The House of Velvet and Glass (25 page)

The girl nodded, concerned. Then Sibyl saw the girl’s eyes shift, with wariness, over Sibyl’s left shoulder. Dovie’s eyes narrowed in a frown.

“Well, if it isn’t the elder Miss Allston,” a voice tittered, and Sibyl felt her heart sink with dismay. She turned her face up to meet the speaker.

Behind her, arms folded, stood a woman about Sibyl’s age, with an equine face topped by an expensively maintained chestnut cloud of hair, beaming a chill nonwelcome down at them.

“Why, Miss Seaver,” Sibyl said. “It’s been such a long time.”

“So it has!” the woman-pony agreed. “Ages. But it’s not Miss Seaver anymore. I’m Mrs. Leonard Coombs now.”

“How silly of me,” Sibyl said with a tight smile. She knew Mildred Seaver was married. And she knew Mildred was married to Leonard Coombs. Leonard Coombs, a mild-mannered Yalie who, during Sibyl’s first season out, had been vying with Benton Derby for Sibyl’s attention. Instead of dancing, at which Sibyl failed to excel, they ended up sitting on staircases, knees pressed excitingly together, talking in hushed voices about books. Mildred Seaver, in Sibyl Allston’s sewing circle and dance class, gawky but persuasive, had, through a series of maneuvers that Sibyl still lacked the social virtuosity to untangle, insinuated herself with the bookish young man, locking him down in a matrimonial triumph trumpeted across all the regional newspapers the following winter.
Ten thousand
orange blossoms, the papers breathlessly chronicled.

“And how is Mister Coombs?” Sibyl inquired.

“Just topping, thanks!” the former Miss Seaver beamed, exposing the full panoply of her teeth. “He’s just been named partner in Daddy’s firm. And he positively dotes on Lenny Junior.”

“Ah,” Sibyl said. Lenny Junior. Proof, as if she needed any more, that the Allstons had fallen well off the Coombses’ visiting list. They hadn’t even been sent a card. “Why, I hadn’t heard. Congratulations.”

Mrs. Coombs simpered, shifting her hips. “Oh!” she moaned, a hand to her chest to show how stoic she was. “Well, thanks. It was just awful, you know. Really, too awful to be believed. You are
so
lucky, to be spared all that. I’d just as soon never go through any of it, to be honest. It really is better, I wager, not having to be married at all. Now, who’s this?”

She turned an appraising eye on Sibyl’s luncheon partner, who responded by sinking lower in her garden chair.

“Mrs. Coombs, I’d like you to meet Miss Dovie Whistler,” Sibyl said. When she faced Dovie, waving her hand at her in introduction, she found the girl’s face purpling with slow-simmering rage.

“Whistler!” Mrs. Coombs whinnied, bringing a thoughtful finger up to her chin. “Whistler. Hmmmm. New York?”

“Never been,” Dovie said, arms folded.

“No? Well, that’s odd. The only Whistlers
I
know are in New York. We see them every summer at Newport, when we go down for the regatta.”

“No relation,” Dovie said, emerald eyes darkening.

“Well, that’s a shame. They’re lovely people. He’s from a banking family, and they race the most gorgeous little ketch, why it makes me just blue with envy. Blue!”

“People don’t turn blue with envy,” Dovie said, using a voice that sounded like a regular conversational tone but that managed to fill the room. “Must be that good Newport blood you’re thinking of. Sounds like
you
would know.”

“What?” Mrs. Coombs sputtered.

Sibyl laughed before she could help herself. “I’m afraid she’s right, Mildred,” Sibyl said, heart thudding with enjoyment at adding to the woman’s shock. “Green’s the color of envy, not blue. Why, you should know that.”

“Well!” the woman clopped backward on one of her low-heeled hoofs, reeling from surprise. “My goodness.
Miss
Allston. I don’t know where you could have found such a creature.” She glared down at Dovie, radiating waves of social contempt.

“I guess we’re just too regular to know from blue, aren’t we, Sibyl?” Dovie remarked, settling back in her seat, legs crossed at the knee, looking up at the woman with an expression of open challenge. “But then, I’ve heard that the thin air up there on Mount Olympus can do terrible things to the mind. And don’t even get me started on what it can do to a girl’s
face.
”

Sibyl gasped in both shock and, if she admitted it, pleasure. She’d never had the nerve to say what she really thought about Mildred Seaver to anyone but Eulah, and here Dovie had almost sensed it without her having to say a thing. She almost hesitated to look at the young woman sitting across from her at the garden table, for fear that she would give away her delight.

