The House of Velvet and Glass (44 page)

“
It’s because you’re such a worrier,”
Eulah’s voice suggested in Sibyl’s mind.
“Look, you’re making yourself older just by fretting. There’s no use fretting, you know. I never fretted, did I? If you fret, it’ll just make him not notice you.”

“What?” Sibyl whispered to herself.

A scratch came at the door. Then another. Sibyl glanced up. The scratch turned into a soft knock.

She quickly fastened the buttons on her blouse and moved to open it.

“Oh!” Benton exclaimed, seeing her hair undone. “I’m—I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Sibyl swallowed, her eyes darting around her room to check for any improper signs of female residency. A corset lay abandoned on the floor in a tangle of laces, and her dressing gown was draped over the back of the armchair near the fireplace, a drooping puddle of silk. The bed linens were mussed, the pillows still deformed from the pressure of her sleeping head.

“Not at all,” she said, recovering from her surprise, and nudging the errant corset under the bed with a toe. “That is,” she corrected herself, “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a mess.”

He edged around the corner of the room, trying, and failing, not to let his eyes roam around this private feminine cloister. “I would never wish to intrude,” he began, “but I was thinking. About Edwin. And I had a question that I wanted to ask you. If you don’t mind.”

She reached forward and drew the dressing gown away from the back of the armchair, the silk making a soft whispering sound as she did so. Benton swallowed, visibly.

“All right,” she said. “Sit down, then.”

He did so, perching on the edge of the chair, as though settling comfortably would betray an inappropriate degree of ease with being where he was. She seated herself across from him, running a hand through her loose hair without thinking.

“What is it?” she asked.

He looked around, as though he might find a clue for how to begin secreted somewhere in the carpeting. “I was wondering,” he said. “How much you knew. Of Edwin’s travel plans.”

“What?” Sibyl asked, perplexed.

“Edwin told us he was traveling. What did you know about his trip?”

Sibyl’s dark brows knotted together over her eyes. “Why, nothing,” she said.

“You didn’t know he was going overseas. And that he was taking a steamer.”

“No,” she said. “I only ever spoke with him when you were there. He didn’t tell us his exact plans. Did he? I don’t think he did.”

“That’s what I thought,” Ben said, bringing a finger alongside his temple and staring into the fire.

“Why are you asking me this?”

He hesitated, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t know. Something’s bothering me, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

“Poor Edwin,” she said, thinking. The young professor’s face hung before her, the image of him from her vision crowding in on her thoughts. Sibyl reached for the newspaper on the end table, scanning the late edition for more details on what precisely had happened to the ship.

“Can this be right?” she asked, peering at the paper. The newsprint was so fresh that it peeled off the page, staining her fingers as she read. “They don’t know how many torpedoes it was?”

“They don’t. Some reports say it must have been two, as the ship was too grand and powerful to be breached by just one.”

Sibyl sat, eyes wide, thinking back to the closing image of the vision that she had been revisiting, daily, in secret, alone in her rooms for the past few weeks. First came the one explosion, the shattering impact of something striking the hull, which she didn’t see, but rather felt. Then a second, deeper explosion, the one that she could see through the dining room window, that blew itself outward, shooting water and debris into the sunny afternoon sky.

“The boiler,” she remarked to herself, eyes widening. “It must be.” She turned to him, growing increasingly certain the more she considered it. “Ben! Oh, my God.” As the realization dawned on her, Sibyl sank beneath a crushing wave of guilt.

She’d known. She’d seen it. And she hadn’t done anything to stop him going. She hadn’t understood in time.

Benton leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, looking at her with concern. “What is it, Sibyl? What’s the matter?”

“
Lusitania
.” She moaned, holding her temples between her hands. “Oh, my God, why didn’t I tell him? Why didn’t I say something?”

“What are you talking about?”

She climbed from her chair and knelt before him, searching up into his face, her lip trembling. “Benton,” she whispered. “I was wrong. In that vision. The one I kept having. I was wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Benton looked stricken.

“It must be. In all those times I never actually saw the name of the ship anywhere. I didn’t see the stern, and didn’t find it written anywhere inside. I just assumed . . . I assumed . . .” She trailed off, still on her heels, newspaper dropping to her lap, hands covering her face. Her voice caught in a sob, and she groaned, “Oh, no.”

