The House of Velvet and Glass (29 page)

Harlan scowled, the corners of his mouth pulling down. Well, he’d just show himself into the dining room, then. He wasn’t about to give up the chance of some bacon just because his father happened to still be in there.

As Harlan turned toward the dining room, he caught a flash of movement at the periphery of his vision. Deep within the recess behind the stair, by the kitchen corridor, he glimpsed a striped cotton skirt disappearing around a corner, followed by the bitter slam of a door.

“Betty,” he started to say. But the skirt was already gone. Clearly she had been eavesdropping while he whispered to Dovie. He couldn’t understand it. So he’d kissed her. So what? It didn’t mean anything. He thought Betty was a fine girl, who knew he was just horsing around. But when he went skulking after her again, to steal another one, she’d slammed the kitchen door in his face. And now Dovie occasionally complained that her food was underdone.

With a sigh of self-pity at the complicated dealings of women, Harlan steeled himself and stepped into the dining room.

He found his father pushing back his chair, brushing off his suit with a carelessness that usually signaled his return to the business of life outside of the Beacon Street house. Mrs. Doherty was bent at the opposite side of the table, gathering soiled dishes. In a lazy puff on the back of one of the dining chairs perched the iridescent blue macaw, his head tucked over his shoulder in sleep, a claw pulled into his chest. Mrs. Doherty edged around the chair that held the parrot, giving him a wary glare, and hoisting the dishes unnecessarily high for clearance over his head. A few peanut shells lay scattered before the chair where Baiji dozed.

“I can’t believe you bring that animal in here, Papa,” Harley said, easing with splendid indifference into the nearest chair and propping a knee on the edge of the dining table. He folded his hands behind his head and lolled his gaze up to the ceiling. While he sat, Mrs. Doherty silently placed luncheon-size silverware and a napkin on either side of him, unsparing in her disapproval despite her failure to voice it.

Without answering, Lan Allston reached a finger over to scratch the creature under a wing. The macaw’s feathers stretched outward in a slow pouf of disturbance, and his mouth yawned. Then the bird returned to his nap while Lan pulled the chronometer from his vest pocket, rubbed a meditative thumb over its face, and turned his eye at last to his son.

“Finally awake, I see. Well, I suppose that’s a relief. You’ll have to hurry,” Harlan’s father said.

“Hmmmm?” Harlan asked as he tried, and failed, to summon Mrs. Doherty’s attention. She exited the dining room by pushing through the door to the kitchen with her back, hands laden with dishes, her eyes avoiding both of the Allston men.

“Say,” Harlan remarked, “do you think old Doherty’ll be able to fix me up with some bacon?” He rubbed a hand over his slim belly, wishing that bacon could be made to appear by force of will.

His father scowled down at him, returning the chronometer to its allotted pocket. “As I was saying. The car’s coming for you in ten minutes,” Lan announced. “Whether you’ve eaten or not by then is immaterial. But you’ll need to look more pulled together than that, I should think.”

“Car?” Harlan echoed, only half listening.

Mrs. Doherty reappeared through the kitchen door and approached Harley’s seat. She carried a plate with some slices of meat—roast beef, maybe, cold and unappetizing-looking, with a grayish sheen—and a disappointing spoonful of cabbage. The plate was laid before Harlan with a minimum of ceremony, and she started to withdraw when Harlan stayed her with a hand on her sleeve.

“Come on, Doherty. Can’t Betty get me some bacon or something? I’m starved,” he said, turning plaintive eyes on her and sticking out a satirical, puppyish lower lip.

The housekeeper flinched, clearly annoyed, but she said, “I’ll see, Mister Harlan.” She disappeared back into the kitchen.

“The car,” Lan Allston reiterated. “It’s coming to take you to your appointment this afternoon.”

“What appointment? I haven’t got any appointment. I’m going to the Sox game,” Harlan said, pushing the cold meat around his plate with a fork. This would not do, this cabbagey stuff. Maybe some coddled eggs, to go with the bacon. That’d be the ticket.

