The House of Velvet and Glass (38 page)

This long ago afternoon, in a Salem parlor half a world away, lurked now in the back of Lannie’s mind as he lay in the Shanghai house of smoke and flowers.

Just as he had stared through the slats of the zoetrope, now his full attention focused on the strange scenes forming within the light on the motes of tea at the bottom of his cup. He stared, entranced, pulled in by the illusion.

“Like a zoetrope in my hand,” he whispered.

He saw water, mostly. At first. Not water in the teacup, not tea, but
water
—the ocean. Whitecaps, ripples, and swells. As though he were there in person, staring at the surface of the sea while riding to shore on the cutter. He had never, outside Eunice Proctor’s well-appointed drawing room, experienced a moving image reproduced, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away. The perspective within the teacup changed, as though he were skimming along the water like a seagull, and he came upon a clipper, the
Morpheo
, he thought, slicing its way through a canal.

“The ship,” Lannie whispered.

The image shimmered and transformed into another ship, similar to
Morpheo
but larger. A steam-sail hybrid, and his perspective zoomed over the deck until it hovered by a man of about thirty bent over a navigation table. With a chilled gasp Lannie saw that this man was
himself
, with long muttonchop whiskers, and that he was giving instructions to a younger man standing next to him.

“Steam?” he whispered. He knew of steamships, but had yet to work one. He spoke the word aloud, and the scene melted apart, unveiling a ship that boggled Lannie’s mind. Impossibly large, massive, more like a European hotel laid on its side than any oceangoing vessel. The behemoth had no sails, pushing itself forward through a starlit night, muscling aside the ocean as it went, with four striped smokestacks belching coal smoke. A craggy shape floated in the distance.

“But, what? How does it—?” Lannie sputtered. Was it another command? When he was even older? Was it all just a phantasm of his twisted imagination?

“You’re muttering,” the young man overhead commented. Lannie didn’t hear him.

Inside the tea glass, the sea boiled away to reveal a college campus in the full flush of autumn. Blurred faces passed by, young men his age, none of them familiar. And then he saw himself.

His cheeks were fuller, tanned still, his hair less moppish, and his mustache had finally come in. This grown Lannie was not doing anything in particular, just striding along past Massachusetts Hall, shuffling his feet through chestnut leaves, hands in his pockets, lost in his thoughts.

Lannie imagined he could hear
bong
ing, the university clock tower perhaps, and then the college campus dissolved, its buildings melting like spun sugar in boiling water. Out of the swirling tea fragments resolved the form of a fine house, rising from an empty riverside vacant lot within scaffolding, brick by brick, in a time-lapse succession.

“My!” he exclaimed.

As he watched, a man, himself he guessed, only older, in a dark waistcoat, his whiskers touched with dignified gray, ushered a very young, very beautiful woman on his arm up the stairs.

“Having pipe dreams, are you? They can be awfully nice, sometimes.” The scholar’s voice wedged itself into his ear. Lannie pushed it away.

He wanted more. He wanted to see inside the house. He watched himself fumbling with keys at the front door, the beautiful woman tossing her head back and laughing, waving her hands with excitement while she explained something. His older self smiled and nodded, but there was something behind the smile that looked a little sad.

“I don’t see what you want a clock for, anyway.” The voice intruded again.

What was he wanting to talk so much for? Lannie wished he could be left alone with his teacup. He was entranced. Pipe dreams, maybe, but everything he saw fit the plan he had hatched, with his father’s guidance, in the months leading up to the ship’s departure for the Far East. He’d finish out his time on
Morpheo
, make some money. He would arrive home older, wiser. Then he’d be ready for college down in Cambridge. After Harvard he’d get his own merchant command. With this new command he’d make his fortune. He’d make his name.

And someday, he’d meet that exquisite girl. Who was that girl?

Absorbed in his plans, Lannie grumbled an incoherent nonresponse to Johnny. He wanted to see more. He wanted to see all that the sea would make of his life.

“A clock can’t actually tell you anything about time,” the scholar mused, oblivious.

