The House of Velvet and Glass (49 page)

“Close it behind you, if you would,” Lan Allston said from behind his newspaper.

He was sitting, as was his habit, in the Greek revival armchair with its horsehair upholstery, a castaway on an island in an ocean of Helen’s taste. A pleasant fire burned in the fireplace, and the mantel clock announced that the hour was well past midnight. Baiji the macaw perched, one claw tucked up in a puff of iridescent blue feathers, fast asleep on his hat rack. Everything seemed as it should be, except for the lateness of the hour. Sibyl obeyed, rolling the door closed behind her.

“You’re up late, Papa,” she remarked, moving to take the armchair across from him.

“Mmmm. Well, I’ve been awaiting my daughter’s arrival from some mysterious late-night errand,” the old sailor said, cocking a graying eyebrow at her. She met his gaze with a polite smile.

He waited, and when she didn’t volunteer any information that would clarify her whereabouts, he cleared his throat, folded the newspaper with a rustle, and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

“My dear,” he said, employing a term of endearment rarely heard in the Allston house, which alerted Sibyl to pay closer attention. “I see you’re as little disposed to idle chitchat this evening as I am. So I will come to the point. I’ve waited up to persuade you not to talk Harlan out of going to Plattsburgh.”

“I beg your pardon?” Sibyl asked, confused.

“You’re going to try to talk him out of it,” her father said. “You can’t. You mustn’t. I know why you feel that you must, but it is imperative that you obey me in this respect. It’s very important.”

“Papa, I—” She started to protest, baffled as to how her father might know of her plan. It was impossible. She’d only just formulated it. And no one had been in the social ethics building with her and Benton. No one could possibly have told him. Her mind tripped along at a mile a minute, leaping ahead to figure out what she was supposed to say, but falling short, baffled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about” is what she finally came up with, but her eyes slid down to her fingers, toying with a loose thread on the armrest of her chair.

“Oh, you don’t?” he asked.

“No,” she said, her attention absorbed in the threads. This armchair was much more threadbare than she remembered. She would have to see about getting it recovered.

“Sibyl, hold out your hands, please,” he commanded.

She glanced up, her heart thudding faster in her chest.

“Hold them out?” she faltered. “Whatever for?”

“Do it, if you will, my dear. Please. Hold up your hands.”

She did so, facing up, palms to her face, like a magician about to do sleight of hand, showing that he has nothing hidden up his sleeve.

“No,” Allston said. “Out straight in front of you, please. Like this.” He demonstrated, extending his arms out straight from his shoulders. His hands had a slight tremor as he held them there, the ravages of his rheumatism.

She followed suit, extending her arms out slowly from her shoulders.

Her hands trembled.

She frowned, commanding them in her mind to be still.

Still, they trembled. She looked at her father with frightened eyes, and found him gazing on her with a wounded expression, the same helpless worry in his eyes that he tried to hide when she would appear at the kitchen door with scraped knees as a child, weeping for him to pick her up.

“As I suspected,” her father said, leaning back in his chair and bringing a thoughtful finger alongside his temple. “You haven’t stopped. In fact, I wager that you’ve increased your usage. Even though I specifically asked you to give it up.”

Sibyl, ashamed, folded her arms tightly across her chest, and half turned her body away from her father to face the fire.

“I’m just tired, is all,” she insisted, hiding her face from him. “It’s awfully late.”

“It isn’t that late. You used to stay out ’til much later than this, you and Eulah. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t lie to me.”

Chastened, Sibyl hung her head. Her father sighed, the long sigh of a man disappointed and not knowing where to begin. When she hazarded a look in his direction, she found him slouching in his chair, arms draped over the swooping armrests, legs stretched out straight before him. There was something oddly youthful about this posture, like a teenaged boy drooping in a chair out of sight of his mother, and Sibyl felt that she was being given a glimpse of the young man her father had been, years ago, before the weight of dignity settled so heavily on him.

“How did you know?” she whispered, dismayed to hear in her voice the timbre of a little girl caught standing over a broken punch bowl.

He sighed again, staring into the fire, his eyes open wide, and though the rims were pink with fatigue his eyes themselves were still the aquamarine color of a tropical sea.

