“Did someone leave a TV on?” Blake asked, looking confused as the children shook their heads, and there was no television in the formal dining room anyway. Not knowing what else to do, Sybil opened the door into the dining room from the kitchen with a feeling of trepidation, sensing what was about to happen. One by one, she, Blake, and the kids walked into the dining room, as all the Butterfields seated at the dining room table, elegantly dressed, stopped talking and stared at them. Sybil knew what it meant and who they were, but it was too late to warn any of her family, even Blake.
“Good Lord! Who are they and what are they wearing?” Augusta said loudly, glaring at them through her lorgnette, and Angus turned to observe them with a look of surprise. He couldn’t take his eyes off Sybil, who was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and ballet slippers. “Are those costumes of some kind?” Augusta asked. She was wearing a gray velvet gown with lace at the neck.
Bertrand had risen to greet them, and looked at Blake with a welcoming smile, as though they had been expected and were properly dressed. His manners were impeccable, his eyes warm, and all of the Butterfield men were in white tie and tails, as they wore to dinner every night, except Magnus, who looked immaculate in a sailor suit. Charlie, his counterpart, was wearing the corduroy pants, sweatshirt, and running shoes he had worn at school. Andy was in khakis and a sweater, and Caroline had on a miniskirt, which Augusta noted with horror. She rapped her brother’s hand with her fan when he stared at her, and he laughed. He had never seen anything like it, but thought it excellent attire for a pretty girl. Gwyneth and Sybil exchanged a shy smile. Gwyneth was wearing a beautiful lavender silk gown and a diamond choker, and Sybil thought she was even more beautiful than her portrait. She had flawless porcelain skin, pale blond hair upswept in a loose chignon, and huge blue eyes similar to her mother’s and Bettina’s. Gwyneth turned to the butler, whom Sybil recognized, standing at attention behind the Butterfields, and Gwyneth spoke to him in the same Scottish accent as her mother, but in a gentler tone.
“Phillips, please set five places for our guests,” she said softly, and he nodded and disappeared to carry out her orders. Blake stared around the room, as did the children, trying to understand what had happened. But the Butterfields weren’t frightening, they felt like friends. Blake glanced at Sybil, and she nodded to reassure him. Blake and Sybil’s children weren’t frightened either. They were fascinated by the Butterfields.
A moment later, Phillips reappeared and set places at the table for all five Gregorys where Gwyneth indicated as Bert chatted good-humoredly with them. The fact that they weren’t dressed for dinner didn’t seem to bother anyone except Augusta, who spoke under her breath to Uncle Angus. He found the women in the group delightful, whatever they were wearing. The families introduced themselves to each other, and Blake was seated between Bert and Bettina, who was a beautiful young woman. Sybil sat between Bertrand and Josiah, their oldest son. Andy was between Gwyneth and Lucy, whom he thought was the most exquisite girl he’d ever seen. She had her mother’s perfect creamy skin and blond hair, and was wearing a demure white evening dress. She appeared to be about twenty, which Sybil knew from the book was the age she had been at the time of her death. Magnus looked to be six, the age he was when he died, three years after they’d bought the house. Caroline was between Lucy and her brother Charlie, who sat next to Magnus on his other side, who looked totally delighted. The two little boys hit it off immediately and were enchanted to discover they were both six.
Augusta continued to gaze at their guests through her lorgnette, with her lips pursed in disapproval and the little black pug at her feet. Angus’s English bulldog was sound asleep near the fire, snoring loudly. Charlie noticed him and laughed. Magnus said the dog’s name was Rupert. And his grandmother’s pug was Violet.
Everyone at the table looked happy except Augusta, who rarely did anyway. She was their collective conscience and always complained about the children’s manners or what they were wearing.
“I have no idea who these people are,” she said in a loud whisper to her brother, as he continued to stare at Sybil and Caroline with a look of delight. He thought them an excellent addition to the meal.
