The House of Velvet and Glass (57 page)

“What happened?” she asked.

Sibyl had been following the war’s progress in the papers as best she could during her time away, though she’d had to pay one of the kitchen girls at the sanitarium to smuggle the newspapers to her room. Too stirring for the nerves, the doctors had said. Sibyl didn’t care. She no longer minded having her nerves stirred, particularly when it concerned people she loved.

“They were very keen on tactics for this one, because they knew the geography of the ridge would make it damned difficult for the Germans to defend with just a rigid trench line,” Benton said, his eyes shining with excitement as he recalled the complexities of preparing for battle.

“So the Corps officers held some lectures to spread all the tactical knowledge the French had acquired at the Battle of Verdun. Well, I’ll tell you, they had us rehearsing the maneuvers over and over again before the offensive. Harley, he was popular with the Canadian boys. After a while they were just itching to stop rehearsing and get on with it. He kept as cool a head as I’ve ever seen, and helped some of the younger fellows keep their concentration, too. You would’ve been proud of him, Sibyl.”

She nodded, smiling. She tried to imagine Harley a leader of men, a wielder of influence, and found that she could picture it more easily than she expected.

“They split the campaign into four objectives, and the plan was for us to leap-frog our way to the ridge in stages, with enough speed that the Germans wouldn’t have time to react. We were in an infantry group aimed at the third objective, a little town called Thelus in a small stand of woods outside of Vimy. For once we were going to have plenty of artillery, a lot more than the usual Corps allotment. In that part of the country there was an awful lot of fighting in tunnels underground, too, you know. We had to work hard to know not just the trench system, but also the tunnels underneath. Lots to prepare for, lots to get wrong.”

Sibyl’s eyes widened, imagining having to fight to the death in the darkness of a cave, like a mole against a weasel. The idea of such confinement made her panicky and ill.

“Well, in the months leading up to the offensive, we were intensifying our nighttime trench raids on Fritz. It got to be kind of a game, actually.”

“A game?” Sibyl said, aghast.

Benton laughed and said, “Oh, sure. Companies would compete over how many prisoners we’d take, and what kinds of intelligence we could beat out of them.” He saw the expression of horror on Sibyl’s face at this casual allusion to violence, and tried to tamp down his enthusiasm to a level more appropriate for a drawing room.

“At any rate, Harlan had been made a company commander in February. Late one night, near the end of March, he led a raid on a German trench not far from Thelus. They put up a real fight, those fellows, and it got ugly. But we managed to take it. Eleven sniveling German kids taken prisoner, and Harlan had just cornered their commander. He’d torn a kind of document case off the man and just passed it to me when we saw the Kraut bastard was holding a grenade.”

Benton paused, the muscle at his jaw twitching at the memory. Sibyl waited, gazing up into his face with its angry pink scar. Already she found she only saw it if she tried.

“Well,” Benton said at length. “There wasn’t any time. No time at all. Without even thinking, Harley threw himself on the German commander. We all hit the ground and then it was over.”

“Ben,” she whispered, brushing her hand over his eyebrow and down his cheek. “Ben.”

He smiled, disengaging from their embrace and leading her over to the bench in the bay window. “Well,” he said, voice somber. “I’ll spare you the details. But there’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?” Sibyl asked, working to push the image of Harlan’s last moments away from her mind.

He smiled out of one side of his mouth. “You don’t know what was in the document case.”

Her eyebrows rose in curiosity. “And what was in the case?” she asked.

“A map,” he said, leaning his chin on his fist and smiling at her. “Of part of the German tunnel system under the trenches. It included a tunnel under the Thelus line. One we didn’t even know about.”

“Well,” she said, a slow smile dawning across her face. “How about that.”

He nodded, enjoying her smile. “How about that indeed. Having that map meant that when we finally launched the offensive we were in that much more command of the terrain. It was one less place they could surprise us. It was small, Sibyl, but it made a crucial difference.” He paused. “We retook the ridge. The offensive worked.”

