The House of Velvet and Glass (48 page)

Nothing happened. It sat there, a lump of cloudy, polished quartz.

“I don’t know, Ben,” Sibyl managed to say. “I’m not sure it’s going to work like this.”

Benton didn’t respond, instead scribbling notes in his notebook. “That’s all right,” he said, eyes on his notes. “Just tell me whatever happens. Remember. Even no result counts as a result.”

Sibyl let her gaze soften, pushing aside the worry that she would fail.

“Narrate for me, Sibyl,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget. I can’t see it, remember.”

“Nothing,” she murmured. “I don’t see anything.”

He nodded, and checked the pocket watch.

She sighed. It wasn’t going to work. Benton was right, it was all just in her head. She’d been a fool to think any part of it was real. She was tricking herself, just as Mrs. Dee had tricked her.

There was nothing to see.

“Narrate,” Benton prodded her gently. “Go on.”

She sighed. “I’m trying to see,” she whispered. “I’m trying. I truly am.”

As she spoke, she squinted her eyes. The glass had darkened. She was sure of it.

Sibyl swallowed, a curious mixture of excitement and trepidation surging through her. “It’s . . .” she started to say, and Benton’s ears pricked up, pen poised.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s darkening,” Sibyl said. “Yes. Definitely darkening.”

“Is that what usually happens?”

“Yes,” she said, but her voice sounded strange to her. “It starts to darken, and then it looks as though the ball is filled with black smoke.”

“Is that what’s happening now?” Benton asked, pen moving quickly.

“Yes,” Sibyl said. She almost felt as though she were not the one speaking, as though she were floating, watching herself. “It’s filled with black smoke, as though it were hollow. But it’s not.”

Keeping his voice neutral, Benton asked, “And what happens, after the black smoke?”

Sibyl leaned forward, bringing her face closer. Inside, the smoke coiled and bubbled over. Underneath the smoke, she thought she could detect a landscape. “Usually, it parts.” She paused. “And before, I’d see water.”

“And this time? How is this time different?”

“This time, it’s not parting. It’s still there. But I can see—” She narrowed her eyes, unsure. “I think I can see land. Like a field. With grooves in it? But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Don’t worry about whether it makes sense,” Benton said. “Just tell me what you see.”

Sibyl nodded, detached. “I see the smoke, only now it’s not as thick. Drifting. Like a haze.”

“Good,” Benton encouraged. “What else?”

“Under the haze, there’s definitely a landscape. A field, I think, but with those grooves. And some flashing lights. In the haze. They’re far away.”

“Are all of them far away?”

Sibyl jumped, as one of the flashes burst nearby, sending a smattering of dirt high into the air. Her fingers twitched over the glass. “No,” she said. “One of them just came very close. An explosion.”

“Interesting,” Benton said, writing furiously in his notebook. “Tell me more.”

Sibyl gazed closer, uncomprehending. “Ah,” she said, furrowing her brows. “They’re not grooves after all. They’re deep. And things are moving inside them. It’s hard to see with the smoke.” A flash went off, nearby, and more dirt burst through the air.

“Things?” Benton asked, frowning. “What sort of things?”

Sibyl peered into the scrying glass, willing herself to understand. “Round things?” she asked.

“Can you give me any more details? What variety of round things?”

She grunted with effort, and her fingers pressed harder on the glass, as if she could wring the sense out of the confusing images it was showing her. Inside, her perspective crept nearer, floating through the haze, impervious to the showers of dirt and flashes of reddish light. She drifted over the landscape, its frost-tipped ruts of mud, outlined by long undulations of sharp-looking wire. Then, her perspective nudged up to one of the grooves, and peered in.

“Oh!” Sibyl exclaimed. “It’s— Ben, it’s people. Men.”

“What did you say?” he asked. He laid his pen to the side.

“Inside the grooves. They’re like hallways in the earth. Full of men, wearing helmets. Round. Like dinner plates? Round, anyway. They’re covered in mud. They’re holding rifles.”

“Sibyl,” Benton said slowly. “When you say grooves, or hallways in the earth. Could you mean trenches?”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes, trenches. That’s what I meant.”