“Huh?” Lannie said, irritated. The image in the teacup grew difficult to discern. He needed to concentrate, or it didn’t work. Whatever “it” was. He wished the young man would stop distracting him.

“It’s useless to know what time it is
now
,” Johnny insisted. His bowl’s worth of opium must have worn off, making him chattier. “Knowledge of the past makes a man wise. Knowledge of the future, well”—he laughed—“that could make a man rich. But neither will make him happy.”

“You don’t think being wise and rich is the same as being happy?” Lannie asked, still with one eye in his teacup. Johnny wasn’t making any sense.

“Yankee with the fake Chinese name,” the scholar said, peering over the edge of the bunk and looking into Lannie’s face. “Only by being present can you be happy. Too much attention to the past and the future takes the
now
away. And once it’s gone, you never get it back.”

Lannie laughed, shaking his head. “You’re crazy, you know that?” he suggested.

The scholar’s face withdrew back to the top bunk. “Maybe,” he muttered. “Maybe not.”

Lannie pulled his chronometer from its hiding place and gazed on it, as if consulting the timepiece would prove his acquaintance wrong. But something was off. He screwed his eyes tighter. Lannie had trouble telling what time the chronometer read. God knew what poisons were in his blood, souring his humors and fogging his brain. Try as he might, he couldn’t derive any sense from the chronometer face. With a sigh of irritation he secreted the instrument back in the safety of his armpit. If he nodded off he had no wish to be relieved of it before he even had the chance to use it at sea.

He ruminated, swirling the liquid in his cup, watching the patterns shift with the motion of the tea. “Johnny?” Lannie said without tearing his eyes away.

“Mmmmmm?”

As he’d said his companion’s name, the scene in the leaves shifted, focusing. He saw Johnny, in the same clothes that he was wearing now, in the thin light of early dawn. An argument. A crowd had gathered. Someone stepped forward and shoved him in the chest. The group cheered, like the braying audience at a bare-knuckle boxing match. Johnny shoved back, and the crowd clustered nearer, egging them on.

Then the other man had his hands around Johnny’s throat. The hands tightened, and Johnny’s face started to turn cherry red. His fingers clawed at the other man’s hands, and his feet beat against the ground.

“Oh, my God!” Lannie exclaimed.

“You shouldn’t swear, Yankee,” Johnny muttered from the bunk overhead. “Unchristian barbarian.”

“Oh, stop it!” he cried, forgetting himself, speaking to the figures that he saw in the glass.

At the moment that the words escaped his mouth, the scene shifted. Someone broke through the crowd around the two men, who were locked together, grappling, each man pushing the other’s face away with a clutching hand, teeth bared in animal strain.

Johnny’s tongue protruded in a grotesque perversion of a mask from Greek tragedy, his limbs slackening. Then the third figure was upon them, there was a flash of something bright and a splash of red, a spreading blotch on the larger man’s shirt, and the hands around Johnny’s neck loosened. Freed, Johnny doubled over, collapsing on the ground, coughing and clawing for air.

Through the zoetrope of Lannie’s teacup, the larger figure fell to his knees, his hands wrapped around his middle, surprised. With each slosh of the teacup the man’s face changed, as though viewed through a prism. The third man stood over him, and Lannie could see that the third man was breathing heavily, his head down, his hands at his sides. Both of the third man’s hands were stained red, and at his side, held loose, was a short knife dripping blood.

“Johnny,” Lannie started to say, baffled. The scene was like a version of what had happened in the whorehouse, but the time was clearly different, and the outcome was as well. He didn’t understand. Was he just now feeling the fear from the earlier fight, when Tom had beaten a tooth out of his jaw?

“Don’t spend too long in the pipe dream,” the scholar admonished. “You might never make it back.”

But Lannie didn’t say anything. Deep within the shifting forms of tea, in the strange dreamworld the drug had woven in his mind’s eye, the third man, the one holding the dripping knife at his side, had lifted his other arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and turned at a different angle, so that Lannie could clearly see his face.