He hesitated, looking at her. “He saved my life, Sibyl, and the lives of the men he was with. And he did it with honor. Selfless honor.”

She sat, digesting what Benton had to say, her sadness mingling with pride, and also with something else—possibly relief. Relief that Harlan was able to become, however briefly, the best version of himself. Relief that his life could have a pinnacle like that, a moment when he would always be his best, and happiest, self.

A footfall shook her out of her thoughts, and she found her father emerging from the inner parlor, Baiji perched on his shoulder.

“I see you’ve been entertaining our guest. A bit early, aren’t we, Professor Derby? A touch enthusiastic, perhaps?” Lan Allston smiled on them, and the smile broadened when he observed his daughter to be blushing.

“Surely you’re not taking the macaw in to dinner with us, Papa,” Sibyl protested, attempting to recover her decorum.

“Why not?” her father asked with a mock wounded cast. “He gets lonesome, sitting in the parlor all day long. Why can’t he have a change of scene once in a while? He’s very well traveled, you know. I picked him up in Shanghai.”

“Yes,” Sibyl said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve mentioned it. A time or two.”

As though aware that he was a subject of discussion, the iridescent blue parrot stretched out his wings like a gargoyle, opened his mouth, and stuck out his tongue.

“Very expressive,” Benton remarked, in the tone of a man who is being polite, but would prefer to keep his distance.

“He dotes on that bird,” Sibyl said. “None of us have ever understood it.”

“Not true,” Lan said, moving to the mantel and gazing up at the painting. “Your mother was always very understanding about Baiji.”

“She wanted to turn him into a hat,” Sibyl remarked aside to Benton, who hid a smile.

Lan Allston sighed, gazing up at the painting of his wife. “I’ve always been rather partial to this painting,” he remarked to himself. “She’s frozen in time, almost. Just how I remember her. Always young. Always about to speak.”

“Mother was always about to speak when she was alive, too,” Sibyl said, half-joking, and half sad.

“Well, that’s the real mystery of death, I think,” her father remarked, eyes exploring the painting. The bird seemed to be gazing up at the portrait, too, his wings shimmering and settling along his back. “Think of that young fellow who was on the boat with them. The bookish one.”

“Who?” Sibyl asked. She had taken Benton’s hand in hers and was toying with his fingers.

“The Widener boy. Harry. Whose mother gave the library to Harvard.”

“Such a generous gift,” Benton remarked, tickling Sibyl’s palm with his ring finger where her father couldn’t see. She noticed that he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring anymore. “I’m rather looking forward to seeing it when I get back to campus.”

Lan Allston said a thoughtful “Hmmmm” and turned to gaze on Benton and Sibyl. His eyes, usually so clear and blue, were looking more watery than Sibyl remembered. Her father was getting older, too.

“A wealthy young man from a good family,” Lan said. “Spent his time in leisured pursuits, collecting books, traveling the world. If he’d lived to be my age, that would’ve been the sum total of his life, you know. Family, of course, that’s important. Civic duties. Philanthropic pursuits. I’m sure he was a fine young man, and would’ve made a fine old man, too, no doubt. He would live to be old and distinguished, and he would die, and there would be a respectful obituary in the paper, noting all his accomplishments, and omitting any allusion to his myriad personal faults, whatever they may have been. Then his children would’ve helped themselves to a few of the tomes he’d worked so hard to assemble, probably looking for value over content. The balance would be auctioned off. And that would be the end of it.”

He paused, reaching up to scratch Baiji under the chin. The parrot seemed to smile, enjoying the scratch with lidded eyes. Sibyl and Benton exchanged a look.

“But consider this,” her father continued. “Because that young man died on
Titanic
, his name is now synonymous with the finest university library in the world. His study is preserved, just as it was, for time immemorial. His collection stays whole. He has left a legacy. In a way, that damned boat going down was the greatest thing that could have happened to him. For what he wanted to be.”