Mrs. Coombs opened her mouth, as though she had been hit in the chest and couldn’t catch her breath. Sibyl glanced at Dovie, who met her look with a mischievous smile. Twin sensations of mortification and mirthful joy rose within her, and Sibyl felt her cheeks flush. She was terribly afraid that she would start laughing.

“My goodness,” Mrs. Coombs managed, struggling to regain her upper hand by addressing Sibyl alone. “What
unconventional
company you’re keeping. But I suppose those Allstons always did have rather distinctive taste in friends. It’s one of your great strengths, you know. I’ve always said so. You are so openhearted, you’ll just keep company with anyone. How very progressive you are!”

Mrs. Leonard Coombs then turned on her substantial heel and marched through the French doors, through which the sound of whispering could be clearly heard. Sibyl managed to last until the moment when she thought Mildred might be out of earshot before laughter burst out of her mouth, and she folded her arms around her waist, whooping, shoulders shaking.

Dovie watched the woman go, waves of hostility vibrating off her small form. Then a slow smile broke across the girl’s face. It widened, and she, too, started to laugh.

“Oh! Oh!” Sibyl cried, wiping the corner of her eye with her napkin. “Oh, if you had any idea how long I’ve wanted to say something like that to her. She’s been insufferable since we were girls.”

Dovie grinned, and shrugged her shoulders.

Finally, as her laughter died down to snicker, Sibyl grew aware of the silence within the lunchroom. She leaned forward, gesturing for Dovie to incline her ear.

“I think, my dear, we’d better be going,” she whispered.

“I haven’t even finished my cake yet!” Dovie protested in mock-innocence. “But if you think we must, then we must.”

“Oh, by all means, finish your cake,” Sibyl said, through a nervous giggle. The silence in the clubhouse puddled deeper.

Dovie took the last chunk of tea cake and crammed it into her mouth, puffing her cheeks out like a squirrel. “Done,” she said, word muffled through the mouthful of cake, a few crumbs escaping between her lips, and she brought her hand up to keep the rest of it in.

Sibyl, eyes twinkling with merriment, got to her feet. “All right,” she said. “Let’s be off, then!”

She threaded her arm around the girl’s waist, and they tripped out in lockstep together, heads high. They marched through the dining room, past several dozen silent, watching, judging pairs of women’s eyes. She spotted Mrs. Rowland, a wicked smile twisting the corner of the matron’s mouth. Sibyl and Dovie picked up their pace to an almost-jog, leaving behind a trail of cake crumbs, never to set foot in the Oceanus Club again.

That evening, the two young women perched across from each other in the inner drawing room, a fire going in the fireplace, Sibyl bent over some needlepoint in Lan’s old Greek revival armchair while Dovie flipped through a fashion magazine, her feet tucked under her. They had no other company besides the observing macaw, at whom Dovie cast the occasional worried glance as he sat, immobile as a sculpture, on his hat rack. Lan Allston had yet to return from his business downtown, and the two young women had shared a plain dinner in the dining room, talking with excitement about fashions and magazine stories and society gossip, and revisiting the scene of Dovie’s shocking triumph.

“I swear,” Sibyl said, smiling over her needlework. “The expression on Milly Coombs’s face was priceless. I could bottle it and sell it.”

“She really stole your fella, huh?” Dovie said, flipping another page and tapping her chin in thoughtful consideration of the coat sketches spread across her lap.

“I guess she did,” Sibyl confirmed, pulling the thread tight and knotting it with a quick motion. “I was pretty disappointed at the time, but I don’t really care anymore. He was pleasant enough. Collected stamps. Just think, if I’d married him I’d have spent the rest of my life pretending to be interested in philately. Ugh. But even so, he was rather sweet to me for a time. That’s all.”

Dovie sniffed. “A girl’d get slapped for less,” she muttered.

“Beg pardon?”

“Oh, nothing,” Dovie said, flipping another page. After a long pause, she asked, “And there wasn’t ever anyone else?”

