Chapter 16

After Thanksgiving, Sybil was organizing papers in her office, as she was in the home stretch of her book, and she noticed the box the bank had given her about the Butterfields, with the photographs and Bettina’s book in it. She smiled when she saw it. Nearly three years after they’d bought the house, she knew so much about them, probably even more than Bettina had known when she wrote it. Sybil had the benefit of the present to add to the past, while Bettina could only guess at the future. And she was blissfully happy in Paris with Louis.

She glanced through the photographs and saw pictures of Lili as a baby, and with Bettina shortly after she was born. Bettina looked so serious and unhappy. She had been so worried about the responsibilities of being a mother, and now she was in love with a wonderful man and protected by him. Her letters from Paris were only happy, after three months of marriage. She felt totally separate now from her life in the States, and believed she would never live there again.

Sybil found other photographs too, of Magnus and Josiah, Bert and Gwyneth. They’d looked so young when they were married. There was one of Bettina after she bought the house back, after Louis died, in 1950. It was jarring to see it, knowing that they had just gotten married that summer. But in real time, she had married him in the summer of 1919. Sometimes Sybil forgot that she was reliving history with them because the present times she lived with them were so vivid. They existed in another dimension together in addition to the one each family was in, a hundred years apart.

There was a picture of Gwyneth too, after Bert died in 1930, when Bettina took her to Paris to live with her after they sold the house in San Francisco. Gwyneth looked so ravaged, so lost without him, that it pained Sybil to see it. And when she looked at the date on the back of another photograph, she knew that Gwyneth had died a few months later in 1932. After that, the only ones still alive were Bettina and Lili, and there were no more pictures. And then Sybil thought of something. Bettina had written that Lili got married in France to Raphael Saint Martin, a doctor, after the Second World War. She had a son named Samuel, born in 1946. As far as Sybil knew, Samuel Saint Martin was the last descendant of Gwyneth and Bert. There were no other heirs, as Bettina had been their only surviving child, Lili Bettina’s only issue, and Samuel Lili’s. He was the end of the line. Sybil wondered what had happened to him, and if he’d had any interest in the house or knew anything about it. His mother had sold it after his grandmother’s death in 1980. Sybil wondered what had happened to him since.

The bank had said that Lili had sold the house from France without even coming to see it, because she was in ill health. She had inherited it from her mother and disposed of it. Michael Stanton of the Berkeley Psychic Institute had said that Lili probably wasn’t alive when he visited the house. She would have been a hundred and one years old now, and if Samuel was still alive, he would be seventy-three. For the first time, Sybil felt a duty to try to contact him and share his family history with him. Maybe he never knew anything about them, since Lili had no real bond to the house, and in everything Bettina had written in her lifetime, she had admitted that she and Lili had never been close. She blamed herself for it, and Lili’s ties were all in France, and she would have had none of the Butterfield history to pass on to her son.

Suddenly Sybil knew what her mission was and what she owed them, and wanted to give them. She wanted to reach out to Samuel and tell him about the Butterfield Mansion and the wonderful family who had lived there, and were his heritage too. It was a gift she could give to him, and to Bert and Gwyneth. Samuel Saint Martin was the last link in the chain. She and Blake were the guardians of their history, but Samuel was the rightful heir to it and their stories, their victories and their broken dreams. He had a right to know the truth about all of it, and even to meet them, since the strange phenomenon that existed in the house would allow him to, if he wanted to and was willing. And if they were. He could meet Augusta, his great-great-grandmother, and his great-uncle Magnus, his great-great-uncle Angus, and Bert and Gwyneth, his great-grandparents, and Sybil knew she had to pass it on to him. She could be the bridge between the Butterfields she knew and their last descendant. All she had to do was find him, if she could. And then he had to believe it was possible for him to meet them, and not that she was some lunatic who had imagined it, or was lying to make herself interesting. She wasn’t sure how to convince him, if she found him, but she wanted to try. She had a strong sense that when Bettina had bought the house back after Louis’s death, she had lived with her family around her in the same spiritual dimension where they existed now, and where Sybil saw them every day. They had probably populated Bettina’s final years in the same way until she died. So she was never alone or lonely in her final years, and had returned to the comfort of her youth.

And somewhere in the world was Lili’s son, who had a rich history he probably knew nothing about, but deserved to at least learn as the Butterfields’ final blood relative. She felt powerfully that Bert and Gwyneth and even his grandmother Bettina would have wanted that. Sybil was the only one who could give him that now, or at least offer it to him. She not only knew their history, she had lived it with them. They had entrusted it to her by being so open with her and her family, and she wanted to share it with Samuel now.