“Good God,” Benton breathed, unable to hold back his shock.

“Trenches,” Sibyl reiterated. She floated over the ragged edge of the bulwark inside the scrying glass and drifted past the men inside. Under the smudges of grime and the boils on their frightened faces, she saw that most of them were boys, as young or younger than the ones in Harvard Yard. The trench was shin deep with filth and slush.

“Sibyl,” Benton said, clearly trying to keep his voice steady. “What has any of what you’re seeing to do with you?”

“What do you mean?” Sibyl asked. Her vision was hazy, clouded with smoke and grit. She floated past the form of a boy half submerged in slush at the bottom of the trench, his one visible eye open and glassy, the skin of his cheeks waxy gray.

“With you,” Benton reiterated. “What you’re seeing. It must pertain to you somehow.”

“But I don’t understand what I’m seeing,” she murmured. “I don’t know.”

“Think,” he urged her, picking up his pen again. “The book is very clear. No matter how remote it seems, something in this vision has direct bearing on your life. If what you’re seeing is what we think it is.”

We?
Sibyl frowned. But she didn’t recognize the landscape, she didn’t understand the situation, she didn’t see herself, she didn’t see anyone that she— Wait.

Sibyl gasped.

“Oh, Ben,” she breathed. “It’s Harley. I see Harlan.”

Chapter Twenty-five

“Here,” Benton said, handing her a glass of water. Sibyl accepted it, her shoulders drooping. She gulped the water eagerly, wanting it to wash away the residue of what she had just seen.

Benton sat down across from her with a grunt of fatigue. He pulled his notebook over so that they could both see it. “Well,” he said, resting his cheek on his fist. “I must say, that was a surprising turn of events.”

“How do you mean?” Sibyl asked, setting the water glass aside. She thought she had never been more tired in her life.

“Look here,” Benton said, indicating the notebook. “Ten o’clock, morphine administered. Ten oh one, no change. Ten oh two, no change. Then finally, at ten oh eight, the black smoke appears. At ten sixteen, the black smoke reveals a strange grooved landscape, that was how you described it. The vision proceeds like this, in a reasonably regular progression, with each interval revealing a new level of detail. It went that way for nearly an hour, right to the moment you saw your brother. In fact, I think it would have continued if you hadn’t been shocked out of your receptive state by the sight of him.”

Sibyl watched Benton while he spoke, weighing what he was telling her. She’d had no real awareness of time while she gazed into the glass. “So,” she hazarded, “you don’t think I’m just dreaming, then?”

“Sibyl,” he said, taking her hands in his and looking with intensity into her face. “Have you even read up on the war?”

“Why? What do you mean?”

Benton pressed his lips together in frustration and tried again. “The war in Europe. Do you read about it? Are you aware at all of what’s been going on?”

Sibyl paused, annoyed at herself. “Well, I—” She thought. “I know Papa was all incensed that the Kaiser used chlorine gas.”

“Whom did he use it on?”

“Um,” she demurred. She couldn’t look Benton in the face. She knew about the poor Belgian orphans, and that was about it. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve been meaning to read up on it, you know, but Wilson seemed so dead set on keeping us neutral, and I thought . . .”

“As I suspected,” he said, sitting back and drumming his fingers on the laboratory table.

“I’ve been so busy, you know.” She started to excuse herself, but he held up a hand.

“No, no,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t fault you for not knowing. I only mean that your lack of exposure to what’s happening in Europe makes the vision that you’ve just had all the more compelling. You didn’t even come to the word
trench
until I supplied it to you. Did you even know that they were fighting in trenches along the western front?”

“No,” she confessed. “No, I didn’t.”

Benton’s eyes locked on Sibyl’s and softened. He brought up his hand, brushing his knuckles along her jaw and bringing his fingers behind her ear, threading them into her hair. Gently, slowly, he brought her face to his, while her eyes widened, and his lips found hers.