“How. Did. I. Know,” he said, enunciating each word. The aquamarine eyes swiveled from the fire to his daughter’s face and settled there. She waited, knotting her hands together so that he would not see them tremble anymore.

“You might well ask,” he said. “How I knew about Miss Whistler. Or how I knew that the sea would make my fortune. How I knew it would take away my wife and youngest daughter.”

When these words met her ears all of Sibyl’s breath squeezed out of her body at once. She sat, frozen in her seat, trying to absorb what he had just said to her. Trying, and failing.

“What do you mean?” Sibyl stammered. “What are you saying to me, Papa?”

“Well, to begin with, I don’t have rheumatism, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said with a wry, but sad, smile. “Never have. The prescription, the laudanum drops, I take only to keep the symptoms of withdrawal at bay. And those symptoms are wretched, I assure you. The addiction itself is my ailment, my dear, as I fear will yours be if we don’t act quickly. But the drug, as I gather you’ve come to know, is only a small part of what I’m talking about. Perhaps not even the most important part.”

“So it’s true, then,” Sibyl said, her voice sounding hollow in her ears.

“I don’t pretend to understand the mechanisms of it,” her father said. He got to his feet, standing with a stretch and then leaning an elbow on the mantel. The firelight cast itself upward over his face, and the soft quality of the light smoothed away some of his weatheredness, continuing Sibyl’s strange impression of her father standing before her as a younger version of himself. “I don’t know why it’s not this way for other people, or if it’s the work of God, or the devil. But yes. It’s true. It’s been true for me for the past fifty years.”

Sibyl let out her breath by slow degrees. “Incredible,” she said. “I thought it was true. But Benton was so persuasive. He wouldn’t be convinced. Not until—well . . .” She trailed off, watching for her father’s response.

“Yes, well. Professor Derby. He’s a scientist. And at root, a practical man. Like Richard, his father. Sometimes there’s just no reasoning with practical men about impractical matters.”

“Fifty years? Really?” she asked with amazement, watching him. He gazed with an absent look into the fire.

“Fifty years,” he repeated. “Or a little more.”

“But how . . . ?” she started to ask.

“In China,” he said. His tone, Sibyl knew, did not invite discussion of the circumstances of Lan Allston’s introduction to scrying. A dark shadow crossed his face, the ghostly shadow of horror and regret, and for a sickening instant Sibyl wondered if she would see her father cry.

“I see,” she said, looking away. She paused, and asked, “Do you know what I’ve seen, then?”

Her father moved from the mantel out of the circle of light cast by the fire, into the shadows in the deeper recesses of the inner parlor. Sibyl heard a pleasant clucking sound, the sound of Baiji being scratched gently under his chin.

“Yes.” Her father’s sepulchral voice floated out of the darkness. “I have.”

“Yet you’re telling me not to stop him?” Sibyl got to her feet, growing angry. Surely her father couldn’t resent his prodigal son so much that he would wish him dead. She couldn’t imagine her father being that cold. Not when there were so few of them left. Not when it would mean leaving her alone.

A heavy, resigned sigh, and he spoke again. “I am not telling you. I’m asking you. Begging you, really. Not to try to stop him.”

“But why?” she demanded, digging her fingers into the back of the armchair, her voice rising. “How can you condemn him like this? It’s impossible, you can’t have seen it, otherwise you’d never ask such a thing of me. How can you?”

“Because,” her father said, in tones of deep sadness and resignation. “Because I have also seen what happens to Harlan’s life if you succeed.”

A long, leaden pause plunged the room into abrupt silence. In the silence the fire popped.

“What do you mean?” Sibyl hissed.

The shadows parted to reveal her father moving back toward the light, the seams of his face craggy with fatigue.

“Ah,” he said with a grim smile. “You haven’t discovered the parallax then, I take it. Well, it’s probably for the best.”

“Parallax?” Sibyl asked, dark brows furrowing. Her eyes flashed black. “What parallax? What does that mean?”

“It means,” he said, drawing the words out in a meditative way, “that objects—or in this case, events in time—can sometimes look different if viewed from a different vantage point.”

Sibyl grew light-headed and leaned her weight into the back of the chair. In the dim recesses of the room, Baiji released a quiet sneeze.

