The House of Velvet and Glass (43 page)

“Which one is that?” Mrs. Widener asked, taking another sip of her wine.

The band tuned up and launched into a sedate foxtrot, and Helen lifted her chin, looking for a glimpse of Eulah’s vermilion silk. “Sibyl,” she said, eyes still scanning the crowd. No sign of Eulah. Where could she have gone?

“That’s a beautiful name.”

“You think so? I thought it was awfully queer, when he chose it for her. But I guess it’s grown on me,” Helen said, giving up her search and turning back to her tablemate. She pressed her lips together, thinking about her older daughter. Such a serious girl. Even playing, as a child, she did so with a seriousness of purpose. Harley toddling along after her, Sibyl giving him instructions. He was her little lieutenant. And so stubborn! No one could ever tell Sibyl anything. It was a relief that she was so reliable. Imagine, a child with Eulah’s freewheeling outlook and Sibyl’s independence! Why, her heart quailed to even think of it.

Sibyl grew up pretty enough, Helen supposed. A little dark. A shade too thin. But she had suitors, perfectly fine ones. The Coombs boy. He was innocuous, but adequate. She had liked that Derby fellow well enough, and he might have taken up Richard’s stake in the firm. Give Lan a proper heir apparent. For a time it looked like Sibyl would be all right. Lan had been so certain! But something happened. Helen never understood what. She worried that Sibyl had been too coy. Too much the friend, and not enough of a woman. Finally Helen had to accept that Sibyl was a lost cause. They would be just as happy to keep her at home, if that’s how it was going to be. Particularly when Lan got older. Sibyl would be invaluable then.

“Well, I think it’s rather elegant,” Eleanor said, lifting her nose with a sniff. Her fingers turned her wineglass on the tablecloth.

“She’s so like her father,” Helen mused, gazing at the nosegay of lilies forming the table centerpiece.

“Oh? How’s that?”

Helen paused, thinking. She had been seventeen when she first met Lan Allston. It was at a dinner dance given by her Boston Edgell cousins, and Helen remembered that that night was the first time her mother let her wear her hair up. She’d felt awfully mature, with that heap of curls pinned on her head, and the high bustle in the back of her dress rustling with taffeta formality. She’d taken the train in all the way from Framingham for the occasion with her mother, whose ambition for Helen made her own for Eulah look laughable in comparison. It wasn’t often she was invited to dances in Boston. Her mother was determined to make it count. Most of the train ride was spent listening to her mother emit a stream of commentary on who might be there, and who Helen should endeavor to meet, and what Helen must, under no circumstances, say.

But Helen was never very sure of herself, especially not at seventeen. When they finally arrived at the dance she loitered on the periphery of the drawing room, alone, watching as crowds of young people laughed and stepped their way through a quadrille. Twisting her hands together in her purple taffeta, Helen wished she could disappear behind the potted fern. None of the other girls were wearing purple. Maybe it was old-fashioned? She didn’t know anyone except her cousin Constance, who was older, anyway, and who always seemed like she was being nice to Helen out of a sense of duty, and not because she wanted to.

“Go on,” her mother hissed in Helen’s ear. “Circulate, at least!” Helen felt a sharp pinch on the flesh of her upper arm, and she squeaked.

“Mother!” she hissed back. But there was no arguing with Mehitabel Edgell. Helen felt her mother’s eyes boring holes in the back of her neck as she propelled her recalcitrant daughter from behind the fern around the edge of the room, and deposited her within a crowd of strange men’s shoulders. Helen’s heart thudded in her chest, and she broke into a clammy sweat.

“Why, it’s you!” a merry voice said in her ear. “I wondered if I’d find you here.”

Helen jumped and looked around to see who had spoken. There, standing at her shoulder, was an elegant man who looked to be in his early thirties. He was tall and regal-looking, with his hair longer than was fashionable, and sideburns reaching almost to his jaw. His eyes were an unsettling shade of pale blue and had creases around them that had been burned there by the sun. He was smiling down at her.

“Me?” she said, taking a step back. “Have we met before?”

“I don’t believe we have,” he said. “I apologize for not arranging a more proper introduction. I’m Harlan Plummer Allston Junior.” He half bowed with an air of ironic seriousness. “But, of course, no one calls me that.”

She laughed before she could help herself. He was old, but he was sort of funny. “Oh? And what do they call you, then?” she asked.

“Lan,” he said. “And you’re called Helen, aren’t you?”

She gasped, so surprised that she grew light-headed. Her mother had laced her too tight, as usual. “Why,” she stammered. “Yes. Yes, I am. Helen Edgell.”

“I thought so,” he said. She stared at him, her lips parted in wonder. Something about Lan Allston soothed her. Most of the other men in the room struck Helen as arrogant, overcompensating by putting on airs of sophistication. But something about Lan Allston was serene and unreachable. She gazed into his eyes, seeing depths of experience there that she knew she would never understand, which lent him a gravitas that the other men were lacking. And this man, whose respectability struck Helen as hard won rather than given, was focusing his attention on her.

“You haven’t danced yet, have you?” he said, offering his hand. “Did you lose your card?”

“N-no. I haven’t. It’s . . . you know, I’m not sure where I put it,” Helen said. She placed her hand in his without a moment’s hesitation. The skin of his hand was rough and weathered in a way that made Helen shiver. It was a hand that had been places far beyond Framingham.

“Then we must remedy that,” he said with a smile. Helen let herself be led into the center of the dance floor, to be spun around the room with ease in the sturdy arms of the man who, she knew with sudden clarity, would be her husband.

“Helen?” Eleanor Widener prodded her.

“Oh?” What was she talking about? Oh. Sibyl. Of course.

“Your eldest? She’s like her father, you said.”

