“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?”
Her father sighed, massaging his forehead with his fingertips. Deep in the shadows the macaw let out a sleepy caw. “I suspect,” he said, “that most people would hold your opinion. But this is still new to you, I gather. It’s not new to me. It’s weighed on me for almost as long as I can remember.”
“But why should it?” Sibyl asked, not understanding, hurrying over to kneel at her father’s knee, looking up into his face.
“I suspect that most people, hearing our family has the wherewithal, under specific, and dangerous, circumstances, to s
ee what God has in store for us, would be envious. But that envy would be misguided, Sibyl. You see this as a great gift now. That’s only because you haven’t lived with it long enough. Do you think I liked knowing that the sea would give me my livelihood, while taking away what I love? Even before I met Helen, I knew how she would die. Do you think I liked knowing, even before you all were born, that I would outlive all my children, save one? That my efforts to change the plan, my struggles to be free, would only make the outcomes worse? It’s actually—” He paused, resting his hands gently on his daughter’s shoulders.
“What?” she whispered, looking with terrified eyes, obsidian in the firelight, into his weathered face.
“It’s a curse.” He said the word softly, so softly that Sibyl at first didn’t register its gravity.
“A curse?” she repeated, a deadly chill spreading through her limbs.
He nodded. “Yes. It doesn’t look that way at first. But it is. In truth I feel myself,” he spoke gently, “to be damned. I have sinned. I know this. And I must bear my punishment as best I can. I only ask that God not visit the same punishment on my children. Not on you, my dear. Not on you.”
Sibyl dropped her head, wiping at the corner of her eyes with her fingers. She felt her father’s hand descend on her head, patting her hair with a soft, reassuring stroke.
“There, there,” he murmured. “Don’t cry, my dear. Please don’t cry.”
She didn’t respond, bringing her forehead to her hands, still knotted together on his knee. She choked back her sobs, keeping silent, and he stroked her hair. They sat like that for a long while.
At length Sibyl swallowed her tears and said, “But, Papa. What shall I—what shall I say to him?”
“You shall say nothing,” Lan Allston said. “You shall let him make his own choices, guided by God’s hand. Even God cannot make us other than we are, but he can, in his love, show us the best possible path. That is the kindest, the truest thing you can do for your brother. You must let him feel himself to be free.”
She searched his face, horrified by what he was asking her to do. “But how can I face him?” she said, aghast. “How can you ask me to say nothing, to let him go away? What can I say to Dovie? To Benton?”
The old sailor smiled wanly down on his distraught daughter. “You have the strength. And in asking these questions you begin to see how dangerous, how horrible, this skill is. You must give it up, before it’s too late. I’m begging you. Give it up. We’ll find a way to help you. But you must give it up.”
He clasped his hands around hers, pressing them between his rough sailor’s palms. Sibyl felt their tremor, which she now understood was a sign not of tired hands beaten by a life at sea, but of his addiction, his enslavement, to the hideous seduction of scrying.
Sibyl looked down, and then she pulled her hands away and struggled to her feet. She drew herself up to her full height and looked down at her aged father, who gazed up at her with sorrowful eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Sibyl hurried back to the outer drawing room, her arms wrapped around herself, and when Benton and Dovie saw her horrified face they both leaped to their feet.
“Darling,” Benton exclaimed, stepping to meet her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and peered down into her face. “Why, what is it?” he asked when he read her distress. “What can have happened?”
Sibyl forced a smile, tossing the loose strand of hair off her forehead with a quick motion of her head, which made her look fleetingly like Harlan. “It’s nothing,” she said, placing a soft hand alongside Benton’s cheek. His skin was rough and sandpapery to the touch, a hallmark of the lateness of the hour. She allowed herself to rub her thumb along the corner of his mouth.
“It’s not nothing,” he insisted, gray eyes darkening with concern.
“No, really,” she said firmly. “It’s just the lateness of the hour. I’m so tired I can barely see straight. Surely you must be tired as well.”
“I suppose,” Benton demurred. Hesitant, Dovie, her face streaked with tears and rivulets of kohl, approached from the bay window and hovered at the outer rim of their conversation.
“I confess, I’m awfully tired, Sibyl,” the younger woman said, resting a hand on Sibyl’s arm.
“Well,” Sibyl said, placing her own hand over Dovie’s and then smiling at them both. “That settles it. Benton, perhaps you should head home. I’ll see Miss Whistler upstairs, and we’ll regroup to take on the Kaiser tomorrow. All right?”
Benton looked doubtful but pulled out his pocket watch and let out a low whistle when he observed the time. He replaced the timepiece in his waistcoat pocket, and threaded his arm through Sibyl’s free elbow. “Reasonable to the last,” he said. “All right. I don’t have any classes until tomorrow afternoon. Shall I drop by for breakfast, then?”
