The House of Velvet and Glass (28 page)

Without answering Sibyl placed the box on her belly and opened the lid. The crystal orb glinted in the firelight, safe in its velvet nest. She ran her fingertips over it, tracing minute circles around its edge, over the top, enjoying its smoothness. Her mind turned away from herself, enjoying the mingling sensations of the cool stone against her skin, the warm lap of the firelight, the sagging cushion of the chaise.

In its lining of black velvet, the scrying glass pulled the light deep into itself, faintly glowing under her fingers. She could see the rock’s milky veins, shifting as she rolled the ball with one thumb. Sibyl sighed, feeling her weight release into the chaise. Her eyes slipped out of focus.

Time passed, but Sibyl didn’t know how much. She was floating in a half-sleep in which she was conscious, but unconcerned. The surface of the ball darkened, as though the light were drawing away from the crystal’s surface, collecting into a pinpoint at its center. As Sibyl focused on the pinpoint of hard white light, a transformation began to take place.

Under her fingertips, the surface of the scrying glass appeared to be roiling. The ball itself was motionless, but its surface looked contorted, moving, slippery. Sibyl felt her blood moving in her veins, and her lips parted while she watched, entranced.

The ball had blackened, the inside of its membrane obscured by billows of smoke, puffing out from its fiery core. The billows thickened, coiling back on themselves, tiny storm clouds clashing together inside the sphere, as though the scrying glass were hollow, though it was not. Her fingertips twitched where they rested on the ball, and the smoke moved faster.

After a time, the smoke slowed, thinning into nearly recognizable shapes, like storm clouds parting in a distant sky. She beheld a nighttime as dark as what she had once seen arcing over a mown field out in the countryside, away from the electric lights of the city. The spherical firmament inside the glass was speckled with pinprick stars, an entire night sky perfectly rendered in miniature.

Sibyl let her breath out in slow degrees. She had been holding it without knowing. She sat up on her elbows, drawing into a seated position, her back curved so that she could have a clearer view into the velvet-lined box. Moving with care, deliberately enough that the springs in the chaise didn’t make a sound, Sibyl brought the box with its microscopic universe into her lap.

The stars inside the scrying glass winked, and she brushed a thumb over its surface, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing. Then, the stars began to move. They shifted, rotating down, like sped-up film, until deep within the glass the tiny night sky met a dark, distant horizon.

Sibyl peered closer, whispering to herself, “It’s just a dream, a Xanadu, I’m seeing.”

Dovie might have said something in response, but Sibyl didn’t hear her.

The horizon was smooth, reflecting a mirror image of the stars. Sibyl’s brows knitted together in concentration. Then she understood: water. She was seeing the surface of some body of water, late at night. Sibyl’s lower lip drew under her tooth in thought.

Across the surface of the water, a subtle change. A ripple, foaming white. Sibyl’s hands, thumbs resting on the crystal ball, fingers wrapped around the base of the wooden box, brought the scrying glass up out of her lap until it was level with the end of her nose. She breathed carefully, not wanting to cloud it with moisture from her breath.

The foaming along the surface of the water continued, impossibly small, difficult to see but unmistakable. The perspective inside the glass shifted, and when Sibyl understood what she was seeing her shock was so deep and disturbing that she let out a cry.

On the periphery of her vision, she sensed Dovie sit up, concerned, and from far away heard the girl’s voice say, “Sibyl? Are you all right?”

Sibyl made no answer. For there, with perfect clarity, slicing with pride through the silent ocean night, Sibyl beheld the prow of an ocean liner.

Chapter Fifteen

The Back Bay
Boston, Massachusetts
April 29, 1915

Harley lay on his side, feet dangling over the edge of his rope bed, head propped on his hand. His hair stood up in a rumpled mess, the bedclothes bunched at his feet. Someone had crept in while he slept and cranked open the window, letting the breath of spring freshen the room. Outside, a warm rain drummed on Beacon Street, punctuated by a roll of thunder in the distance, out over the water.