“Ah.” Helen paused. And so she was. There was something of the Allston stillness in Sibyl. The same uncanny certainty that Helen had sensed in Lan that first night she met him. “I suppose that Sibyl has her father’s”—Helen groped for the right word—“resilience. They take everything in stride. Most things, anyway.” She paused again, and Eleanor leaned forward, waiting for Helen to continue.

The tune changed, and several couples made their way back to their tables as a bevy of waiters deposited the first course of supper, starting with the captain’s table.

“Where could they be?” Helen asked aloud, searching the crowd for Eulah and Harry. “You don’t think something can have happened, do you?”

Eleanor Widener laughed. “Indeed not, Helen,” she said, placing a hand on Helen’s forearm. “There’s nothing to worry about. Not a thing in the world.”

Chapter Twenty-two

The Back Bay
Boston, Massachusetts
May 7, 1915

“But that’s impossible,” Sibyl said. Her stomach dropped, the same sensation she had riding the roller coaster at Revere Beach one ill-advised summer afternoon years ago. The tottering and tipping at a high apex, and then the sickening fall and spin, the sound of screams in her ears. She thought she was going to be sick.

“We only just saw him! He couldn’t have been.”

“He was,” Benton said. Sibyl saw that his eyes were red-rimmed and raw. He reached a hand to Sibyl’s knee, and the warm pressure of his fingertips told her that this was real, what he was saying. This was really happening. “Edwin Friend was definitely on
Lusitania.
”

“But I don’t understand,” she protested. A bubble of panic rose in her chest, panic tinged with despair.

“He told us he was sailing, remember? That was why we had to hurry and see Mrs. Dee the day we went to his office. That was why it couldn’t wait. He was set to sail from New York the next day. May first, it was. I had a cable from him on the dock, as a matter of fact. They were delayed by a couple of hours as they took on some passengers from another ship that had just been requisitioned.”

“Requisitioned!”

“For the war. They can do that, you know.”

“Oh. The war. Of course.” Sibyl let her breath out, a confused coldness spreading within her, as though she had taken a long drink of ice water. She looked down into her lap and then glanced up to Benton’s face. “But is he . . . ?”

“There’s no knowing,” Benton said. “None of the newspapers can agree about how many casualties there’ve been. I’ve tried calling Cunard, but there’s no getting through. The operator told me not to bother, nobody’s getting through at all. She suggested I watch the papers instead. But so far half of them say everyone’s been lost, and the other half say everyone’s been saved. I can’t tell what’s true. It’s madness.”

Sibyl’s grip tightened on her own hands in impotent worry, her needlepoint slipping to the floor unheeded. She blinked back the hot tears that were trying to force their way out of her eyes. “But. He could be saved, then couldn’t he?”

Benton watched her, and his own eyes reddened. “I’m hoping. I’m—” He paused, not meeting her eyes. “Praying, even. I’m praying.”

They sat for a long silent moment, each weighing in private horror the feeling of an ocean liner shifting underfoot, listing, being swallowed by the gaping maw of the sea.

“Then all we can do is wait. We have to wait,” Sibyl said. “Oh, my God,” she added, remembering the ring on his hand. She looked with new horror at Benton. “He has a wife, doesn’t he?”

Benton looked down and nodded, wiping his eye with the back of his wrist. “He does. And she’s going to have a child. In four months.”

Sibyl’s breath caught in a stifled sob. “Oh,” she whispered, placing her head in her hands. “Oh, poor Edwin. I didn’t know that.”

“It was in the cable he sent me. Asked me to look in on her while he was away. I’d thought something was up, you know. He’d been even punchier than usual the past few weeks. But I can’t believe he’d go overseas at a time like this. That damned fellowship that he got. Meeting with the British Society for Psychical Research, or some nonsense. The consulate as good as warned the passengers that it would happen. Did you see the announcement? In the paper, no less!”

“They did?”

“They did. Here it is.”

Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.

Imperial German Embassy

Washington, D.C. 22nd April 1915

“They said it. It’s practically a promise.”

“Why in God’s name would he go? Why would any of them? I had no idea they’d issued a warning like that. What could have been in his head?” Sibyl exclaimed, a tear escaping her eyelid and streaking down her cheek. Her face was blotchy and hot.

“I wish I knew. But he’s always been so damnably confident. He’d have been too excited thinking about his conference. And anyway, plenty of people thought they’d never have the nerve to attack an ocean liner. He’d have said the same.”

Benton’s face blackened with anger at his friend and colleague. “Stubborn as a mule,” he added, voice breaking again. He sank his head in his hands, and Sibyl saw his shoulders shuddering. She didn’t comment, instead letting him sit like that, resting her own hand on his knee.

“Ben,” she whispered. She moved her hand to his back and stroked his shoulder. “Ben,” she whispered again.

Upstairs, Sibyl unwound her hair and ran a brush through it, listless. They’d had a nearly silent supper, Benton pushing vegetables around his plate, responding in monosyllables. He was still downstairs, playing a disinterested hand of cards with Harlan while her brother chattered about what Wilson would do next. Benton seemed unwilling to go home, and no one mentioned the time.

Half undressed, her blouse undone at the throat and hair loose around her shoulders, Sibyl sank into her armchair and gazed into the fire, thinking about Edwin Friend. His warm, sparkling eyes. His expectant wife. She must be frantic with worry. Benton had phoned her from the front hallway, just before dinner, and Sibyl had done her best not to eavesdrop. But the hopeless expression on Benton’s face after the call told her that there was still no news.

The fire popped. Sibyl brought a thumbnail to her mouth and gave it a meditative chew.

She caught sight of her reflection in the window glass, her face drawn and pale, faint purplish circles under her eyes.