Her feet pressed to the floor as she struggled into her dressing gown, tangling one arm in a filmy sleeve, a few strands of hair hanging into her face. She could scarcely remember what time they’d gotten home. Before first light, but only just. As she stumped through the rear entrance of the house behind her father, she had heard the first tittering of the sparrows who nested in the ivy on the face of the town house. A few of their tiny bodies fluttered under ivy leaves and burst forth to swoop through the darkness, protesting the opening of the back door.
“The sound of morning,” her father murmured to himself before closing the door behind them.
Sibyl shuffled into the lavatory that she used to share with Eulah, bent over the claw-footed bathtub that Helen had chosen, and twisted the hot water tap. How had Helen been so certain that she would have daughters, who would need a claw-footed bathtub? It was as though their mother had willed Sibyl and Eulah into being, because the existence of such a fine lavatory required it.
Steam began to rise off the porcelain, filling the room with a fragrant cloud, and Sibyl leaned against the marble vanity, peering at herself. In the thin morning light Sibyl’s skin looked older, more papery, her eyes ringed in shadow from the previous night.
She squeezed her eyes closed, thinking about the policemen with their questions and scribbling pencils. Harley hadn’t been able to say anything of use, of course.
“Should be a quick recovery,” the dapper young doctor assured her and her father as Dovie loitered within hearing range. “I should say the rib’s merely cracked, rather than fully broken, and I think you’ll find that his youth and vigor will set him to rights sooner than you might expect. We’ll keep him for a few days, just for observation. We’re in a better position to keep him comfortable.”
As the doctor spoke, the nurse shot her father a nasty look. Sibyl didn’t understand why. Lan seemed unperturbed by the nurse’s disapproval, agreeing to leave his son in their care. But not before the police were satisfied.
Sibyl sighed, opening her eyes and staring at the disheartening spectacle of her face.
With Harley slipping in and out of consciousness, unable, or unwilling, to articulate what had transpired, the two policemen determined there was little reason for them to be present at the hospital. Benton grew insistent, pushing himself into the policemen’s faces with all the righteous fury at his disposal.
“Can’t you see he’s been beaten?” the young professor insisted, too loudly. A few heads turned in the hallway, looking. “He’s lucky they didn’t do worse! He could’ve been killed. I fail to see how you’re going to find the men responsible if you don’t speak with him. I insist you try again.”
Sibyl observed the policemen’s response to Benton’s wrestler’s bluster. The two uniformed men (one of them, she noted, with a cauliflower ear, and probably not from wrestling, either) passed first through bemusement, then to placation, before finally growing angry and dismissive.
“Well, if the young man ain’t gonna tell us what happened, there tisn’t much to be done about it, then,” one of them said, tucking his pencil into his breast pocket with finality. “Sure, we understand, Professor Derby. You’re upset and all, but I’m afraid it can’t be helped. If the victim don’t want to complain, then there’s no complaint, is there? Unless the young lady wishes to make a statement?”
Dovie, her back to the group, face reflected in the multipaned window, held as still as if she had not been addressed at all. Sibyl’s eyes darkened behind the drifting steam in the lavatory at the memory. Well, what did she expect the girl to do? Just blurt out everything? Including why Harlan was in her rooms in the first place? Surely not. And did Sibyl want to hear it, if she did?
The policemen, Benton, Sibyl, and Lan all waited, watching the tension rippling down the girl’s back, which, with the rhythmic flick of her cigarette, was the only sign that she was a living thing, rather than some wax replica of herself. When she did not so much as shift her weight on her feet, much less speak, the group re-formed, closing her out. The policemen were disinclined to inquire about her relationship, whatever it might be, to Harlan. Perhaps they didn’t wish to embarrass the family. Or perhaps they just didn’t want to be bothered. Benton’s fists balled at his sides as each person in the group wondered what should happen next.
Finally, Lan Allston cleared his throat.
“It’s right good of you lads to be so concerned for my son’s welfare,” he said, sounding less the noble patriarch and more the genial sailor who has risen through the ranks. “Perhaps when the boy’s more himself would be a better time.”