“What a wonderful surprise,” Bertrand said warmly to their guests around the table, which was beautifully set with silver and gleaming crystal. Everyone began to talk at once as dinner was served, and the food was delicious. Blake commented on the excellent wine. Sybil was dying to talk to Gwyneth, but they were too far apart, and she enjoyed chatting with Bert and Josiah about San Francisco and the house. She explained that they had just moved in, and had arrived from New York.
“We built the house fifteen years ago,” Bert explained, which Sybil instantly calculated meant that the year was 1917 for them, exactly a hundred years before the date that night for the Gregorys. The Gregorys had somehow walked back a century when they entered the formal dining room from the kitchen. Bert and Blake talked business for part of the evening, the older children of both families were having fun with one another, and Charlie and Magnus were plotting happily about things they wanted to do together. Magnus suggested they meet to climb the trees in the garden, which sounded like fun to Charlie too. Magnus confessed to his new friend in a whisper that he wasn’t allowed to, but did it frequently.
It struck Sybil as she watched them that if the year was 1917 for the Butterfields, as it appeared to be from their conversation, Magnus had been a ghost by then for twelve years, since he had died in 1905 when he was six. His age appeared to have remained fixed there, at the age he was when he died. It was an extraordinary phenomenon that Sybil wouldn’t have understood if she hadn’t met with Michael Stanton that day. She was less baffled and confused than the others after everything he had explained. But one thing was for sure, the Butterfields seemed to have no desire to frighten them away. They made the Gregorys feel warmly welcomed, like honored guests. And nothing about them suggested that they were ghosts—they appeared to be entirely real, normal people, although their style of dress, conversation, and manners dated back to 1917. But both families seemed to have much in common, shared interests, and enjoyed each other’s company immensely, even laughing at each other’s jokes.
The meal ended too soon, and Bert said quietly to Sybil and Blake that something extraordinary had happened, and he hoped they would join him and his family again very soon, the following night if they were free. No one mentioned the divergence of dates, or the fact that their two worlds had converged in an astonishingly real way that night.
“I hope they come properly dressed next time,” Augusta added and harrumphed loudly, as Phillips appeared with a decanter of brandy on a silver tray, and another one of port, and Bert invited the Gregorys to join them in the living room. Blake and Sybil stood up with the others, and the entire group followed Bert and Gwyneth into the large living room, as Sybil admired Gwyneth’s dress, and they chatted. But as soon as they entered the living room, the Gregorys found themselves suddenly alone. The Butterfields had disappeared, and when they glanced back into the dining room, the fire was no longer lit, the room was dark, and all signs of the meal had disappeared.
“What just happened, Dad?” Andy asked his father, and Blake looked puzzled as he stared at Sybil, and didn’t know what to say to his son. And Caroline was visibly confused as well.
“I think something very strange and very wonderful happened tonight,” Blake said slowly. “We met the family who built the house and used to live here.”
“And still do,” Sybil said softly.
“Can we see them again?” Charlie asked, looking anxious. “Magnus said he’d come to my room to play tomorrow.” And he had promised to show Magnus his videogames, and how to play them.
“Then maybe he will,” Sybil said gently, as the Gregorys walked into the kitchen, still confused. Their roast beef was in the oven, vastly overcooked by then, and Blake looked at Sybil as their children left the kitchen and went upstairs to their rooms to do their homework. It had been a w
onderful evening, and they all hoped they’d see their new friends again. No one was upset by having met them, or afraid of them. It had been a positive experience for all.
“What just happened here?” Blake asked her, shocked and mystified.
“They still live here,” Sybil said calmly, and she sat down at the kitchen table with Blake to tell him what Michael Stanton had said.
“They’re such nice people,” he said afterward. “How is this possible? They thought it was 1917 tonight, and it’s a hundred years later for us.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of gift that life is giving us,” Sybil said thoughtfully. “We see history through their eyes and they see the distant future in us.”
“Are you frightened?” he asked her. What had just happened had shaken him, despite how enjoyable it was. And he’d really liked Bert, they saw eye to eye on many subjects they had discussed.
