The House of Velvet and Glass (3 page)

“
Le Sang de Morphée
indeed,” Mrs. Widener remarked to herself, surveying the glittering scene before her with a gaze of supreme boredom.

“Blood from a stone, more like,” Mr. Widener replied, resettling a pair of gold spectacles on the bridge of his nose and applying his attention to a sheet of heavy card stock in his hand. Helen was shaken out of her reverie long enough to notice that menu cards had appeared. Oysters! Well, she supposed that was apt. And perhaps that boded well for Eulah’s chances. Helen placed equal stock in the power of old wives’ tales as she did in the newer branches of thought. Consommé Olga, whatever that was. Poached salmon and mousseline sauce with cucumbers.

“What is the name of this tune, Helen?” Mrs. Widener interrupted her thoughts with a poke of her gloved finger on Helen’s forearm.

“Why, I’m sure I don’t know.” Helen smiled, catching a glimpse of Eulah in the crowd of dancers, her head thrown back in exquisite laughter at something Harry was saying. Through the rising babble of dinner conversation, the clinking of cutlery and glassware, the swelling horn section of the band, Helen wondered if she could be hearing the clock tolling again. Was it tolling in actuality, or just in the back of her mind? She pushed the question aside, taking up the menu again to see what gustatory delights lay in store for her and her daughter.

Roast duckling in applesauce. Parmentier and boiled new potatoes. Cold asparagus vinaigrette. Pâté de foie gras, and—oh, Eulah would be so pleased—chocolate and vanilla eclairs! Helen turned in her seat, searching for her daughter’s gay face in the crowd of revelers, dropping the menu in her haste on the floor, where it settled against the gilded leg of her chair.

At the top of the menu, engraved in elegant, nautical letters, was written the name of the splendid ocean liner that was carrying them home: T
ITANIC
.

Chapter One

Beacon Hill
Boston, Massachusetts
April 15, 1915

Goodness, but the air was cloying. Sibyl Allston felt a cough rise in her chest and pressed her handkerchief to her lips to silence it. Thankfully she had soaked the kerchief in a little 4711 this time; the astringent, citrusy scent of the cologne sharpened her mind and pushed away the room’s miasma. She shifted, feeling her heart turn over in her chest, lurching in trepidation tinted with a strange kind of excitement.

Across the table, Sibyl observed an anonymous man, on the elderly side of middle age, also overcome by the heavy atmosphere. His eyes watered, and skin hung in sallow folds over his detachable collar. She didn’t know his name, though she supposed it would have been easy to deduce from the papers if she bothered to look. Sibyl saw him, every once in a rare while, driving down Beacon Street in an old-fashioned brougham, one of the last ones in town, his eyes sheathed in worry. Strange that they should always see each other here, always be seated directly opposite one another, and yet never breathe a word.

Mrs. Dee insisted on that. Absolute secrecy, and absolute silence. Mrs. Dee had a way of dealing only in absolutes that Sibyl had once found reassuring.

The parlor where they gathered every year had been redone in the modern style some decades ago, in homage to Mrs. Dee’s “celebrated” status. The furniture was all carved rococo woods, weighted down with curlicues and waxen fruit and snarling animal faces, the seats upholstered in scarlet silk with golden tassels. The walls bore silk upholstery in a rival shade of magenta patterned with rosebuds, their dignity screened from sunlight by double-hung velvet portieres in deep navy, kissed by sun bleaching at their fringed edges, ends puddling on the floor. The fireplace mantel was black marble, crowded with daguerreotypes and small geodes clustered on a doily, with twin crystal whale-oil lamps at either end.

The mantel also held a small brass dish, shaped like a leaf, with a smoldering cake of incense, its smoke snaking upward to the ceiling. Two ochre Turkish rugs warred for prominence over the floor, rivaled only by the vitrine against the far wall, cluttered with porcelain, bronze sculptures of frolicking nymphs, and glass-eyed stuffed birds frozen in flight. At the center of the riot of objects, each coated in a dignified veil of dust, glowed a glasslike orb nested in velvet. Sibyl eyed this item idly, attracted to its cleanness, she supposed, for it alone seemed to bear the trace of polish and care.