Her father rested a rough palm on the shoulder of each policeman in turn, squeezing with seriousness, and shook each man’s hand, leveling his ice blue gaze square in the other men’s eyes. The policemen, shrugging, both ready for a long day to draw to a blessed close, minds on cold roast beef at kitchen tables and sleeping children at home, withdrew without argument, and with evident relief, laying the authority to resolve the situation at the feet of the aging sailor.
Draping her dressing gown over the back of a chair, Sibyl eased first one bare foot, then the other, into the scalding water in the bathtub. She lowered herself with care, her senses awakening from the mingled sensations of steaming water and chilled porcelain against her skin. Sibyl rested her head against the tub back, eyes drifting closed, feeling her aching limbs loosen.
In a few short days, they said, Harley could come home. He’d have to be tended to, of course—wounds cleaned, bandages washed and changed, food more tender than usual while his lip and jaw healed. There was the question of school. And the debts. Harley, a bundle of situations, as always. Sibyl slipped deeper into the tub, knees emerging from the soapsuds, water meeting her lips.
Her father had circumstances well in hand at the hospital. But it was fitting, and typical, for him to step forward in a moment of acute crisis. Once the crisis had passed, or rather shifted into the new shape of normal, the minor details of its resolution would be left to her. Sibyl folded her arms over her breasts, sliding down still farther, pulling away from the weight of her responsibilities. Her head slipped beneath the surface of the water and she was alone, suspended, listening to the movement of her blood in her body and the rhythmic pulse of her heart.
A bubble slipped out from one of her nostrils. Sibyl felt the tantalizing pull of nothingness, of warmth and vacancy, and she lingered in it. Another bubble slipped from her nose.
Without warning, a steely hand clamped over her upper arm and hauled upward. Sibyl gasped in surprise, breathing water into her nose and down her throat, tinged with the sour floral taste of lavender soap. Coughing and sputtering, Sibyl scrambled upright with a splash, wet hair plastered to her face as she heaved for breath, water running off her lips, her fingertips, her chin.
“Miss!” a voice exclaimed.
Sibyl looked up into the shocked and worried face of Mrs. Doherty, one sleeve rolled to the elbow, holding a bath towel. She was accustomed to entering without knocking, as had been her habit since Sibyl was old enough to bathe herself. Behind the housekeeper’s deliberately unflappable stare, Sibyl saw worry mingled with contained panic. Sibyl drew ragged breaths, her hands clutching the sides of the bathtub, face flushed and clearly alive. Seeing that Sibyl was safe, the housekeeper’s expression resolved from alarm to disapproval.
“Oh!” Sibyl panted, wiping the hair out of her eyes with one hand while trying to cover the modest parts of herself with both arms. Sibyl’s cheeks reddened in embarrassment and aggravation. Mrs. Doherty stared closely at her, more concerned with Sibyl’s mental state than her physical one. Sibyl glared back, wishing the woman would go away.
Finally, Mrs. Doherty said, “I can’t have Betty hold the breakfast,” as though that were a credible explanation for hoisting Sibyl out of the water with such urgency. She waited, keeping a wary eye on the young mistress of the Beacon Street house, pretending to be readying to offer Sibyl the towel.
“Breakfast?”
Sibyl asked, aware that she had overslept. The staff had a schedule to keep, which she herself had set for them, and which it was her duty as mistress of the house to maintain.
With a sniff of annoyance, which she could afford now that the safety of the situation was clear, Mrs. Doherty laid aside the towel and turned her attention to the vanity table. Her back to Sibyl, she rearranged the bottles by order of size with a brisk hand while she spoke.
“The eggs’ll be getting cold, and you know how he hates cold eggs.” Neither of them felt the need to specify whose eggs would be growing cold.
The housekeeper hazarded a worried glance over her shoulder at Sibyl, who affected not to notice. Then with a grunt of resignation the woman bustled out, the door clicking closed behind her.
Sibyl sighed again, dropping her head back into the cooling water, feeling its surface close over the tip of her nose as she knew with sickening certainty that she could hide from this day no longer.
