The House of Velvet and Glass (30 page)

“Sleep?” the young man echoed. “Who said anything about sleep?”

Gingerly Lannie spread his peacoat over the bunk’s filth, and lay down. His spine popped, cracking with relief at being allowed to lie flat for the first time in weeks.

His eyes drooped, and before he knew what was happening he was falling backward into a sleep as black as a midnight pond.

“You closing your eyes, Yankee with the fake Chinese name?” the translator’s voice said, and Lannie’s eyes flew open, startled. He had no idea where he was.

“What?”

“Don’t fall asleep, now.”

“I wasn’t! That is, I . . .” Lannie trailed off, licking his lips, confused.

“Course you weren’t,” the translator agreed.

Time passed. Lannie couldn’t tell how much. He was accustomed to the rigid order of watches on the ship, of the
dong
ing of the ship’s bell, and was disturbed not to sense the time. How could there be no clocks here? Of course, there wasn’t much of anything here. He would give most anything for a clock.

“Johnny,” he ventured.

“Mmmmm?” came the voice from above.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Time is just point of view.” The scholar yawned. “A single day is nothing to a rock, and a lifetime to a mayfly. What’s the difference?”

Lannie chuckled. “Well, I guess you’re right. But I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea what time a clock would read right now, if I were to look at one?”

The young man sighed at Lannie’s apparent thickheadedness.

“No idea. But if you’re really that concerned about it, just ask.” He called out a short, declarative syllable, and a small boy scampered over. Johnny issued a command, and the boy dashed off. In a moment he reappeared, presented an object to Lannie on outstretched hands, bent his head, and waited.

“What are you waiting for?” Johnny asked, gazing down from overhead.

“What?” Lannie said. “I don’t understand.”

“He’s brought what you asked for. You’d better pay him.”

Lannie propped himself on an elbow and peered at the object in the boy’s hands. To his surprise, he found a small marine chronometer, of polished brass, its crystal crusted with salt.

“What’s this doing here?”

“I imagine someone used it to buy goods in trade. Looks too old to be much use, anyway. I’m surprised they took it.”

Lannie knew better. A sailor would have to be of some rank to warrant a chronometer. He would have to be desperate to part with it. Lannie smiled, brushing his fingertips over its burnished surface, wondering what ports it must have passed through to go from London, where it was made, to this dank corner of Shanghai. Valparaiso? Tortuga? New York? Salem, even?

“Pay him,” Johnny said.

“I don’t know how much.” Lannie hesitated. He could never afford to buy such a fine timepiece in a chandlery. They were so prized for longitudinal navigation that old chronometers wound up on fireplace mantels, not in pawnshops. But Lannie suspected that dens of iniquity were unaccustomed to dealing in fine marine instruments and wouldn’t know its worth.

“Bah.” The scholar dismissed Lannie’s concern. “Just give him something for his trouble.”

Eyelids fluttering with excitement at his good fortune, Lannie rummaged for his wad of bills, peeled one off, and presented it to the boy with an affectation of reluctance. The boy pocketed the money and moved off, with a touch of smugness at the good bargain.

Lannie settled on his back with his new prize cradled in his hands. He held it up to his ear, listening to its reassuring ticking. Sure enough, it was late enough at night to qualify as morning. But no matter. He had a chronometer!

The young woman with braids reappeared, carrying a tray. She set it on the floor with a thud and placed a small lamp at Lannie’s elbow, reaching up to place another by Johnny. Next to the lamp she dropped a length of bamboo with an earthenware bowl attached, a metal knitting needle, and a grubby spoon. Johnny exchanged a few words with the girl, who argued, looking put out. Johnny argued, and the girl muttered in annoyance, but acquiesced.

“I’m getting her to help you,” Johnny explained.

“Help me?” Lannie said, tucking the chronometer under his arm. “Help me with what?”

The girl leaned nearer, and a braid fell from her shoulder, swinging down and brushing against his arm. Lannie swallowed, muscles tensing.