“Different,” she breathed. “Are you telling me there’s some way to see different alternatives? Each time I’ve tried I’ve just seen the one event, and then when it came to pass, I saw the beginnings of another one. Every time, it gave me more details. And sometimes the details changed, but I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t control it at all.”

Her father sighed, running his fingertips along the back of his armchair. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” he said finally. “Let’s leave that aside.”

“Tell me,” Sibyl commanded, her heart rising in her throat. She tightened the hand on the back of her armchair into a fist, her nails digging into her palm. “Tell me how it’s done. You must.”

“I must!” he exclaimed, looking up at her with mild surprise. “Well, well. What a willful daughter I have, all of a sudden. Your mother always thought it was Eulah who was willful, you know. But I knew better.”

“Oh, won’t you tell me!” she burst, blind with rage.

Her father met her outburst with a raised eyebrow. “You know,” he remarked, circling the edge of the firelight and coming back to the mantel, “that I grew up in Salem, don’t you?”

Confused by the apparent shift in topic, Sibyl shook her head, and frowned. “What? Of course. You even took us to visit the house when we were small. What of it?”

“Chestnut Street.” Lan sighed, momentarily wistful. “I had some happy days there. A boy running loose in a bustling seaport town, ships arriving every day from the Far East, odd fruits, spices, curious men with gold in their ears. A real seagoing city it was. Well, it was a different time.” He shook off his passing thought and settled again in the Greek revival armchair, cupping his chin in his hand.

“Papa,” Sibyl interjected, but he raised a hand to quell her.

“My own father, your grandfather,” Lan continued. “The first Harlan Allston. Like me, he married a woman many years his junior, after a successful career at sea. That means he was born in the very first years of the last century. Practically an eighteenth-century man. Can you imagine that? The Revolution was still fresh in people’s minds when he was a boy. The old houses still stood. People frightened him with stories about witches cooking up naughty little boys in giant cauldrons, and then Mother frightened me with the very same stories. I sometimes wonder what my father would have to say about Boston today, if he could see it. The automobiles. Electric lights. The people. So many people! From all over the world. This is really an Irish city, you know, Sibyl. The times are changing, and they will never change back. Our set may hold ourselves aloof, but we are fooling ourselves.”

Sibyl watched, still standing, her face frozen in a grimace of confusion and anger.

“Well, those days are past. I don’t pretend to know whether for good or ill. I moved down to Boston with your mother, because she wanted to be among fashionable people. Salem’s seagoing days are gone. It’s a different city now. Shoe factories and salt water taffy. But I mention it only because the Salem where I grew up, you know, the Salem of a generation ago. It was still, in its way, a rather religious place.”

“
Salaam
,” Sibyl said, watching him. “It means peace.”

“Just so,” her father said with a tiny smile. “All the other Essex county towns took their names from English towns. Even Boston. Marblehead took its name from the cliffs it was built on, of course. Always were a stubborn people, those ’Headers. But only Salem took its name from a religious idea. From the hope of peace. And you may not know this about me, my dear, but I am a rather religious man. I believe that God has a particular plan in mind, for each of us. And we have no way of knowing what that plan might be. But whatever it is, it must be for the best. Because Providence—God—has willed it so.”

Sibyl’s eyebrows rose, surprised to hear this deeply buried vestige of old Puritanism lying hidden in her father’s heart.

He stared hard at her, compelling her attention with the force of his gaze. “It is not our place,” he said, enunciating each word with care, “to monkey with what God has planned. It is hubris. Of the very worst kind.”

She swallowed. “But—” she started to protest.

He held up a hand.

“Why do you think I’ve never told you about this particular skill I have?” he asked.

“I—” Sibyl stammered. “I don’t know. Why didn’t you?”

“Because I wanted to protect you from it. I never wanted you or your siblings to know. Ever. Why do you think I denied Harley the morphine in the hospital? I’m no sadist, no matter what the boy might think of me. I would never wish one of my children to suffer unnecessarily.”

“But look at what you’re asking of me,” Sibyl said, her voice catching in her throat. “How can you say you want to protect us? Wouldn’t this skill, or whatever it is, wouldn’t this be a way of setting ourselves free?”