Chapter 17

With a feeling of trepidation, and after thinking all night about it and whether it was the right thing to do, Sybil started searching for Samuel Saint Martin the next day. All she knew about him was the minor mention of him in Bettina’s book, as Lili’s son.

His father, Raphael, had been a doctor, and if he and Lili had other children, Bettina didn’t mention them in the book.

Sybil didn’t know what was pushing her to look for him, and she didn’t tell anyone about it. It might be a dead end, anyway. He might have died. Or the Butterfields could refuse to meet him. Lili hadn’t been part of their lives once Bettina moved to France and she was a baby then. Her seventy-three-year-old son might just seem too remote to them. They lived within the confines of the house and the grounds and the world they had known, with the family members they had lived with for more than a century. Samuel might not seem part of the family to them. But Sybil could feel something beckoning her as she began her search.

She found him on Facebook in less than an hour, if it was the right person. It had been startlingly easy, and his age matched up. She had nothing else to go on. His Facebook page said that he was a history professor at the Sorbonne, he lived in the fifth arrondissement on the Left Bank in Paris, which wasn’t far from Saint-Germain, and Sybil was desperately curious about him and wanted to know more. She had a burning sense that this was important without knowing why.

She was composing an email to him on her computer that afternoon when Gwyneth walked into the room. She had come to finish a drawing she had started.

“What are you doing?” She was bored and missed Bettina, and hadn’t had a letter from her in a week. Bettina was busy reorganizing her new home and enjoying their busy social life. She had written that she loved being married and having a home of her own, and not just living with her parents.

“Looking for your great-grandson,” Sybil said seriously, looking distracted.

“Very funny.” Gwyneth thought it was a joke.

“No, really. I know that makes no sense, but it’s one of those time-dimension things I can’t explain, it just is.”

Gwyneth nodded. She knew it happened to them, but it confused her, so she tried not to think about it, about who was dead and who wasn’t, and who wasn’t really the age that they seemed, who was past and who was future. It was much easier to take it at face value. And Sybil was more interested in it than she was. Bert didn’t like her to talk about it, and had forbidden her to tell anyone.

“So I have a great-grandson?” she asked, looking uncomfortable. Bert wouldn’t have liked her asking questions about the future, even if Sybil knew the answers, particularly if she did.

“Yes, you do. Lili’s son,” Sybil said. It seemed harmless to tell her, as long as she didn’t warn her of the tragedies that would come and no one could alter.

“Shouldn’t you be working on your book?” Gwyneth said to change the subject.

“Don’t remind me. I’m taking a break.” Sybil smiled at her. “I’m almost finished.”

“Do you know where he is? My great-grandson, I mean.” Gwyneth was curious about it, even if she knew she shouldn’t be. They both knew it was dangerous to pry into the future, and they were usually careful not to and respectful of the privilege they had.

“Sort of. If he’s the right one, he’s a history professor at the Sorbonne. That’s all I really know. The rest is guesswork. And maybe he won’t give a damn about any of you or your history if I find him, but I figured that you or Bettina or someone, maybe your mother, would want me to reach out to him, to tell him about all of you, so you could meet him if you want to.” And he’d have to be willing to come to San Francisco if so. It was all a long shot for now.

“I think that would be nice,” Gwyneth said, smiling at her. “We’re all still here. He might as well know about us.” And then she looked shyly at Sybil. “Sometimes I think we’re here because of you. Maybe without you, if you and Blake hadn’t bought the house, we wouldn’t be in our home anymore.” It was one of those rare times when one of them admitted that the way they all existed, including her and Blake, wasn’t entirely normal, and had defied what was possible for other people.

“I don’t think that’s true. I think you’d be here anyway. I think you’re all so attached to the house and your life together, you’ll never leave,” Sybil said honestly. “You were all here when we arrived. We just found you. We didn’t bring you back.” Sybil took no credit for it, and what she said was true. She smiled warmly at Gwyneth. The two women had a powerful tie of love and friendship and had been through a lot together.

“Do you ever get tired of us?” Gwyneth asked, since they had opened a forbidden subject, and Sybil laughed.