The door to the dining room squeaked open, and Sibyl edged into a room so encased in walnut paneling that even the cool springtime sun through the bay window failed to relieve the impression of night. Efforts had been made at brightening the space in deference to the season: a cheerful arrangement of paperwhites and daffodils sat in the center of the dining table, perfuming the air. The table held a white linen runner, needlepointed by Helen as a new bride, with white roses and young fawns in repose among tiny ivy leaves. Someone had taken the time to polish the silver and the candlesticks, which caught the morning light with a chill glimmer. Even so, the room managed to absorb these gestures of sunshine, swallowing them up.
At one end of the table a straight-backed chair stood out at a careless angle, overlooked. In the vicinity of the chair rested a crushed napkin, half obscuring a few coffee stains and a sprinkling of crumbs. A fork, clotted with eggs, sat tines down on a greasy plate. Sibyl ignored this tableau, which happened to be arranged at her customary seat, and settled instead at the opposite end. At the table’s head, behind a newspaper, Sibyl found her father, steam still rising from his freshened coffee.
“Good morning, Papa,” Sibyl said, announcing her presence, her voice rusty from sleep. As she spoke Mrs. Doherty appeared, sliding a silent plate of eggs and buttered toast into place before her. Coffee poured, as if of its own volition, into a waiting cup at Sibyl’s fingertips. Sibyl felt the housekeeper’s gaze on her, as though confirming her safety once and for all. She did not speak.
The newspaper rattled.
“It’s unconscionable, I tell you,” Lan Allston said from behind the morning edition.
Sibyl sighed, unwilling to revisit the previous evening’s events in any detail before she had had so much as a sip of coffee. She brought the cup to her lips, her eyes on the tablecloth, saying only a noncommittal “Hmmm,” sufficient to indicate that she was listening.
“Chlorine gas,” her father continued, head shaking in disapproval. “You can’t even imagine the depths the Hun will stoop to. And I always thought they were an honorable people.”
Sibyl let out an inaudible sigh of relief that her father was wrapped up again in accounts of the war, rather than in the situation within the Beacon Street house. She had no idea what he could be referring to. Whatever it was, it sounded wretched.
Sibyl wrestled with the habit, inculcated by Helen, of closing her ears, and so her mind, to unpleasant things. Few aspects of Helen’s and Sibyl’s overlapping characters would send Eulah on a tear faster.
“How can you be so horribly ignorant, Mother?” Sibyl’s memory heard Eulah demand, sitting one morning at that very breakfast table. Her imperious younger sister always insisted that there was little worse than willful ignorance of harsh human truths. “I can’t tolerate it, I really can’t.”
Eulah’s dominant theme just before her death had been votes for women, a passion unshared by the other members of the Allston household.
“Really, my darling,” Helen clucked. “You act as though women don’t hold any sway over men already. Whatever would I need the franchise for? Then I’d have to start reading newspapers and following party platforms and all sorts of bother. Who has the time?”
“Mother!” Eulah cried. “You can’t go about having Papa speak for you all the time. Don’t you want to have your own views put forward? Haven’t you anything to say on your own account?”
“Why, my views are Papa’s,” Helen soothed. “And Papa’s views are mine on everything that’s important. In any event, I wouldn’t want to have to deal with the consequences of lawmaking, would you? Imagine, if one made the wrong decision. Why, it makes me tired just thinking about it.”
“Sibsie,” Eulah squealed in rage, turning to her sister for moral support. “I can’t believe her! And you just sitting there like a lump, not even saying anything!”
At that her younger sister had tossed down her napkin and stormed out of the dining room, tipping over a chair in her haste with an abrupt thunk. Eulah always had a flair for the dramatic.
“Must be her special time,” a sullen Harlan muttered, to which her mother hissed, “Harlan! None of that.” She may have even swiped at her son’s elbow with the back of her butter knife, but Sibyl didn’t remember. Helen had been a great one for propriety enforced by butter knife.
Sibyl detected the same streak of self-righteous impatience in Harley, though his point of view was shot through with a naïveté that Eulah, despite her cosseted upbringing, had never had. He certainly preferred to speak rather than listen. Whereas Eulah voiced her politics at club meetings and marches under banners, Harlan limited his activism to grumbled disagreements within the safe confines of the Beacon Street house. Harlan was clear in his sense of how the world ought to be, his opinions formed from the view out of the drawing room window. He had so far proven unable to act toward those ostensible ideals, of course. But he was flush with ideals all the same.