Her father smiled, his sad and stoic smile. Sibyl moved to stand next to him, threading her arm through his. There would be no need for Benton to tell him what had happened. He knew.

He had always known.

“Shall we go in to dinner?” she asked, rubbing her free hand on her father’s upper arm. “We can bring Baiji if you like.”

“Let’s,” the Captain said, moving toward the dining room at a stately pace. “Though we’re still short a few people, by my count.”

“I’m sure they’ll be along,” she said.

They made their way from the front parlor into the entry hall at the base of the stairs, Sibyl and Lan in the lead, Benton trailing behind. Then all at once there was a commotion from somewhere overhead, followed by a crash, and a whirring ball of activity came plunging down the front staircase at a run, skidding across the front hallway carpet and smacking right into Benton’s legs. The ball of activity recoiled, rubbing its nose and blinking, and then after a long and pregnant pause, it opened its mouth and started to wail.

“Good heavens, who’s this?” Benton exclaimed, surprised. He knelt next to the shrieking creature, who upon closer examination proved to be a little boy, about two years of age, with a fuzzy halo of blond hair, dressed in a navy sailor suit and small black boots.

“Oh, Professor Derby, I’m so sorry!” Dovie Whistler exclaimed, hurrying down the stairs and scooping the caterwauling boy up in her arms. Her hair was still cropped short, but her dress was a long, narrow column of buttercup yellow satin trimmed in lace, and her hair was held off her brow with a wide black band. “He’s got so much energy, but he’s so careless sometimes. Aren’t you, Lannie?”

The boy confessed to his carelessness with a fresh shriek, which Dovie quieted with some jostling of him on her hip.

“My word,” Benton breathed, peering at the little boy’s face, and seeing that his assumption was absolutely true.

“Say hello to Professor Derby,” Dovie prompted.

The ball of activity looked warily at Benton, red fist in mouth, and then buried his face in his mother’s neck.

“He’s shy,” Dovie explained, patting the whimpering boy’s back.

Benton’s gaze met Sibyl’s, his eyebrows shooting up. Slowly, Sibyl nodded, smiling out of one side of her mouth. Sibyl watched as Benton’s eyes then moved to Lan Allston’s face, and she saw that he found the old sailor so beaming with joy that whatever questions Benton might have thought to ask fell away as suddenly unimportant.

“I’m sure he’s famished,” Sibyl said. “And so am I. There’s no reason to wait, is there?”

“No reason at all,” her father said, taking her arm.

Epilogue

North Atlantic Ocean
Outward Bound
April 14/15, 1912

Eulah ran up laughing, Harry beside her, and collapsed in the chair next to her mother, out of breath, her cheeks pink from dancing. The two exchanged a quick electric look that Helen noticed with pleasure, and Harry seated himself beside his mother without a word.

“There you are!” Eleanor Widener exclaimed. “We lost sight of you. Must have been the crowd.” She arched an eyebrow at her son.

“Must have been,” Harry said, grinning.

Eulah reached a long arm over the table for her glass of water, gulping it down with abandon and an
aaaaaaaah
of audible pleasure.

“Gracious!” Helen exclaimed, watching her daughter fan herself with the dinner menu and noting her rosy cheeks and the droplets of dew on Eulah’s upper lip. “Why, you’d think you were at a square dance. Eulah. Some restraint, please.”

Her daughter turned merry, sparkling eyes on Helen, who felt herself soften as she always did when her youngest daughter smiled at her.

“Oh, come now, Mother,” she said, twinkling. “There’s nothing better than dancing! Perhaps you should dance, too.”

Helen shook her head with a laugh. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she demurred. “Dancing is for the young. But I don’t even need to, so long as I can watch you. Are you enjoying yourself, my dear?”

“Oh, yes!” Eulah exclaimed. She picked up the vanilla eclair that waited on her dessert plate and took a delicate nibble from the end. “Mmmmm!” she moaned with pleasure, rolling her eyes heavenward. “Mother! Try it. Just a little.”