Sibyl hesitated, looking aside into the fire. Her heart thudded once, twice, heavily, as it always did when she thought back to that snowy afternoon with Benton on the window seat. He had said,
Lydia tells me she thinks we should be married
. And then he had stared at her. Waiting. After an interminable silence, in which her heart collapsed into her stomach and her head grew light with misery, Sibyl had said what she thought he wanted her to say, which was
Oh, indeed?

When she said that, his face crumpled. It was the wrong answer. She still hated to think of it. She knotted the thread of her needlepoint with unnecessary vigor, frowning.

“No one to speak of,” she said at length. “No.”

Dovie gave her a long look. But instead of pressing the question further, she flipped another page. After a time she reached the end of her magazine and cast it to the floor with a bored sigh. Sibyl leaned forward, squinting in the firelight, concentrating on her work. Dovie sighed again, loudly enough to indicate that she was trying to get Sibyl’s attention.

Sibyl glanced up and found the young woman squirming in her armchair, rummaging in the pocket of her skirt. Dovie brought forth the polished crystal ball, which she had been toying with during their conversation in the morning. In the soothing firelight the ball glowed with an inviting warmth, and Dovie folded her legs Indian style in the armchair, resting her elbows on her knees and holding the ball nearer the firelight.

“It’s so pretty,” she remarked, rolling it along her fingertips. Behind her, the macaw let out a sumptuous yawn.

Sibyl smiled, setting her needlework in her lap. “It is,” she agreed. “I’d forgotten you still had it.”

Dovie gazed on it intently for a few minutes, her eyes almost crossing with the effort. Sibyl laughed aloud, sensing what she was trying to do, and Dovie blushed. Then a slow smile awoke in her features, the same smile of collusion that had lit up the girl’s face that afternoon.

“It’s for seeing, you say?” she asked, her eyes twinkling with secret mischief.

“Yeeees,” Sibyl said, drawing the word out, dubious.

“Ah,” Dovie said. She drew her lip under a tooth, staring at the ball, rolling it in her palms, and then leveled her green gaze on Sibyl.

“I know what we’ll do,” Dovie said, abruptly reaching forward and taking Sibyl by the hand. “The best way to see anything. Only you’ll have to come with me tomorrow.”

“Come with you?” Sibyl echoed, her hand still in Dovie’s.

The girl’s grip felt warm, reassuring, and despite her initial misgivings Sibyl found herself wanting to keep Dovie’s attention. She felt privileged to have been invited into a secret confederacy with the younger woman. It reminded her of the unique pleasure she used to feel when Eulah would grab her shoulder as she passed in the hallway after a late dance. Sibyl would sit in Eulah’s vanity chair, her chin resting on a fist, nodding and laughing while her sister recounted what had been said to whom, and why, and what it might mean, and didn’t Sibyl think that’s what it meant, really? She had envied her sister’s beauty and social success, it was true, but their nights of discussion made Sibyl feel invited into Eulah’s charmed sphere. Now she felt drawn to Dovie in the same way. It was uncanny how much Dovie reminded her of Eulah.

“Come where?”

“You’ll see. You’ve taken me to your club, now you have to let me take you to mine. I insist.”

Sibyl blinked with uncertainty. “Yours? But I don’t—”

“Trust me.” Dovie smiled, cheeks dimpling, her hand tugging gently at Sibyl’s. “We’ll bring the crystal ball with us. It’ll be fun, I promise. What else have we got to do tomorrow, anyway?”

“Well,” she demurred. “As long as we’re home by suppertime, I don’t suppose . . .”

“It’ll be great,” Dovie insisted. “You’ll see.”

Laughing, almost cackling, with pleasure, Dovie released Sibyl’s hand and leaned back in her armchair, her eyes glowing in the firelight.

Chapter Thirteen

Chinatown
Boston, Massachusetts
April 18, 1915

Sibyl lost track of which street they were on after a series of turns that carried them around the Common, across Boylston Street, and past the electric marquees of the theater district. The street where she and Dovie stood was busy at midday, the spring sunshine quickening everyone’s step, casting everything with the golden gloss of possibility. Sibyl stood half a head taller than all the hurrying people in that quarter. All of the signage was written in unfamiliar, oddly beautiful characters: Chinese. She turned to ask Dovie what they were doing here, but her companion’s attention was absorbed in her silk evening bag, still speckled with Harley’s blood. The girl rummaged, muttering under her breath.