Sibyl herself sat perched on a hassock that positioned her too low relative to the table in the center of the room, her knees drawn up and angled sideways, one hand clasping the opposite wrist. A slender woman, ebony eyed and dark browed, with a long nose and milky skin, Sibyl dressed practically, in shirtwaist and slim dove gray skirt, her hair gathered in a bun at the crown of her head. Her one concession to adornment was a small pin at her throat, of gold and black enamel encircling an ivory wafer patterned with two laurel leaves. The laurel leaves were so cunningly worked that it was almost impossible to tell that they were formed from pale human hair: Helen’s mother’s. Helen herself had worn the laurel leaves for years; it was a wonder the pin hadn’t made the voyage with her. Sibyl reached up to finger it, reassuring herself.

The pin was an outdated ornament, but Sibyl herself was outdated in some respects. Not that she really minded anymore. At twenty-seven she had finally accepted that her life would remain confined to the oversight of her father’s household. She clasped her hands in her lap, digging a thumbnail into the flesh of her palm to distract her from the sore spots forming under the bones of her corset. Maybe Eulah had been right about rational dress after all. She shifted her weight, stomach sinking at the thought of her sister. The waiting was the worst part. Soon they would begin.

“If you would all kindly take your seats,” Mrs. Dee intoned from the parlor door, where she had appeared with no warning.

The celebrated medium enjoyed making an entrance though sometimes found it difficult, given her small stature. Sibyl appreciated that Mrs. Dee was always the last one in the room, counting on the element of anticipation and surprise to make up for what she lacked in intrinsic majesty. Plump and mono-bosomed, waddling in last year’s hobble skirt, Mrs. Dee waved her hands in a herding motion to gather her supplicants around the mahogany dining table. A silent butler drew back the most ornate of the various chairs, a pointed Gothic monstrosity that had been raised on casters to make Mrs. Dee seem taller. She settled herself in her throne as the dozen Bostonians in her parlor picked their way to seats that belonged to them by force of habit.

Sibyl knew a few of them; some she had known from before, in the little world of Boston society with its tight web of marriages and cousinships. Mr. Brown she knew from Belmont: she’d been to dancing school with his niece. Mrs. Futrelle, in from Scituate, her grief making her sharp features more drawn and ethereal with each passing year. Mrs. Hilliard had been in the same Thursday evening lecture club as Helen. The two Miss Newells, survivors both of the gruesome ordeal, the elder of whom, Madeleine, had been in Sibyl’s sewing circle. They were put in a lifeboat by their father on that dreadful night, never to see him again.

Not in this life, anyway.

Sibyl shivered, an inward chill raising goose bumps on her arms.

The others, like the sallow man seated across the table, remained a mystery. She knew that she might see them here and there, glimpsed in a church pew, or in a distant row at the Colonial Society; might even see one of their pictures in the
Evening Transcript
. No acknowledgment would be made on either side. What happened in Mrs. Dee’s parlor every April fifteenth was for them, and them alone.

“The lights, please,” Mrs. Dee commanded the butler, who obligingly turned down the gas in the overhead chandelier as he withdrew. When he slid the pocket doors to the parlor closed, the room sank into an eerie twilight. Sibyl could just make out the faint outlines of the people gathered about the table, and the shadows of the stuffed birds frozen in the vitrine. The rest of the room was murky and black, the smell of the incense almost overpowering. Her heartbeat quickened.

“Let us join hands,” Mrs. Dee’s voice suggested, swimming out of the darkness. Sibyl placed her two hands outward, palms up, on the cool tabletop, and felt unseen hands grasp them, warm and reassuring. She always found holding the hands strangely troubling, as though she were both tethered to the earth, yet isolated in the void. It felt almost obscene, this pressing of flesh, intimate, yet anonymous. As these uncomfortable thoughts passed through her mind, one of the hands offered an unsolicited squeeze.

“Now,” Mrs. Dee’s voice continued, distant and placeless. “I would like each of you to inhale deeply.” She paused. “And then exhale. And as you feel the air travel out of your body, I want you to relax.”

