The House of Velvet and Glass (35 page)

“Why, that would be . . .” Professor Friend trailed off, stumbling over the look that was passing between Sibyl and Benton. He cleared his throat, and Sibyl cast her eyes back to the tabletop. “Yes. That would be remarkable. Yes. If Miss Allston were willing, of course.”

“Well, I don’t—” Sibyl stammered. “That is, I’ve had some successes, yes. But they were always in rather particular circumstances.”

Benton, watching her closely, said without looking around, “I feel certain we can approximate the necessary circumstances.”

Sibyl caught his gaze and shook her head, a fraction of an inch. He reached a hand across the table and took Sibyl’s in his own.

“Miss Allston’s been suffering a slight cough today. Nothing serious, but I’m sure she’s concerned that it might be distracting. Mrs. Dee, surely you keep a cough remedy handy?”

The medium’s eyebrows rose, and she gestured with a careless hand over her shoulder, bringing the butler to her. “Why, I had no idea she was feeling unwell. You do look rather pale, Miss Allston.” She turned to the butler and said, “Bring some of those drops I keep in the medicine cabinet.”

“Very good, madam,” the butler said, tilting his head in acquiescence.

While they waited for him to return, Professor Friend leaned back in his chair, brushing thoughtful fingers over his mustache, as he was wont to do when considering a vexing question. “Now, Mrs. Dee,” he said. “You are familiar with the work of the Seybert Commission, no doubt?”

“Professor Friend, is it? I can’t say that I am. I’m sure you understand that my desire for privacy keeps me from willfully entering any sort of controversy.”

“But of course. The Seybert Commission”—he leaned forward on his elbows—“was established some years ago at the University of Pennsylvania. It was one of the first university-based inquiries into Spiritualist phenomena. In that vein, I’m anxious to learn how you structure your mediumship. For instance, do you employ slate writing?”

“Oh! Indeed not,” Mrs. Dee said, as though shocked by the very idea. “No, I find that those spirits who are kind enough to visit our gathering don’t go in for parlor tricks.”

Professor Friend nodded his approval.

“No, most of the time we are blessed with manifestations of a visual sort,” Mrs. Dee continued. “Images, and voices. I’m sure Miss Allston has told you. Occasionally the table will lift itself clear of the ground. And at times, we will even have a strong physical manifestation, brought about by ectoplasmic condensation.”

Sibyl thought she heard Benton muffle a snort under his handkerchief.

“The water,” she whispered. She turned to Mrs. Dee. “That night. When we reached my mother. The table flooded with ice cold water.” Sibyl crossed her arms with a shiver at the memory, cupping her elbows in her hands.

“So it did,” the small woman said, her voice gentle and serene.

Sibyl felt Benton’s eyes still on her, soft with concern.

“Fascinating,” Professor Friend said. “So what structure shall we follow this evening?”

“Well,” the medium said slowly. “I’m most concerned for Sibyl’s well-being, of course. I should dearly like to observe her newfound talents for myself. I’m sure you gentlemen would as well.”

At that moment the butler reappeared, carrying a teak tray with a stoppered glass bottle, a cut crystal sherry glass, and a silver teaspoon. He brought the tray around the table and set the implements one at a time in front of Sibyl.

She looked at Benton with confusion and whispered, “But I don’t see how . . .”

“Trust me,” he murmured in response.

Sibyl took up the bottle and saw that the label read
PEEKMAN’S PREFERRED CHERRY COUGH ELIXIR
. The label featured a drawing of a smiling young woman, with lidded eyes, surrounded by swirling locks of hair dotted with pink lotus flowers. It promised
IMMEDIATE RELIEF OF COUGH, PAIN, RHEUMATISM, FATIGUE, NERVES, DROPSY, FEVER, AND SHINGLES
, together with quotations from doctors attesting to its efficacy. She measured out four teaspoonfuls into the sherry glass.

The liquid was dark reddish brown, and smelled foul. Nothing at all like cherries. She lifted the glass, with another long look at Benton. He nodded in encouragement. She tilted her head back and swallowed the elixir, its harsh chemical taste causing her to gasp and cough.

“My goodness!” Mrs. Dee exclaimed. “But she
is
ailing. What good fortune we had some drops on hand.”