“Never, except when Angus plays the bagpipes.” They both laughed. Sybil turned back to her computer then. “I’m trying to find this guy’s phone number. Maybe I should just call Paris information.” She did, as Gwyneth listened to her, marveling at modern communications when they gave it to her, as simple as that. A moment later, when Sybil turned to say something to her, Gwyneth had vanished, to check on Magnus and make sure he wasn’t up to mischief. And she didn’t want to intrude on the call.

Magnus had been rambunctious lately. Charlie was getting more homework and couldn’t play as often, or for as long. It made Sybil wonder if she was damaging her children, allowing them to grow up with people who no longer existed in the present, and facilitating their living together as friends. But the Butterfields had enriched their lives in so many ways. She didn’t know what they would tell their children about it. What had Bettina told Lili? Did Lili know? Or did Bettina simply live with her family and never tell her daughter of the unusual phenomena in the house? And would Lili have believed her or thought her senile and dismissed it as an old woman’s fantasies or some form of dementia, living in the past? Sybil was sure that Bettina had come back in order to find them all again, after Louis died. And now Sybil didn’t want to leave the house either, nor did Blake or their children. She couldn’t imagine living without the Butterfields anymore. They were an important part of each other’s lives.

Sybil wanted to call Samuel Saint Martin in Paris, but she realized it was one in the morning there, and she’d have to wait until morning for him, and midnight for her.

She went back to her research papers but couldn’t focus as she thought about Samuel Saint Martin, curious if he was even the right one. Thinking about him made her wonder if she should be writing the Butterfields’ family history instead of her book on design. She was curious what kind of history Samuel was interested in. Maybe he should write the family history, using Bettina’s original book as a base. Maybe that was why she felt compelled to find him, so she could give him all the material and he could write it. She knew there had to be a reason why she felt so strongly that she had to reach out to him. The idea had come from somewhere. She sensed that someone or something was pushing her to find him.

Neither she nor Gwyneth said anything about it that night at dinner. They talked about their plans for Christmas, which was only a month away. Everyone would be home except Bettina, who had written that she would be spending the holiday in Dordogne with her husband and in-laws. Gwyneth commented to Sybil how much they were going to miss her.

“You never should have let her marry a Frenchman,” Augusta said from the other end of the table. “I told you that. She’ll bring Lili up as a French child. She’ll never even know us.” Augusta looked disapproving as she said it.

“You liked him, Mother,” Gwyneth reminded her.

“I did,” she admitted. “But, still, she should have married an American. A suitable one,” she said pointedly, referring to Lili’s father and Bettina’s regrettable transgression with the restaurant owner’s son. They had never heard from any of the Salvatores again. The match had been reciprocally undesirable, and Lili was the only fortunate result. And now Louis had adopted her, so the Salvatores could be entirely forgotten. “Will the little countess be joining us for Christmas this year?” Augusta asked Sybil, and she laughed. She meant Quinne.

“I’m not sure.” Andy was very serious about her, but they were so young, and she had her family in Scotland to go home to, although they seemed to be a bit disorganized about making plans, and so was she.

She went upstairs with Blake after dinner, and once he was asleep, she went to her office to call Samuel at midnight, which would be morning for him.

Sybil had gotten his number from information and hoped it was the right one. The phone rang several times before he answered. He had a young voice in spite of his age, and answered in French, which Sybil had expected, and she asked him immediately if he spoke English. Her college French was too rusty to even attempt.

“Yes, I do,” he said, sounding puzzled about who she was, and for an instant, she wondered where to start and then jumped in before he could hang up.

“I know this is a bit unusual, but I’m a friend of the Butterfield family, your grandmother Bettina’s family, actually. My husband and I bought their home in San Francisco three years ago, and I have a book written by your grandmother about the family and the house, and quite a lot of photographs of all of them. And I wondered if you would be interested in seeing them, or would even like to visit the house,” she said cautiously. It seemed like a safe opening, although a little forward. She had no idea how he’d react.

“I really know nothing about them. My mother came to France when she was a year old. She never had any interest in my grandmother’s family. She was closer to my grandfather’s family in France. And my American grandmother moved back to the States when I was four years old. I only saw her a few times in my life. I don’t think my mother and her mother were very close. But thank you. You can send me a copy of the book if you wish. I’d like to read it. Were they interesting people, or just rich Americans?” he asked, and the question annoyed Sybil. They deserved far more respect than that. But at least she had found the right Samuel Saint Martin. That was something.