“I’m not afraid anymore,” she said quietly. “I was at first.” And then they laughed about Augusta and Angus, and talked about the children, and Gwyneth and Bert. A little while later, Blake and Sybil went upstairs, after she’d thrown out the burned roast beef and put away their unused plates. There was no way to explain it, or tell anyone else, but all of them agreed, when they said good night to their children, that it had been a magical evening, and they hoped it would happen again. Sybil was almost certain it would. This was only the beginning of a friendship between two families that had been determined by the fates, and would ultimately bless both. She could feel it deep in her soul.
Chapter 5
Sybil devoted the next morning, after Blake and the children left, to finishing Bettina’s book. The Butterfields’ history was all there. Josiah had died a hero’s death in the First World War. They had lost their entire fortune in the Crash of ’29, and Bertrand’s bank had closed, which bruised his spirit badly, along with everything else. Their daughter Lucy died that year as well, before her father’s death, which had added to his sense of devastating loss and grief. He had lost three of his four children by then, which shattered Gwyneth too.
Bert had fought valiantly to maintain their home, but their greatly reduced circumstances and Lucy’s death had been too much for him. He had died in his sleep of a heart attack a year later, in 1930, at the age of sixty, just as Michael had guessed. And Gwyneth had lost too much by then, and too many people she had loved. She had sunk into a deep depression, and Bettina had returned from Europe to comfort her and help her sell the house. They had sold many of their valuables, some art, and Gwyneth’s and her mother’s jewelry. Their whole life had changed. After the house sold, she had gone back to Europe with Bettina, and lived with her and Bettina’s second husband, Louis de Lambertin, who was a kind man, and Bettina’s daughter, Lili, who was twelve years old then. Gwyneth died two years later in 1932, during a hard winter, of pneumonia, like Lucy three years before. She had lost her will to live when Bert died and she sold the house. It was a sad end to their story, but she had no desire to live without him and never adjusted to her life in France, with no home of her own and only her daughter’s charity to support her.
Bettina and Louis had no children of their own, and he had adopted his stepdaughter, who grew up more French than American, and had no memory of the States, only of France. Lili’s late father’s family had no interest in her, nor contact with her, and had never desired any. Louis and his family had embraced Lili as their own. Bettina spoke French fluently, and spoke it with Lili.
The book said that Lili had been a nurse during the Second World War, and when it was over, she married a doctor she had worked with, Raphael Saint Martin. They had a son, Samuel, a year later in 1946. Lili would have been twenty-eight by then, Sybil calculated, as she read the details she had only skimmed before.
Bettina’s husband Louis died of causes she didn’t mention, in 1950, when she was fifty-four. He had been eighteen years older than she was, so it was a reasonable age to die at the time. He divided his considerable fortune between his widow and adopted daughter, and two months after his death, Bettina had returned to San Francisco and bought her parents’ home from the family that had purchased it from Gwyneth when Bert died twenty years before. In her book she said that she had been happy there until her final days, when she wrote the book, in 1980. She wrote that for thirty years, she had been content in the home where she’d grown up, and the obituary that had come with the material from the bank indicated that Bettina Butterfield de Lambertin had died peacefully in her sleep six months later, at eighty-four. There was a photograph of her with the obituary, and Sybil noticed that she looked like an older version of Gwyneth.
In the book, Bettina said that once she moved back in 1950, Lili had come to visit her in San Francisco every few years at first, but she had been busy with her husband, Raphael, and son, Samuel, who was only four when Bettina moved back to San Francisco. She said she had seen Samuel only a few times as a young child after she left France. She mentioned that Lili had health problems and later on could no longer make the journey to the States. At the end of her life, Bettina hadn’t seen Samuel since he was a child, nor Lili in several years. Sybil wondered if Lili had even been able to come for her mother’s funeral. The bank seemed to know that Lili had died ten years after her mother.