Sibyl half smiled, certain that Harley would object to such an unforgiving characterization. And what of Sibyl? She had usually been content to hold back, observing the larger personalities of her mother and siblings as they clashed together. But she chafed at it.
Sibyl straightened in her chair and inquired, “Really? Chlorine gas, you say?”
Her father lowered the newspaper and leveled his blue gaze on her face. She sipped her coffee with a pleasant smile, then took up her fork and stirred the eggs around the plate in a practiced gesture of simulated eating.
“Hm,” her father said, perhaps trying to evaluate the true depth of his daughter’s interest in current affairs. “Well, I suppose we can discuss it this evening. It’s hardly appropriate breakfast conversation.” His eyes traveled from her face to the fork moving around the edges of her plate.
“Indeed?” Sibyl asked.
“Suffice it to say,” he continued, “the Kaiser is a ruthless man. Ruthless. And without honor.”
Sibyl’s eyebrows rose, knowing that to disparage a man’s honor was Lan Allston’s most cutting insult.
“If you leave the paper for me, I’ll read it this afternoon,” she said, bringing a tiny morsel of egg to her mouth. “Be sure you tell Mrs. Doherty, though, or she’ll throw it out.”
“It’ll be in the Evening Transcript as well, I’m sure,” her father said, still observing the slow progress of her fork. She brought another, equally minute tineful of egg to her mouth and slid it between her teeth. She made a show of chewing, swallowing, affecting enjoyment.
“Betty does the best eggs, doesn’t she?” Sibyl remarked, to push away her father’s close attention.
“Mmm,” he agreed, watching her.
He reached over and let out a sharp ring of the silver bell that rested by his seat. Mrs. Doherty appeared, not bothering to conceal her aggravation at the summons. She was chewing, Sibyl noticed, which suggested that her own breakfast had been interrupted.
“Sir?” the housekeeper inquired, concealing the bite in her cheek.
“Bring Miss Allston some bacon, if you will. We
have bacon, don’t we?” he said, telling rather than asking. It was clear the existence of bacon was not subject to debate. “Good and fried. In butter.”
“Very good, Mister Allston,” the housekeeper said, bobbing a fleeting curtsy before disappearing into the pantry.
“Papa, that’s really not—” Sibyl was silenced by a reproving look from her father.
“You need your strength,” he said, more gently than Sibyl expected. “It was a long night, after all. And it’s shaping up to be a long day today, I should think.”
To her surprise, her father reached a rough hand across the table and grasped her wrist with a reassuring squeeze. She blinked, taken aback by the unaccustomed expression of affection. A smile passed between them, and the meal continued in silence. When Mrs. Doherty reappeared after a few minutes bearing some fragrant fried bacon arranged artfully on a small plate, Sibyl accepted it with a nod, and ate.
Neither of them remarked on the vacant chair at the opposite end of the table.
As breakfast drew to a close, and her father commenced rummaging in his coat pockets for the first pipe bowl of the day, Sibyl decided that the time had come to speak. She cleared her throat, and her father cocked a wiry eyebrow at her, seeming to know what she was about to say.
“Well then. Is she . . . ?” Sibyl began.
Her father nodded, gesturing with his chin to the drawing room across the hall. “I believe you’ll find Mrs. Doherty helped her into some of your clothes. Quite an improvement, it must be said.”
Sibyl started to frown, not knowing that any of her blouses and skirts were missing, and discomfited that they would be taken without her approval. But she stopped herself, feeling churlish. Of course the girl needed clothes to wear.
The previous evening, in a wordless agreement on placing duty over propriety, Sibyl and Lan had pressed Dovie to return with them to the town house for the night. Both the practical Allstons were fearful of letting her travel home alone at such an unwholesome hour, and uncertain of the safety of her rooms, given what had happened. She was a stranger to them, but not to Harlan, discomfiting though that was. And once she was in their home, the girl couldn’t very well be expected to stay in her bloodied tunic, could she? Sibyl covered over her irritation with a determined smile.