Harlan yawned, wondering if that afternoon’s baseball game would be postponed again. Boston had been drowning under days of soporific rain, blurring the streets and fields in a gray haze. He scratched his stubble and turned the page of his newspaper. His eyes skated past the war headlines, bored. Something about the Turks, and the British on Hill 60. Just as well the United States was staying out of it.

Harley rolled onto his back, careful of the bandages around his midsection, and sighed. The newspaper slid to the floor as he played his hand over his belly, wishing someone had thought to send up his breakfast. He supposed he ought to get up. At first, they’d been pretty stern about trying to get him up, mornings. Well, his father had, anyway. Sibyl’d been a softer touch.

“He needs his rest,” she insisted to their father in the hallway, two days after his return home. There’d been some argument, talk about whether he was being coddled, but Sibyl had actually won that one. And he did need his rest, didn’t he? Cracked rib and all. They could at least send up a tray or something. Some bacon. He’d really do with some bacon.

Harley propped himself on his elbows, surveying the room under its wreckage. A soothing breeze crept through the ivy, bringing in the loamy scent of the Common. It smelled like purity and decay at once, reminding him of playing soldier in the woods, or wading in the river basin after Sibyl when she went on her solitary eel-hunts. It felt good, being home.

Maybe if the rain let up he’d run over to the Fenway and see about the Sox and Senators game. It couldn’t stay rained-out forever. Who’d want to go with him? Feet on his desk and a lazy toothpick jutting from the corner of his mouth, Bickering would be ensconced in his office, idle, but would probably insist on staying there “for show.” Townsend would be at the club, hustling for a hand of bridge. Perhaps he could be scared up. Baseball was a good game for betting men.

And Rawlings . . . well. Harlan laughed, shrugging off the passing idea for what it was.

He stood up, stretching his arms overhead, feeling the bandage pull on the skin over his ribs, and then shaking himself like a puppy emerging from the river. He made his way over to the highboy, planted his hands on either side of it, and turned a crooked gaze up at his reflection in the dressing mirror.

An angry boy glared back at him. He was surprised. Could just be an effect of the bruising, he supposed, but his split lip was almost healed, just a faint crust where the laceration had been, and the dull purplish splotch across his cheek had faded to a pale blue. Just enough to make him look interesting. Well, that’s what Dovie said. At the thought of her, Harley’s reflection broke into a smile.

He peered up at himself, raising his chin with arrogance, furrowing his brows. It’s true, the pummeling had taken away some of the gloss of prettiness that had galled him when he was younger. He grinned out of one side of his mouth, trying to seem rakish and mysterious, and enjoyed the effect. He looked like someone with a past, someone who knew things.

He looked more like a man.

By the time Harlan made his way, at an unhurried shamble, smoothing his slicked hair back with both hands and buttoning the cuffs of his shirt, down the main staircase, the mantel clock within the drawing room was chiming one o’clock. He heard voices, laughing, a young woman in the dining room calling out “I’ll be there in just a minute!” and then the sliding door squeaked open to reveal the laughing form of Dovie Whistler. His heart leaped with a mixture of nerves and pleasure.

She looked well. Her face was flushed with health, and she had put on a little weight. Maybe she was eating all the food Sibyl didn’t touch, he reflected, finishing with one of his cuff buttons. Her clothes were neat and simple, well fitting, crisp from where they had been folded on the shelf at Filene’s, and considerably different from the flowing tunics and sleeveless shifts that she favored when he first met her. Maybe he missed the tunics, which hung from her shoulders in a way that often intruded on his thoughts when he was alone. But even in the proper shirtwaist, she was arresting.

He thought he detected his sister’s influence in the tidying of Dovie Whistler, though he also knew her to be a malleable person in general. She might have sized up the situation in the Allston house and made whatever adjustments were necessary to blend into the scenery. Like a chameleon. He smiled on her with proprietary pride and moved to meet her.