Benton looked at her strangely, uncomprehending. “I don’t follow. What were you wrong about? Sibyl, tell me. Please.”

She placed both her hands on his knees and said, “What if—” She paused, afraid to give voice to what she was thinking. “Benton, what if it wasn’t
Titanic
I was seeing after all?”

He frowned in confusion. “What? Impossible.”

“But you said yourself, the image changed as I practiced. At first all I saw was ocean. Then I saw the ship, but it was nighttime. What if I was seeing the ship at night at first because it’s what I was expecting to see?”

“But your expectations never changed. You always thought you were seeing your family’s last moments. You never wavered.”

“You’re right,” she said, looking desperately up into his face. “But, Ben, I was mistaken. I must have been. The daylight? And then at the very end, Professor Friend? I wasn’t seeing
Titanic
. I was seeing
Lusitania
! Oh, poor Edwin.” She choked, the guilt and horror of her mistake squeezing the breath out of her like a vise.

“Coincidence. It must be.”

“How can it be? I couldn’t just make it up. Not and have so many of the details be accurate. Things I couldn’t possibly know.”

Benton stood, moving away from her to stand with his hands propped on the fireplace mantel, his head low between his arms. He shook his head, pressing his weight into the mantel, as if he could push the very idea away from him. “What you’re saying,” he said, his back to her. “I can’t accept it. It’s just not possible.”

Sibyl scrambled to her feet, moving near to him and placing her hand on his arm. His muscles tensed under her touch. “Ben,” she said. “It can’t be a coincidence. It can’t be. The daylight? The explosions? Professor Friend being there, without his wife? I couldn’t possibly imagine all those things. Maybe one or two of them, but not all.” Two tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes. A baby would grow up without a father because she hadn’t understood. “How else do you explain it? I didn’t understand. I failed. I thought I was seeing the past. But I wasn’t. I was seeing the future.”

He spun and looked at her with a wild expression. “Then why would the image have changed?” he demanded. “Explain that. If you were seeing something real, something that was really happening out there, in the world”—he swept his hand out in an all-encompassing gesture—“then it wouldn’t change, would it? What you’re seeing, it’s just dream stuff, Sibyl. It has to be. You put yourself into a kind of . . . a kind of. . . . Oh, I don’t know. A trance. Self-hypnosis. It’s been known to happen, I’ve seen it myself. And then your imagination shows you a cluster of symbols that pertain specifically to you, to your own subconscious mind. That’s the only explanation that could possibly make sense. It’s nothing to do with what happens to people out in the real world.”

“I know. You’re probably right,” she said. “But what if—what if this scrying glass were like playing music? Or—oh, I don’t know—sewing? You can’t just pick those things up and do them perfectly the first time. They’ve got to be practiced. You should see the first pillow I tried needlepointing. I threw it away, it was so awful. And Eulah! Everyone thought she was this marvelous dancer, but she used to practice her steps so much at night that she’d even do it without thinking, while she was brushing her teeth.”

He eyed her, wary. Sibyl tightened her grip on his arm. “She said,” Sibyl tried again, “Mrs. Dee said the scrying glass was for seeing. But she never told me
what
I might see, did she?”

“She’s a fraud, Sibyl,” he said, and his voice had a chill in it that she hadn’t heard before. “And you know it. The only thing you’re liable to see in that glass is what’s already in your own mind. You’re just sad that Edwin’s likely been lost. It’s grief. That’s what it is. And you feel guilty. But you couldn’t have done anything. None of us could have. The only thing that would’ve saved Edwin is if the Germans didn’t torpedo that liner.”

She released his arm, dropping her hand to her side and squaring her shoulders with resolve.

“All right,” Sibyl said, her voice calm. “So it’s all imaginary. It’s all in my head. In that case, then, there’s no harm in trying again, is there?”

“What do you mean?” He straightened, staring at her.

“If the images I’ve seen are nothing but a collection of ideas in my subconscious,” Sibyl said, “subject to changes that are also within my mind, then the vision should stay basically the same if I try it again, despite what’s just happened. Right?”

