried face of Mrs. Doherty, one sleeve rolled to the elbow, holding a bath towel. She was accustomed to entering without knocking, as had been her habit since Sibyl was old enough to bathe herself. Behind the housekeeper’s deliberately unflappable stare, Sibyl saw worry mingled with contained panic. Sibyl drew ragged breaths, her hands clutching the sides of the bathtub, face flushed and clearly alive. Seeing that Sibyl was safe, the housekeeper’s expression resolved from alarm to disapproval.

“Oh!” Sibyl panted, wiping the hair out of her eyes with one hand while trying to cover the modest parts of herself with both arms. Sibyl’s cheeks reddened in embarrassment and aggravation. Mrs. Doherty stared closely at her, more concerned with Sibyl’s mental state than her physical one. Sibyl glared back, wishing the woman would go away.

Finally, Mrs. Doherty said, “I can’t have Betty hold the breakfast,” as though that were a credible explanation for hoisting Sibyl out of the water with such urgency. She waited, keeping a wary eye on the young mistress of the Beacon Street house, pretending to be readying to offer Sibyl the towel.

“Breakfast?” Sibyl asked, aware that she had overslept. The staff had a schedule to keep, which she herself had set for them, and which it was her duty as mistress of the house to maintain.

With a sniff of annoyance, which she could afford now that the safety of the situation was clear, Mrs. Doherty laid aside the towel and turned her attention to the vanity table. Her back to Sibyl, she rearranged the bottles by order of size with a brisk hand while she spoke.

“The eggs’ll be getting cold, and you know how he hates cold eggs.” Neither of them felt the need to specify whose eggs would be growing cold.

The housekeeper hazarded a worried glance over her shoulder at Sibyl, who affected not to notice. Then with a grunt of resignation the woman bustled out, the door clicking closed behind her.

Sibyl sighed again, dropping her head back into the cooling water, feeling its surface close over the tip of her nose as she knew with sickening certainty that she could hide from this day no longer.

The door to the dining room squeaked open, and Sibyl edged into a room so encased in walnut paneling that even the cool springtime sun through the bay window failed to relieve the impression of night. Efforts had been made at brightening the space in deference to the season: a cheerful arrangement of paperwhites and daffodils sat in the center of the dining table, perfuming the air. The table held a white linen runner, needlepointed by Helen as a new bride, with white roses and young fawns in repose among tiny ivy leaves. Someone had taken the time to polish the silver and the candlesticks, which caught the morning light with a chill glimmer. Even so, the room managed to absorb these gestures of sunshine, swallowing them up.

At one end of the table a straight-backed chair stood out at a careless angle, overlooked. In the vicinity of the chair rested a crushed napkin, half obscuring a few coffee stains and a sprinkling of crumbs. A fork, clotted with eggs, sat tines down on a greasy plate. Sibyl ignored this tableau, which happened to be arranged at her customary seat, and settled instead at the opposite end. At the table’s head, behind a newspaper, Sibyl found her father, steam still rising from his freshened coffee.