“You have an appointment with Benton Derby at the college at two o’clock, and the car has been ordered to ensure that you make it in plenty of time,” he father informed him.

“Since when?” Harlan replied, laying the fork aside and folding his arms. He tossed his flop of hair off his forehead, lifting his chin to make certain his father knew that he was an adult now, and so not one to be pushed around.

“Since I made it for you this morning, while you were still, incredibly, asleep,” Lan said, his hands tightening on the back of his dining chair.

Mrs. Doherty reappeared through the kitchen door and made her desultory way back to Harlan.

“This morning!” Harlan exclaimed, attention still on his father. “Well, it’ll have to wait. Got plans already, I’m afraid. Like I said.”

“Plans, have you?” his father said, his eyes chilling by perceptible degrees, and the lines deepening around his mouth. The skin between his father’s knuckles turned white with the force of his grip. “Unless those plans that you claim to have hatched involve returning your belongings to Westmorly Court and sitting your final exams this very afternoon, then they
do not exist
. Attendance at a baseball game, I can assure you, my dear boy, does not qualify as
plans
in this household.”

“Move back to Westmorly!” Harlan protested, voice carrying just a hint of a whine. “But I’m still recuperating, dontcha know. It’s way too early for me to move. Anyway, I’m done with school. I guess I’m just not meant to be a college man.” He smiled, his face resolving into the same pleased expression he wore when taking a trick with an unexpected trump, and folded his hands behind his head again.

“Done!” his father said, with a laugh of disbelief.

“How ’bout those eggs, then, Doherty?” Harlan said to the housekeeper, who was loitering at his elbow, melting into discomfited invisibility while the altercation between father and son played out its course.

“I’m afraid,” Mrs. Doherty said, her voice strained with formality, “that eggs will be quite impossible this afternoon, sir.”

“What?” Harlan protested. “Since when?”

“Unfortunately,” Mrs. Doherty reiterated, a hint of desperation threading through her voice, “there simply won’t be any eggs available today, Mister Harlan.”

“Well, we’ll just see about that,” Harlan said, starting to his feet in a lather of disappointment. He was waylaid by the housekeeper’s insistent hand on his shoulder.

“Sir,” she said, voice and grip equally tight, insisting on his attention. “The cook has said in no uncertain terms that it will not be possible for you to have eggs this afternoon.” Her dark eyes bored into his, and Harlan read the intensity of warning to be found there.

“Oh,” he stammered.

She held his shoulder a moment longer, staring into his face with motherly coldness. The young man swallowed. So that was how it was. Betty was jealous. As if he didn’t have enough to deal with.

He was startled out of his dismay by the sound of his father pushing the dining chair back into place with a sharp report. The jolt caused the macaw to jump, cawing in protest before resettling himself on the back of his dining chair, one glittering eye observing the discussion.

“Never mind,” Lan Allston said. “There’s no time anyway. You’ve got to be on your way. You’re going to Cambridge. And you’re going to meet with Benton Derby, who has offered to take time out of his schedule to speak with you. And you’re going to listen carefully to everything that he has to say.”

As the patriarch spoke he strode around the dining table, more quickly than Harlan expected, and dug a hand into his wayward son’s armpit, hoisting him to his feet. Harley was always taken aback by his father’s vigor. The Captain was in the habit of moving deliberately, carrying his long legs like a marionette’s, as though he still expected the floor to shift under his feet like the deck of a rolling ship. In some respects Harlan never imagined that his father had been anything other than weathered and elderly, authoritative and decisive. Harlan often forgot that his father was a physical man.

“I believe I hear the car,” Lan said into his ear, in a tone of forced friendliness. “You’d better get your coat and hat. Don’t want to keep Professor Derby waiting.”