“Do you hear what you’re suggesting?” he asked with a wretched expression. “When both your father and I have warned you about the dangers?”

Sibyl’s eyes blackened to the color of obsidian, and she folded her arms over her chest. Standing with her arms crossed kept her hands from trembling. “I don’t care. I’m going to try it again.”

“Sibyl,” he started to object, but she ignored him.

Turning away, she busied herself at her dressing table. Sibyl still had the bottle of laudanum that she had stolen from her father, and it had a few measures of amber liquid left. She lit a stub of candle, tossing the match into the grate of her fireplace, and paused, running her fingers over the wooden box that held the scrying glass.

She mixed a measure of laudanum in the sherry glass that was now a permanent resident on her end table. She carried it, together with the candle and crystal ball, over to the low table by the fireplace and dropped into the chair. Watching her, face bent in a worried frown, Benton lowered himself back into his armchair and knotted his hands together.

“This is a bad idea,” he muttered. But he made no move to stop her. The space between them hummed with sudden tension. The fire popped.

She took a delicate sip from the sherry glass. Oddly, the bitter taste didn’t bother her as much as it had before. She wouldn’t say she liked it, exactly, but she found herself almost . . . anticipating it. While she swallowed the noxious liquid, Benton fumbled in his coat pockets for his cigarettes and leaned forward to light one on her candle.

He leaned back up, inhaling with a squinted eye against the smoke of his cigarette, watching her closely. She took another sip of her laudanum mixture, and as the liquid passed her lips she observed him lick his own lips, unawares.

“It’s all right, Ben,” she soothed, setting the glass to one side and leaning her head against the back of her chair as the intoxicating weight spread through her limbs. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“We’ll see,” he said, still watching her.

She frowned, but put his comment out of her mind. The smoke coiled up from his cigarette, the only movement in the otherwise silent room. She waited until the weight, the wonderful sluggishness, felt familiar, telling her that she had reached the right level for what she wanted to do. Then she opened the wooden box and withdrew the glass from its velvet nest.

The scrying glass’s surface appeared a dull milky blue, shot through with veins of quartz. Sibyl leaned back in her chair, bringing the ball close to her face. She focused her gaze on its surface, where the glimmers of light thrown off by the candle scattered in warm orange speckles. In the background, Benton’s face grew fuzzy and out of focus.

Earlier in the year Sibyl had attended an exhibition of pictures at the Copley Society of Art. Standing in the narrow Newbury Street gallery, she gazed on a painting that at first looked like nothing but blotches of paint, different colors all rioting in a nonsensical mass. She leaned in closer, bringing her nose almost up to the canvas (so new it still smelled of linseed oil), and the colors blurred together. But then, as she moved away, stepping backward one foot at a time, the colors resolved into a recognizable form. If she softened her eyes and stopped trying to see the component parts of the painting, then its internal structure revealed itself—a narrow bridge, arcing over a shimmering pond dotted with lilies. Sibyl gasped with sudden recognition as it happened, and once she saw the image she didn’t understand how she hadn’t seen it earlier.

In some respects using the scrying glass felt similar to that, like seeing without being aware that she was seeing. Sibyl let her gaze play about, not looking at the surface, instead absorbing the interplay of light and shadow. At first she saw nothing. She let her eyes relax. When Mrs. Dee showed her how to use the glass she made a fetish of hard concentration, but that didn’t seem right to Sibyl. Of course, Mrs. Dee was a fake. Or, if not a complete fake, as she claimed, then her fakery long ago eclipsed any real talent the woman may have had.

Sibyl let these thoughts drift through her mind, and set them aside. The spots of candlelight on the orb’s surface glowed, merging together in a web of light and then drawing into the center of the ball. The collected pinpoint of light deep inside the scrying glass began to release familiar coils of rich black smoke. Sibyl released an audible sigh of pleasure.

“Sibyl?” Benton asked, his eyes growing concerned. When she didn’t respond, he muttered, “I knew this was a bad idea,” and took a long drag on his cigarette.

Inside the ball the black smoke thickened, rolling back on itself. Her lips parted in anticipation, looking for the familiar ocean surface. She waited, and she waited, but for some reason, the image didn’t change. The smoke stayed, moving, always moving, but it stayed.