Sibyl lost herself in the feeling, the salty, earthy taste of him, the prickle of his cheek against her skin. Her hands hovered at shoulder height, like confused moths, before she had the presence of mind to lower them to his shoulders and close her eyes. They lingered, sipping each other, and Sibyl felt Benton shift on the stool opposite her, bringing a hand to the small of her back and drawing her to him. Her hands roamed to the nape of his neck, and as the pressure of his mouth deepened, she slid her palms down the front of his shirt to his waist. She sighed, and he broke their embrace with a breathless gasp. His gray eyes bored into her, alight with certainty.

“I believe you,” he whispered. “I believe that somehow, some way, even though it goes against all logic and common sense, you are able to see the future in the scrying glass.”

“But if what I’m seeing is true,” she whispered, “then we’ve got to hurry home. We have to stop Harley’s going.”

“You’re right,” Benton said, getting to his feet. “Come on. It’s time we went home.”

When they arrived back in the Back Bay, Sibyl expected to find all the lights extinguished in the Beacon Street town house, and everyone long since asleep. To her surprise, every window in the house was lit, silhouetted forms moving behind filmy window curtains. The bright windows and forbidding front door gave the house the disturbing aspect of a creature with an open mouth, covered in a fur of ivy, waiting to gobble them whole.

Sibyl and Benton mounted the front steps with trepidation, and before she could knock, the door was opened by Mrs. Doherty.

“There she is. And not a moment too soon. I suppose you know you’ve missed supper,” the housekeeper said by way of welcome as she relieved them of their overcoats. Sibyl opened her mouth in explanation but was interrupted by the sound of feet thumping down the stairs, a blur of flying blond hair and sniffling, and Dovie Whistler flinging herself into Sibyl’s arms.

“You’re back! Oh, thank heaven you’re back. He’ll listen to you,” the girl gasped, her eyes wide with panic.

Sibyl raised a tentative hand to the girl’s back as Dovie coiled her arms around Sibyl’s waist and pressed her face into her neck with a dramatic sob. Sibyl’s eyes met Benton’s over the fuzz of the girl’s hair, and he shrugged.

Unmoved by the display of misery snuffling into Sibyl’s blouse, Mrs. Doherty said, “I think you’ll find, miss, the Captain’s been waiting for you in the inner drawing room.”

“He has?” Sibyl said, eyes widening in surprise. “Well, that’s odd. I’d best go in, then.”

“Yes, I guess you’d better,” the housekeeper agreed.

Gently Sibyl started to prize Dovie’s arms from around her waist, but the girl tightened her grip.

“Oh, Sibyl,” she cried. “Please go upstairs first. Please! Go talk to Harley. I can’t make him listen. He said he’s dead set on it. I’ve never known him to be so stubborn.”

She looked up into Sibyl’s face with pleading eyes. Sibyl saw a wellspring of need behind those eyes that startled her. She had seen the girl upset before, and she had seen her insistent, but she had never seen her nakedly fearful. The sudden change in her usually bold and independent friend was disconcerting.

“I’ll talk to him, dearest, I promise,” she whispered into Dovie’s hair. “But I must see what Papa wants first. It’s his house, you know. I’m sure whatever’s going on with Harlan will keep for another quarter of an hour.”

Sibyl managed to free herself from the girl’s grip, only for Dovie to attach herself with a fresh sob, barnaclelike, to Benton Derby.

“Well!” he exclaimed, taken by surprise, holding his hands up at shoulder height as though someone had just pressed a knife to his back and demanded all his ready cash. “I suppose I’ll just stay here, then,” he said. “And make sure Miss Whistler’s all right.”

“I suppose you shall,” Mrs. Doherty said, unmoved by the histrionics being performed in the front hallway. Her expression suggested that they had been under way for some hours. “He’s asked to see Miss Allston alone.”

“Oh,” Sibyl said, exchanging a look with Benton. “Well. That settles it.”

“Come, Miss Whistler,” Benton said to the trembling girl attached to the front of his shirt. “Miss Allston tells me you used to go upon the stage. We must hear you recite some evening. I wonder if you’ve ever seen Bernhardt?”

He ushered her, with a steady stream of theater prattle, to the window seat in the front parlor, glancing over his shoulder at Sibyl with a look of curiosity mixed with concern. Sibyl returned the look, then hesitated outside the lacquered pocket doors leading to the inner parlor, and rolled them aside.