Sibyl did as the voice suggested, drawing the turgid air into her lungs as deeply as she could, and then letting it back out through her nose. As she did so, she felt her scalp begin to tingle, the skin loosening, just as it did when she unpinned her hair after a long day. She breathed in again, more softly, and as she exhaled the close atmosphere of the room receded, and the tingling deepened. Her head nodded forward.

“Very good,” soothed the voice, sounding farther away. “Now I would like all of you to clear your minds completely. Wipe them as blank as a chalkboard at the end of a day of tedious lessons.”

Sibyl closed her eyes, picturing her mind as the voice suggested. She wiped once, twice, three times. Then the board was empty, and Sibyl exhaled with relief.

“Now,” the voice suggested, far at the outer rims of Sibyl’s consciousness, “I would like you to focus your attention on the face of the person you would most like to reach.”

Sibyl concentrated, trying to recall Helen’s face. Her mother, looking younger than her years, though a little jowly. But Sibyl had trouble getting the details right. Her mother’s hair, for instance: how had she been wearing it? Sibyl could remember the high pinned curls that Helen wore when Sibyl was small, but she must have changed it half a dozen times since then. Had she started to gray, or was she still dark? What color had Helen’s eyes been? Hazel? Sibyl knew they hadn’t been brown, like her own. Had they been blue, like Eulah’s? Sibyl frowned, mouth pulled down in guilt. As Sibyl had grown, she found herself less willing to look Helen in the face. Her mother lingered in her memory as a voice of disapproval from the corner of the room, no longer attached to a living, expressive face.

For some reason Eulah left a more vibrant image in Sibyl’s mind. She’d been so like Helen, in her unconventional opinions and her affection for fine things, making the two women overlap in Sibyl’s memory. But Eulah, young, vibrant, suffered none of Helen’s worried disappointment. Sibyl had no trouble recalling her sister’s liquid blue eyes, the dimples in her cheeks when she said something daring, even the way that Eulah’s wild curls could be tamed into an elegant sweep up the back of her head. She could still hear the timbre of Eulah’s voice, lower and more earnest than her looks implied. When Sibyl tried to picture Helen, Eulah invariably got in the way. But that was how it was when they were alive, too: Eulah had always gotten in the way. Sibyl had only been out four seasons when their mother gave her up as a lost cause and started plotting Eulah’s entree into society instead. Eulah, who wouldn’t squander her opportunities, as Sibyl had.

“Try to see every contour of the person’s face,” the voice interrupted. “The eyes. The nose. The texture of the skin. The hair. Hold your loved one’s face before you as if you were sitting right across from him, in this very room.”

Sibyl heard murmurs of grief and recognition escape from various ends of the table, and she squinted her closed eyes, trying to do as she was told. So she couldn’t picture Helen this time; no matter. She would try to reach Eulah instead. She loved her sister, as everyone had. She had as much cause to reach her as anyone. Yes, there was Eulah’s form, the general outline of her face. Her eyes. Her nose—wait. No. Her nose had been smaller. There were her dimples, and her chin. Sibyl pressed her lips together in concentration.

“Ah!” the voice breathed. “I sense that we are being joined from the beyond! Everyone, remain focused and calm. You have nothing to fear. These are your loved ones, come to share their wisdom with us.”

Sibyl tensed, worried that she hadn’t captured the right qualities of Eulah’s face. The image kept unraveling before her, pulling apart and reforming, hazy and indistinct.

“I sense a male presence in the room!” Mrs. Dee announced, and Sibyl felt secretly relieved. Now she had more time to gather her recollections together. She was afraid that she might hurt Helen or Eulah, as if they could somehow see into the hollows of her mind and perceive the imperfection of her memory. She was afraid that they would find her love inadequate and, worse, trembled to think that they might be right.

“Sir, are you there? Can you hear us?”

Three sharp raps vibrated through the wood of the table, causing the backs of Sibyl’s hands to slap against the tabletop. A woman’s voiced gasped, and Sibyl’s pulse beat in her throat.