Dovie stopped midstep when she saw him, her face breaking into a sparkling smile. He loved it when she smiled like that. Her smile remade her entire face, transforming her from a painted china doll to a twinkling girl, throwing light into her eyes. She glanced over her shoulder into the dining room, craning her neck with swift, birdlike motions back and forth, and seeing no one, skittered up to him on her toes, silently flinging herself into his arms. He took her porcelain face in his hands, cupping it in his palms, feeling the smooth skin of her cheeks under his thumbs, tilting her face up to meet his kiss.

She let out a happy protesting squeak, yielding for a delicious moment before squirming out of his grip, laughing.

“Harley! You bounder,” she scolded, keeping her voice soft so as not to be overheard. “Someone could see.”

“I don’t care.” He grinned, moving nearer. He brought his lips close to the pearlescent curve of her ear and whispered, “I thought I might see you last night.” Knowing that she was housed just down the hall from him had been an exquisite torture.

She laid a hand alongside his cheek.

“You’re still recuperating,” she said, in a voice so low and quiet she might not have been speaking at all. “And anyway, I—I was— It seemed too risky.”

He folded his arms around her waist, pressing her to him, burying his nose in her soft halo of blond hair. He indulged in a long sniff, enjoying the warm girl-smell of her, punctuated with a hint of lavender soap, likely borrowed from his sister. She allowed him to hold her, his arms tightening, before she gently slid her fingers under his forearms, prizing his grip from around her middle.

They heard footsteps padding across the floor of the drawing room on the other side of the staircase, and the enameled sliding door rolled open just as Dovie had freed herself from his grasp.

“Oh!” Sibyl exclaimed, coming with apparent surprise upon their conference in the entryway. “Excuse me.”

“I was just telling Harley a joke I read in the paper,” Dovie said quickly.

“Were you now?” Sibyl said, folding her arms. A knowing smile settled on her face, which caused Harlan’s temples to flush.

“I just love jokes. May I hear it, too?” his sister asked, leaning in the doorway.

Grinning, ducking her head, Dovie peeked up at Harlan through lowered eyelids and placed her hands on her hips in that film ingenue way that she had, the fingers pointing down along her flanks. She tossed her bob back out of her eyes, exposing her creamy expanse of neck.

“So did you hear about the daring bank robbery last week?” she asked, in the rote teasing tone of a vaudeville actress about to deliver a real groaner.

“Oh, no,” Harlan replied, crossing his arms over his chest, in the attitude of a man in the audience playing along. “Do tell.”

“Oh, yes,” Dovie said. “It was very daring indeed. The villain walked right into the bank, pulled out a pistol, and then he held up the cashier in broad electric light, before running out and escaping under cover of day!”

A pause while Harlan brought his hand up to his forehead with a groan of dismay, while Sibyl spoke the single syllable “Ha!”

“Doves,” Harlan said, shaking his head with a smile. “That was terrible.”

“Wasn’t it grand? You simply cannot top me for skills as a comedienne,” she replied, batting him on the shoulder. But as she did so, her eyes traveled past him, coming to rest on Sibyl. Out of the corner of his eye Harlan noticed his sister incline her head, beckoning Dovie into the drawing room. Dovie giggled, bringing her gaze back to Harlan’s face.

“I’ve just left your father in the dining room,” she said. “We had a splendid lunch, didn’t we, Sibyl?”

“If you can call cold meat and cabbage splendid,” Sibyl muttered, turning her back.

Harlan realized that his sister hadn’t said anything to him that day—no good morning, no how are you feeling, no oh your lip is looking well isn’t it. He frowned, put out and overlooked. Dovie pulled away, but he held on to her hand as she started toward the drawing room, only letting her go when she moved past the limit of his arm’s length. She waved at him over her shoulder, mouthed the single word
Soon
, and the enameled door slid closed, cloistering them away. He heard murmured voices but couldn’t discern what was being said.