Harley frowned, considering twisting free of his father’s grip. But he reconsidered. He wasn’t a child. What harm was there in seeing Benton? What could the professor do, anyway? He’d go, he’d hear Ben out, his father would be placated, and maybe there’d even still be time to scoot over to the Fenway afterward. Hell, maybe he’d talk Ben into going with him. At this thought Harlan’s mouth twisted in a mischievous smile, and he tossed his hair back.

“All right,” he said. “But if I’d known I had some big appointment today, I’d have gotten more dolled up before I came down.”

Without releasing his grip on Harlan’s armpit, Lan Allston steered his son from the dining room, through the front hallway, and over to the hall stand by the front door.

“Careful, Papa,” Harlan protested as Lan plucked rain gear from within the indistinguishable jumble. “My rib’s still awful tender.”

Inside the front drawing room, behind the closed door, Harlan overheard a musical giggle, which he knew belonged to Dovie. He wondered what secrets could be passing between Dovie and his sister. Harlan almost envied their confederacy, the late-night giggles and whispering. Much like he’d felt when Sibyl and Eulah cloistered themselves away in their lavatory after coming home from dances. More than once he’d pressed his ear to their keyhole, aching to be let in on their secrets, to hear what they were saying about the people they’d met. Harlan felt terribly alone, those nights.

His father said nothing but buttoned Harlan into his overcoat as though he were still a little boy, even going so far as to wind a knitted muffler around the young man’s neck. At first Harlan found this treatment irritating, but deep within himself, the sensation of his father’s hands on the buttons of his coat, somehow more sure, more
buttoned
than when he did it himself, filled Harlan with reassurance.

“There,” Lan Allston said, brushing off Harlan’s shoulders with finality. “Now then. We’ll have the car drop me at the office, and then it’ll take you into Cambridge. Should be plenty of time. Come along.”

Harlan looked into his father’s weathered face and felt his obstinacy soften.

“All right,” he said.

The two Allston men moved, one after the other, with identical gaits, out the front door of the Beacon Street house and into the drizzling springtime afternoon.

In the dining room, in the quiet void of their abrupt departure, Mrs. Doherty picked up the plate of uneaten roast beef and cabbage, frowned, and carried it back into the kitchen.

Interlude

Shanghai
Old City
June 8, 1868

Lannie’s eyes rebelled against the dark. He heard shuffling, and his nose sensed old wood, damp earth, and warm bodies clustered together on a humid night. He deduced that he was standing in a long cavern, with a floor of packed mud covered in straw and windows blotted out with old paper advertisements. The atmosphere was heavy. Though he sensed that he was surrounded by people, he heard no talking.

“It doesn’t look like much,” Johnny whispered in his ear. “But you’ll see.”

They stood near the door, waiting. A bead of moisture traced from Lannie’s hairline to the bridge of his nose, and he shrugged out of his peacoat.

A faint glow swam toward them, resolving into a minute young woman, simply dressed, her jet hair worn in two long braids over her shoulders. She nodded to Johnny, looked over Lannie, and indicated with her head that they should follow.

The room was lined with plain bunks, two and three high. Every bunk contained a supine figure, some curled into the wall, feet folded, backs bony. Lannie passed faces with blackened, hollow eyes, hands coiled under chins like mummified children. Most of them were dressed in tatters, their bare feet weathered in a way that suggested a perpetual lack of shoes.

“You’re worrying,” Johnny murmured. “Don’t. The only ones who get like that’re the ones that never leave. We’re gentlemen with self-control. Aren’t we?”

Lannie laughed, a bark born of discomfort rather than amusement.

They were shown to two empty bunks, one over the other, covered in mats that had not been changed in some time. Johnny vaulted into the higher bunk, stretching out with a sigh. Lannie held back. He’d had bedbugs plenty of times, of course, those itchy devils, but he didn’t relish having them
and
fleas, all at once. Not when hot baths were hard to come by on the
Morpheo
.

“Priss,” Johnny scoffed, folding his hands behind his head.

Lannie drew himself up and blustered, “
I
don’t care where I sleep. I can sleep anywhere. This’ll be luxury, compared to a hammock.”