“I’ll tell Betty to expect you,” Sibyl said. She and Dovie, arm in arm, walked Benton to the front door and waited while he climbed into his overcoat. He met Sibyl’s eyes and seemed on the point of leaning in for a kiss. She didn’t move, keeping her arm in Dovie’s and smiling at him.
“Well,” he said, hesitating.
“Good night, Professor Derby,” Dovie said, tightening her grip on Sibyl.
“Good night, Miss Whistler. No welshing, now. I get a recitation of Longfellow from you. I’m holding you to it.”
“Good night, Benton,” Sibyl said. They exchanged a look that promised further discussion tomorrow.
Benton then cocked his hat, said, “Ladies,” with a mock salute, and vanished through the front door.
“Come, dear,” Sibyl said, leading Dovie up the winding front staircase. The girl leaned on Sibyl’s arm, as though the strain of Harlan’s possible departure had robbed her of her strength. Her body felt small and fragile next to Sibyl, birdlike, and as they mounted the staircase Dovie rested her cheek against Sibyl’s shoulder.
“You’ll talk to him tomorrow?” she murmured.
“I will,” Sibyl said, voice grim.
“You promise?” the girl pressed.
Sibyl reached across and patted Dovie’s hand. “I promise,” she said.
They reached the top of the stairs, and Sibyl, her arm around Dovie’s narrow shoulders, ushered her to the door of what had been Eulah’s room. The light under Harlan’s door was out, and the sound of gentle snoring could be distinctly heard from within. Sibyl stopped and rested her hands on Dovie’s shoulders.
“Now then,” she said. “You get your rest. All right? I’m sure we can reason with Harley tomorrow. It won’t do anyone any good to have you up all night worrying, will it?”
“No,” Dovie allowed. “I suppose not. Good night, Sibyl.” She rose on tiptoes to place a quick kiss on Sibyl’s cheek. Sibyl smiled at the sleepy girl, who gave her a wave before stepping through the door to Eulah’s room.
Sibyl stood alone in the hallway, and while she stood there the smile dissolved off her face. She listened to the sounds of the house: a creak, a snore, the ticking of the mantel clock downstairs. Then she turned on her heel and hurried down the hall toward her bedroom.
But when she reached the door, she passed it without entering.
Instead, she glanced left and right, and started down the back service stair. The lights had all been extinguished, and Sibyl had to grope her way down the narrow stairs to the lower hall, which led to the kitchen entrance of the house. Once there she fumbled for one of the castoff overcoats that often hung on some pegs by the back door and struggled into one.
A creak of the kitchen door opening, and Sibyl exclaimed, “Oh!”
She was met with the drawn, freckle-spattered face of Betty Gallagher, one arm propping the kitchen door open, the other holding aloft a small oil lamp.
“Miss Allston!” she exclaimed.
“Betty!” Sibyl gasped, bringing a hand to her chest to quiet the thudding of her heart. “Oh, my goodness, how you startled me. But you’re
still here. Whyever haven’t you gone home?”
The cook looked haggard, her red-rimmed eyes blinking rapidly. The fatigue didn’t suit her, Sibyl thought meanly. For the first time, Sibyl thought that Betty looked a little rough around the edges.
“I . . .” Betty started to say. “That is, I had a few things I had to do in the kitchen, and—” She grappled, in search of a credible lie, and then decided to dispense with pretense. “See here, he’s not really going, is he?”
“Who?” Sibyl asked, buttoning up the overcoat. “Harlan?”
“Of course, Harlan!” Betty said, crossly, and Sibyl frowned, hearing the impatience in the other young woman’s voice. Betty had worry lines around her eyes, and sadness around her mouth. If anything, the cook wore the expression of a woman who feels herself too alone.
“Well,” Sibyl said, keeping her reply neutral, “I couldn’t rightly say.” She gazed levelly at Betty, wishing the cook to feel the subtle assertion of her authority. Betty returned the look, glowering under her pale reddish eyebrows.
“I warrant it might be right dangerous, don’t you? If he went,” the cook pressed.
Irritated at the line of questioning, Sibyl said, “Well, I suppose it might be, yes. In any event, I’m glad to run into you. Professor Derby will be joining us for breakfast. I’d like you to plan accordingly.”
A look of pure hatred passed through Betty’s features, so hard and abrupt that Sibyl nearly stepped backward to escape it. The look said that she knew her feelings were of no account, that she was wasting her time, and that she resented them for it.
“Very good, Miss Allston,” the cook said, a perceptible chill in her voice. The anxiety had vanished from Betty’s face, replaced with the subtle, constant anger of the household servant. At that moment Sibyl knew she’d lost her confederate for good. But perhaps she’d never really had her in the first place.
A pause, while Betty seemed on the point of saying something else, when her expression changed again upon noticing that Sibyl had put on an overcoat. “You going out again tonight, then?” she asked, her hostility mollified by curiosity.