“Indeed,” Benton said, his attention still on Sibyl. She wiped the corner of her mouth with a handkerchief, clearing her throat of the sticky, bittersweet fluid. He watched her with a hand resting on the back of her chair. She squirmed under his attention, returning the cough syrup to the tray and nodding her thanks as the butler cleared it away.

“Now then,” Mrs. Dee said, assuming control as Sibyl always knew her to do. “Do you have the scrying glass with you, my dear?”

Sibyl nodded, rummaging in the pocket of her skirt and pulling out the wooden box. “But I’m not certain that I’ll be able— That is, I’m so unaccustomed to having an audience.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Professor Friend assured her. “We’re just a friendly group, aren’t we? No need to feel embarrassed in the least. Isn’t that right, Professor Derby?” Sibyl thought she heard in Professor Friend’s voice a cautioning note to Benton.

“Quite right,” Benton said, close to Sibyl’s ear. She swallowed, watching him as he watched her.

Mrs. Dee motioned to the butler, and he moved around the room, extinguishing lights one after the other, until only a crystal oil lamp burned on a table in the far corner of the room.

“There now,” Mrs. Dee said, her voice soothing and soft. “Let us begin.”

Sibyl sat, her fingertips resting on the surface of the crystal ball, secreted in its nest of black velvet. Her mind felt soft, and the muscles in her neck and arms had unwound perceptibly over the past several minutes. She was aware of Benton sitting next to her, of Professor Friend across the table, an indistinct form in the dim light of Mrs. Dee’s drawing room, and of course of Mrs. Dee herself, presiding in solemn majesty at the head of her séance table. The nameless butler, after setting up the lighting in the room until it matched Mrs. Dee’s precise instructions, had withdrawn, leaving them cloistered in the room, a stick of incense smoking on the fireplace mantel.

With each passing moment Sibyl felt more peculiar. She worked her tongue over the surface of her teeth, finding the feeling of her tongue inside her mouth alien. Benton was right—she felt similar to the detachment she experienced while lying on the velvet couch in Dovie Whistler’s secret club. Though the sensation wrapping around her now was more leaden. And she was sitting up, rather than lying down, which made the whole enterprise dizzier. She felt herself sway where she was sitting on the backless hassock, and a hand pressed to her lower back.

“Are you all right?” a voice murmured in her ear, close enough to stir the fine hairs at the base of her neck, yet echoing as though coming from a great distance away.

“Yes,” she found herself saying. “I am perfectly fine. Thank you.”

“Is she unwell?” another voice asked—Professor Friend, possibly. Whoever it was seemed concerned.

“She’s fine,” the first voice replied—Benton, of course. Still the hand rested on the small of her back, steady and reassuring.

“Miss Allston,” Mrs. Dee said. “The method that I usually use is—”

“Yes,” Sibyl said, cutting the medium off without meaning to. “Yes, I know. But I just watch.”

She exhaled softly, leveling her gaze on the polished blue surface of the crystal. It worked so quickly now, Sibyl hardly had to wait at all before the surface darkened, the ball filling with billows of black smoke, swirling back on themselves. Sibyl let her breath come easily, allowing the room around her to fall away.

Under her fingertips the smoke intensified, coalescing around a tiny pinpoint of light at the center of the ball. The pinpoint grew brighter, twinkling with increasing fire as it drew the smoke into itself.

“What’s she seeing?” someone asked, but Sibyl was barely aware of it.

“Miss Allston?” someone else pressed her. “Can you tell us? What are you seeing?”

The voice reached Sibyl after what felt like several minutes, and though she perceived the sense of the question, it didn’t seem to bear any relationship to her, didn’t seem to have any meaning. She made no answer.

“Miss Allston?” the voice asked again, coming from even farther away.

The smoke had all cleared away by now, sucked down into the burning center of the light inside the ball. The pinpoint intensified, its glow spreading, and then it burst into a million tiny fragments, scattering into the perfect constellations of a cold night sky. Sibyl’s lips parted, and she sighed with satisfaction. This was how it always went. Next, she would be able to see the water.