Sybil felt a wistful sorrow for all of them as she closed Bettina’s book. They had been so closely tied to each other, and so many things had happened to them over the years. Some of them were events that one couldn’t avoid in life, and others tragic accidents that must have marked them forever, like Magnus dying at six, and Josiah and Bettina’s first husband getting killed in the war. It reminded Sybil that the night she and her family had dinner with them had been January 1917 for the Butterfields, exactly a hundred years before the year the Gregorys were living in. In the Butterfields’ world, America had not yet entered the war, and Josiah was still alive.
She wondered, what if she or Blake could warn them of what would happen next, and change the course of their destinies? Could one do that a century later? They were meeting in a neutral space in time. And did Josiah have a choice then? What if he didn’t go to war? His family would have been proud of him when he went. And he would have been considered a coward and a disgrace if he had shirked his responsibility and stayed home. There seemed to be no way to alter the course fate had designed for them, but it was so painful knowing what would come and the losses that would occur. And a hundred years later, no matter what Sybil tried to warn them of, they would all be dead anyway. As far as Sybil knew, the only one who could be alive now was Samuel Saint Martin, Lili’s son, and any children he might have. The Butterfields by name had all died out, and their bloodline had continued somewhere in France.
Sybil was still thinking about it when she decided to try to dine with the Butterfields again that night. Blake and the children came home to find their evening clothes laid out on their beds, where Sybil had left them that afternoon, and when she walked into Charlie’s room to find something for him to wear to dinner, like a blazer and gray slacks, she saw Magnus there, playing marbles with her son. She gave a start, and then all three of them laughed. She was happy to meet Magnus again, despite his dirty face and grimy hands. He looked like he’d been playing in the garden all afternoon.
“What are you two up to?” she asked, smiling at both boys and sitting down on Charlie’s bed, as though Magnus were any ordinary friend.
“He’s teaching me to play marbles,” Charlie said happily, delighted with the promised visit. Magnus had said the night before at dinner that he would come to play with him the next day, and Sybil was pleased to see that he had. There was a bond between the two families now that even time could not displace. “I’m going to show him my videogames after this.” Sybil couldn’t help wondering how that would work. How would Magnus adapt to games that were a hundred years ahead of his time? It was an interesting turn of events.
Alicia wandered into the room with milk and cookies for Charlie, while Sybil watched them,
and she asked her for a glass of milk and cookies for herself as well. Alicia looked surprised and returned with them a few minutes later. As soon as she left the room, Sybil handed them to Magnus, and he guzzled the milk and ate the cookies like any normal playmate of Charlie’s. There was nothing ghostly about him. But Alicia had been totally unaware of him and didn’t see him, which Sybil found interesting too.
Charlie asked him about the secret passages in the house, but Magnus said he didn’t know where they were, if there were any.
She took out Charlie’s blazer, gray slacks, and a shirt and navy tie and laid them on the bed, as the boys looked at her quizzically.
“What’s that for?” Charlie asked her. It wasn’t Christmas or Thanksgiving. “Why do I have to get dressed up?”
“I thought we’d try to have dinner with Magnus’s family tonight,” she said easily, and Magnus grinned happily.
“My grandma’s in a really bad mood, though,” he warned them. “Uncle Angus’s dog, Rupert, ate her embroidery this morning, and she said she was going to boil him for dinner. I don’t think she really will, though. She usually likes him, but she was really mad about her embroidery. She was making napkins for my mother, and he ate them all. And she said Uncle Angus playing the bagpipes gave her a sick headache.” He used the terms of his time to refer to common ailments, and it reminded Sybil of Victorian novels she had loved to read when she was young. “He plays really bad,” he said about his great-uncle, and all three of them laughed. “My mother says he gives her a headache too.”
Sybil left them to their games then, as Charlie started to introduce Magnus to his PlayStation, and Magnus was fascinated by the intricacy of it. The two boys were squealing with excitement and shouting when she moved on to Caroline’s room, and ran into Alicia in the hall.
“Is he all right?” She looked concerned about the violent noises emanating from his room. She didn’t know the children yet, but it didn’t sound right to her.
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