“Johnny,” he said.

“Hmmmmm?” He heard rustling as the scholar shifted himself on the mats.

“Do you think I could get something to drink? I’m parched.”

“I don’t see why not.” He fired off a request to the girl. She snapped back in a tirade, pointing down in front of her at what she was doing. Johnny insisted, and the girl threw down her implements with irritation. When she reappeared, it was with a smeared glass of something watery.

“I was hoping for whiskey,” Lannie confessed.

“Tea is better. You’ll see.” He paused. “Sometimes you find people who can read the leaves, you know. Ever try that?”

“Reading the leaves?” Lannie said, peering into the glass. An unappetizing scum of leaf fragments swirled at the bottom, caught in muddy eddies of tea. “I wouldn’t know how.”

“Give it a try after,” Johnny suggested. “Give you something to do.”

The girl with the braids held a long match to the lamp and then shook it out. She pushed the bamboo stalk into Lannie’s hands. He took it, uncomprehending. “What?” he said.

Irritated, she mimed bringing the end of the bamboo to her lips. The gesture struck Lannie as strangely obscene.

“Are you arguing with the nice lotus flower?” the scholar chided, invisible in the gloom. “Didn’t your barbarian mother teach you manners?”

Lannie snorted at the characterization of the redoubtable codfish aristocrat Sarah Allston as “a barbarian.”

Keeping his eyes on the girl, he brought the end of the bamboo to his mouth. As he did so, she pressed the knitting needle to the opening in the clay bowl, while steering the bowl nearer the lamp flame. The wick needed trimming, and the lamp gave off an oily coil of smoke that made Lannie’s eyes smart.

The girl issued an order, and Lannie inhaled. The end of the knitting needle exploded in a blue ball of flame, and Lannie’s mouth flooded with bitter numbness. Surprised, Lannie slipped, thudding to the bunk. The room tipped on its side, obscured by ragged ends of straw and his peacoat’s collar.

“Ow,” he heard someone say.

The girl was watching him closely and, noticing his expression, emitted a tiny smile before disengaging the pipe from his slack fingers. She laid it beside him, within reach, and moved the forgotten glass of tea nearer. She rolled the lamp wick down, and its smoking subsided. Then she crept away.

He sighed. His lips felt funny. The numbness inside his mouth spread to his face. He brought a hand, with some effort, up to his cheek, and was surprised to find it gritty with dried blood. His jaw felt fine. He worked the muscles in his face, brushing the remaining molars over each other, and felt no pain. In its place Lannie found a splendid wholeness, as though deep in his body rolled a calm, smooth ocean, lit by the sinking pink of an evening sun. Lannie gazed into nothing, glassy eyed, letting the sunset creep along his limbs.

“Tea.” The syllable drifted from the bunk overhead and hovered before Lannie, devoid of context.

Tea
. His mouth felt gummy, coated in a film of disuse. He groped around, hunting for the forgotten drink.

The liquid was tepid, but it washed the moss out of his mouth. He shifted to his side and propped his head in his palm. The rolling ocean and glowing sun still illuminated the inside of his head. He surveyed the room, no longer perturbed by its dessicated occupants, or the silence.

“How’s your jaw?” The words moved slowly, reaching Lannie one at a time.

“Good,” Lannie said.

“
Good
,” the scholar echoed with a sleepy laugh. “Maybe have a little more tea.”

Lannie brought the glass to his face, swirling its contents with a meditative gesture. His eyes slid down to the surface of the tea, the liquid membrane broken by flecks of chopped leaves.

Lannie’s eyes moved, following the leaves. The bits of leaf came together and pulled apart, swirling within the light on the surface of the water, drawing the light behind them in tiny eddies.

A soft sigh of astonishment escaped Lannie’s mouth.

The leaves. They had formed a pattern.