Sure enough, her point of view shifted within the ball under her fingertips, rotating from the sky overhead down to the surface of the water, skimming along the rippling surface of the ocean as if in flight. The water looked close enough to touch, as if she could reach through the membrane of the ball and dip her fingers into its star-spangled surface. Faster, speeding up, ducking and weaving like a tern chasing a school of fish, the image zoomed close alongside a giant ocean liner, brushing along the white foam break rolling off the prow of the ship. Sibyl caught her breath, excited. With each experiment she had been able to glimpse just a tiny bit more.

“I’m not at all convinced,” someone whispered, and at the same time someone else wished aloud that she would comment, or explain something of what she was doing, to offer a narration perhaps, but the whisper had nothing whatever to do with her, and so she ignored it.

Instead, she watched, fingers still lightly pressed to the scrying glass, as the image lingered over the ship’s prow, chasing after it as the prow thrust itself forward through the night. Then, with deliberation, the point of view within the glass pulled away from the waterline, tracing along the side of the ocean liner, traveling up and over a polished railing and moving onto the open bow.

Now, for the first time, Sibyl saw faces, and she let out a gasp of surprise and delight. She didn’t know how much longer she had before the smoke would swirl closed again; usually the image only held together for a few minutes at most, and then it would sink below the black cloud and disappear. She narrowed her eyes, peering closer.

The point of view within the orb floated along, drifting past one laughing, smiling face after another. They were dressed for the evening, these unfamiliar people, the women wrapped in gossamer robes lined with fur against the North Atlantic chill, the men in white ties and long tailcoats. A young couple rose into view, the boy with his hair slicked back as he leaned in to whisper a joke to a young woman with a flower affixed over her ear. Sibyl looked closely, thinking that the laughing girl with the sparkling eyes might be Eulah. But no, this girl had black hair, in tight curls. Whoever she was, she looked happy. The unknown girl tilted her head back for a swallow of champagne, and the point of view within the orb swerved away, searching through the crowd.

Through the muffling haze enveloping her body Sibyl felt her heartbeat quicken, heard the
lug lug, lug lug
of the blood moving through her veins. Inside the scrying glass, her vision drifted through a cluster of couples dancing, well-fed men with cheeks the color of roast beef, sturdy matrons draped in old-fashioned jet beads. She recognized no one. Where could her mother and Eulah be? She remembered her mother’s telegram, that they weren’t at the captain’s table, but she couldn’t recall any details about where they would be sitting. Then she remembered—with the Wideners. But Sibyl didn’t know Harry and his parents. Sibyl frowned, peering into the glass, hunting for what she imagined a bibliophile might look like. Young men in spectacles, moving past people’s shoulders, gleaming candlelight on glassware . . .

Then Sibyl gasped, biting down on her lower lip in alarm. The image in the glass jolted, everyone in the dining room stumbling at once, falling into tables, men grasping at women’s elbows, people’s mouths opening in screams. But she still hadn’t . . .

“Dear me,” someone whispered, voice muffled as though from miles away. “Is she all right? Miss Allston?”

But no, she wouldn’t be distracted, she wouldn’t be pulled back, not when she was on the point of finding them. Now the ship lurched again, and the crowd in the dining room shifted in character. No longer was it a staid and plush gathering of individual people, cultured and urbane, enjoying their voyage between Europe and New York. Instead, the dining room transformed into a panicked mass of black and white dotted in shocking colors, moving as one to run away from something.

Sibyl couldn’t see what was going on. Her breath came faster, and she leaned in closer, bringing her nose almost to touch the stone’s surface, hunting through the surging crowd, desperate for a familiar face. Eulah would have been dancing, surely. Would she have been happy?

The point of view inside the glass moved, but not entirely in response to Sibyl’s will. One of her fingers twitched with tension as she observed the ripples of panic shooting through the crowd in the dining room, here a uniformed man attempting to issue instructions, ignored by the onrushing crowd. Chairs turned over, a man threw aside a table, sending glassware exploding in all directions. Sibyl held her breath as inside the glass the dining room began to list.

Then the point of view inside the glass floated up to the face of a person standing motionless in the center of the crowd. A person who Sibyl recognized.

Her mouth fell open, gaping in shock and incomprehension.

In her ear, the insistent whisper came again, worming into her conscious awareness. “What is it, Sibyl?” Benton’s whisper asked. “What do you think you see?”

A scream rang out.

Sibyl, blinking, was shaken awake with a shock. She looked around, confused, unclear where she was, or what had been happening. Where had the scream come from?