“Very interesting.” Sybil defended them immediately. “Your great-grandmother and her family were actually Scottish. And they were all quite colorful. Your great-uncle was a war hero in the First World War, and your great-grandfather was a very respected banker.”

“And lost all his money in the Depression, as I recall,” he said succinctly. “My mother got her fortune from her father on the French side. Her mother’s family had lost everything, except what she inherited from my French grandfather, from what she always told me. Her mother was only able to buy her family home back with what her husband left her. She went back to the States as soon as he died.” He had a very cut and dried way of talking about it, which ignored entirely who they’d been as people, and what they went through. “My mother always said that her mother became a recluse when she went back, living with her memories. She sounded like a sad woman. She never returned to France. And my mother’s health deteriorated and she couldn’t travel shortly after her mother left. She was only able to visit her a few times. She developed severe Parkinson’s when she was quite young. As a result, I really never knew my grandmother. I’m much closer to my French relatives. The American ones were all gone when I was a child, except for my grandmother. She sent me a check every year for Christmas and my birthday until she died, but I had no other contact with her. She left everything to my mother. And my mother never went back to see the house. She had no history there, and she was quite ill by then, so she sold it. Are there ghosts there?” He laughed as he said it, and she almost wanted to say yes, to jolt him out of his supercilious attitude about the Butterfields, as though he believed them to be lesser people than his French relations. It made her feel that Augusta was right about the French.

“They were a wonderful family, and their spirit and history are certainly here. We love the house. It’s a beautiful place. And they gave so much of themselves to it.” She sounded emotional as she said it.

“It’s very large as I recall, from what my mother said.” But their château in Dordogne was larger, and older. He had inherited it but was thinking of selling it. It was too much trouble and expensive to keep up, and his parents and grandparents were long gone. His daughter wanted him to keep it, but it didn’t make sense for her either. “My daughter might like to see it,” he said thoughtfully then. “She’s an architecture student at the Beaux-Arts and fascinated with old houses.” It surprised Sybil that at seventy-three he had a daughter young enough to be a student. “Her mother is an art professor, and I teach art history,” he said, and then answered Sybil’s unspoken question, as though he’d sensed it. “I married very late. It’s a tradition in my family. My grandfather married my grandmother when he was older too. I married at fifty, to a younger woman. My daughter, Laure, is twenty-two. She’s a terrific girl. Her mother and I are divorced, but she spends a lot of time with me, and we share a passion for art and history. My father was a doctor, and my mother a nurse during the war, but none of the medical genes seem to have come through. The artistic and historical sides have won out.” He laughed again as he said it, and Sybil couldn’t decide if she liked him or not. He sounded a little pompous and very French, but he had softened considerably when he mentioned his daughter. “Unfortunately my mother didn’t live long enough to see my daughter, since I married late. She died six years before, ten years after her own mother.” He was filling Sybil in on all the more recent details she didn’t know. It told her that Lili had died in 1990, if it was ten years after Bettina. And Michael Stanton had been right when he said that he had the feeling that Lili was no longer alive when he toured the house. She had died at seventy-two, which wasn’t very old in that case. And it was clear to her that although Samuel didn’t know much about the Butterfields or the house, he had a passion for history.

“I think you would love the house,” she said to him, trying to interest him in coming to see it. And he could meet his ancestors, if they were willing, or at least see where they had lived and learn more about them. She wanted to encourage him to do that, but wasn’t sure how.

“I probably would,” he said, “but it’s very far away. San Francisco is a long way from Paris.” It was an eleven-hour flight, and a nine-hour time difference. “Maybe my daughter will come sometime. I have a heavy teaching schedule right now, and I’m about to start a new book,” he said, sounding pompous again.

“I’m just finishing one,” Sybil said. So there. Match point. But that wasn’t what the call was about.

“You’re a historian?” he inquired, curious about her. She seemed to know a great deal about his relatives, the previous owners of her house.

“No, I curate exhibits on mid-century modern design for museums, and I write about design. Sybil Gregory.” In case he wanted to check her credentials on the Internet and make sure she wasn’t some crackpot calling him. Their interests were not very different, and overlapped to some extent, since her book was about a more extended period of design history than just mid-century.

“You should write about the Butterfields, if they’re interesting enough. Or at least the house, if it’s still handsome,” he suggested.