Chapter Sixteen

Harvard Square
Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 29, 1915

Harlan realized, as he was halfway across the Yard and closing in on the new library, that perhaps he ought to have given it more thought before setting foot on campus again. Already he had passed two or three boys he knew, and though they greeted him with the jollity and hallooing that were de rigeur among the slick-haired boys of Harlan’s class, he could tell by the nervous flicker of their eyelids that they had heard . . . well, something. How much credence they had given the rumors depended in large part on which of Harlan’s disgraces were under consideration. The conversations were strained, all undertaken with the pretense of sharing news as though Harlan were just back from an extended trip, rather than removed from their world with abrupt finality.

Harlan pulled his coat collar up around his ears, feeling conspicuous for his lack of haste. The clock in the tower of Appleton Chapel struck the half hour, and Harlan’s pace slowed, despite the certain knowledge that he would now be late to his appointed meeting. Harlan frowned at his feet.

Well, the library was looking pretty fine, wasn’t it? Harlan invented a reason to stop walking, indifferent to the creeping damp in his clothes. He turned to the neoclassical row of columns that would soon guard Harvard’s vast collection of books, a mere month away from opening with suitable pomp and ceremony. Imagine, a man who would be not that much older than himself, if he weren’t dead, with a grand new library all erected in his honor. He hadn’t known Harry Widener, himself. Poor fellow. Course there were plenty of ways that Harlan would prefer to be remembered, than with a library. He was never really one for books.

But even so . . .

Harlan stood, stock-still, letting the bustle of campus fall away, thinking. He had avoided considering too closely the fact that his classmate had perished on the same night—probably within moments—as his mother and sister. He hated having to think about them every time he set foot on campus. The library facade was like a giant sign that read
HARLAN, YOU DIDN’T HELP THEM
. Impossible to attend a club meeting, a party, a graduation . . . at every turn, the library would be standing there, a silent testimony to meaningless horror and death. And him, just going along, living. It offended him, being alive like this.

How come some man hadn’t been there to see them safely into a lifeboat? That was the question that Harlan couldn’t escape. The papers had been filled with eyewitness accounts of the heroism of men ushering women and children into the boats, of standing aside, facing their fates without qualm. But not his mother and sister. No one had bothered to help them. Did no one have honor anymore?

His mother had been a helpless duck, cunning with people, but when it came to practicalities, Helen Allston had been a prisoner of nicety. Despite her unorthodox Spiritualist beliefs, Helen belonged to an earlier age. She could never make herself understood on the telephone, railed against every advance of modernity as less refined than some imagined, long-past standard of propriety, which Harlan was pretty sure dwelt only in his mother’s imagination.

Eulah’d been just the opposite, of course. His sister had struck him as a mouthy and large-hatted memorandum sent directly from the future, with her votes and her shorter skirts and her dancing. She surely would have had the wherewithal to. . . . Well, in any case, she would’ve felt no compunction whatever about asking someone to . . .

Harlan folded his arms over his chest and traced a circle in the mud with his toe.

As he turned his desultory way toward Benton Derby’s office, he scowled over his shoulder at the library’s indifferent facade, hating it.

Someone should have helped them.

Someone.

When Harlan came upon Benton Derby’s office upstairs from the Department of Social Ethics, he found the door already open and occupied by a lanky professorial fellow, who looked to be about Sibyl’s age.

Harlan came to a stop, his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat, hair falling forward into his eyes, and wet. He cleared his throat.

“Oh!” the other professor exclaimed. “A visitor, Professor Derby. I’ve monopolized you yet again.”

Harlan peered around the door and observed Benton getting to his feet behind his desk, drawing off his spectacles, and bringing the earpiece to the corner of his mouth. Benton’s face looked pinched, the face of a man with something on his mind. Harlan knew perfectly well that the pinched expression was reserved for him.

“Ah,” Benton said. “Professor Edwin Friend, I’d like you to meet Harlan Allston.”

“How d’you do,” Harlan mumbled, sticking his hand out in front of him.