“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 momen
t 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.
“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.”