“Oh, my God,” Lannie whispered. “It’s me.”

Chapter Twenty

The Back Bay
Boston, Massachusetts
April 30, 1915

“Shhh! She’ll be back anytime,” Dovie whispered, disentangling herself from Harlan’s grasp and rolling out of his reach. Harlan grinned, making a show of grasping at the air where she had lately been.

“No, she won’t,” he insisted. “Come on. Just another minute.”

“She will,” Dovie said, with a lowered eyebrow at him. She turned her back and faced his highboy mirror, bunching her fingers in her hair to fluff it back into place. “I expected her an hour ago. It’s a wonder she hasn’t gotten home already.”

Harlan propped himself on an elbow and looked at Dovie, enjoying the quick movements of her slim arms as she rubbed a fingertip over her lips to redden them. The rumples in the shell-colored slip hanging from her shoulders accented the shape of her body, with its slim boylike hips and narrow shoulders. She looked like a fledgling with her hair mussed like that, all baby feathers and bony legs. A delicious, almost painful twinge of affection caught his breath up short, and he smiled at her, eyes soft. She glanced up into the highboy mirror reflection, meeting his eyes. And returned the smile.

“Oh, who cares what she thinks, anyway,” Harlan said. His hand stretched forward and caught the hem of her slip.

“
I
care,” Dovie said, turning to face him. The slip hem twisted around her legs, tying itself like a bow. He tugged on it, enjoying watching the silk move over her skin. “She’s been real nice to me, you know.”

“Well, sure she has,” Harlan said, still with an easy grin on his face. “You’re wonderful.”

“I mean it,” Dovie said as he drew her slowly to him with the slip in his hands. Her shins met the edge of his rope bed, and she climbed on, standing on her knees with her hands angled down along her flanks. “I know they all think it was my fault.”

“What, this?” Harlan brushed his free hand over the bandage on his ribs. “Oh, they don’t know.”

“They do,” she countered, looking down at him with what he knew was her real serious face, and not her simulated one. “They think I’m some whore you tried to rescue, and my procurer beat you. They do!” she argued over his beginning protest. “Or else they think you got jumped by gangsters, which I probably introduced you to, since I’m so unrespectable.”

“As if I’d borrow money from gangsters. Come on,” Harlan said, grinning out of the side of his mouth. “I haven’t lost
that
much.”

“Harley, you should—” Dovie started to say, but she stopped herself as the sound of footfalls moved past the locked bedroom door. The footfalls stopped, followed by the sound of rustling taffeta, as though someone were listening at the keyhole. Harlan widened his eyes and clapped a hand over his mouth in pretend silence. Dovie smiled down at him, a finger pressed to her lips. A few seconds ticked by, and then the distinct music of an Irishwoman clearing her throat could be heard in the hallway, before the steps moved away.

Laughing, Harlan took up a pillow and swung it at Dovie, hitting her fragile shoulder with a muffled
plumpf.
She squealed, laughing, collapsing into the bedclothes as Harlan rolled onto her on his elbows. “Shhhh!” she whispered, her hands threading through his hair as he rained kisses on her forehead, her cheek, the corner of her ruby mouth, the hollow at the base of her collarbone. “Harley!” she protested, silent laughter shaking her body.

“Shhhh,” he countered, brushing his nose along the creamy planes of her neck where it met her shoulder. Her skin was delectable, the fine hairs at the base of her skull tickling when he pressed his lips there. He loved the warm girl-smell of her, spicy, like incense lingering on her skin.

“Really, you’ve got to tell them the truth. They’ll never like me otherwise.”

“Later,” he whispered into her hair. “Plenty of time for that. Later.”

“Sibyl, please listen,” Benton was protesting downstairs as they entered the front hallway of the Beacon Street town house, Sibyl moving quickly, as if she could abandon his doubt behind her on the stoop. Outside in the street, the taxicab containing Professor Friend pulled away with a sputter of engine backfire, the professor waving farewell through the back window as the cab rolled down Beacon Street.