“Very much so. But I was thinking you should write about them, since you’re a historian. I don’t know why, but I thought you would be intrigued by the house and should know about it, and your family.” She tried to make it more personal for him, to pique his interest, which seemed to be her mission. And even Gwyneth had looked interested in the idea of a great-grandson through Bettina. None of their other children had lived to marry and have children, and Bettina had only had one, Lili. Samuel was the last surviving member of a wonderful family and a great legacy, and his daughter, Laure, whom Sybil had just discovered when he told her. She was Gwyneth’s great-great-granddaughter, which seemed amazing to Sybil. And even more so if they could meet each other. It was an extraordinary opportunity for both Gwyneth and Laure, and the others.

“I can’t imagine writing about a family I’m related to but really never knew, but send me the book. I’d like to read it. You’ve sparked my interest. You’re a good ambassador for them, posthumously,” he added, and Sybil smiled. Not as posthumously as he thought, but there was no way she could explain that to him, certainly not on the phone, the first time they talked. He would have hung up on her immediately if she’d told him, and she wouldn’t have blamed him.

“One feels them very strongly in the house. It was a very important place to them,” Sybil said, trying to entice him, but not give too much away.

“That’s what my mother always said. She said that as my grandmother got older, and especially once her husband died, she was more attached to her history, her own family and her parents’ home, than the live people in her life, like my mother, her daughter. But I think they must have been very different. And my mother was very French. She said her mother always stayed very attached to all things American. And that can be a clash sometimes, culturally. My own daughter likes the idea of having some American ancestry. She thinks it’s exotic.” He laughed. It was interesting to Sybil too that Lili considered herself entirely French, since she was entirely American by blood, and her French father had adopted her. She wondered if that was why Lili was so adamant about it, to establish her identity and dispel the idea of her biological father’s family rejecting her at birth, which Bettina must have told her at some point as an adult.

By the end of the conversation, Sybil was beginning to like Samuel. He had relaxed on the phone, and had been generous with his time, and open about his own family and their quirks. “I only have one very old copy of your grandmother’s book,” Sybil told him then. “I’ll have it copied for you and send it,” she promised.

“Can you scan it to me? That might be simpler.”

“Of course. I hadn’t thought of it. I don’t think there are any other copies of the book than the one I have. She really only did it for the family, and if there were other copies, they must have gotten lost. The bank gave me this one, along with the plans and a lot of old photographs when we bought the house.”

“I can’t promise you when I’ll read it,” he said honestly. “I’m retiring at the end of this semester, and I have a lot of things to wrap up here at the university. After the first of the year, I’ll have more time.” He sounded wistful as he said it. A fifty-year career as an academic was about to end. She suspected he was finding it hard to retire, and was wondering how he would fill his time, other than with the book he said he was starting, which sounded as dry as hers on design. The Butterfields were a far more intriguing subject.

She thanked him again for his time. They had been on the phone for more than half an hour. He was an interesting and intelligent man, and he hadn’t hung up on her, as she had feared. But she hadn’t told him about the psychic dimension to the house either, which no one would have understood or believed, unless they’d experienced it, as she and her family did, and had for three years. They had been living with the entire Butterfield clan since they moved in, and sharing their lives and experiences of a hundred years before, at the same time as their own in current time. But somehow it worked, and the parallel time frames had brought them together as one family under one roof.

Sybil scanned the book for him an hour later, and had just pressed the send button when Gwyneth materialized out of nowhere, as she did at times. It was easier than walking up two flights of stairs, and Sybil teased her about it. Magnus liked doing that too, just popping in, usually in Charlie’s room. Augusta was more circumspect about it, and lumbered up the stairs with her cane, on Angus’s arm, with the two dogs behind them, panting heavily, since both dogs were old and had short snouts.

“Did you call him?”

Sybil had jumped when she turned around and saw Gwyneth right behind her. She was wearing a pretty dark blue velvet dress she’d worn at dinner, and her hemlines had recently gotten shorter and were showing her ankles. Gwyneth was a beautiful woman. They were both up late, thinking about Samuel.

“You scared me!” Sybil scolded her.

“Sorry! Did you?”

“Call who?” Sybil was distracted for a minute, and looking for something on her desk.

“My great-grandson, in Paris.” Sybil looked up and smiled at her, as Gwyneth settled comfortably in a chair in Sybil’s office.

“Yes, I talked to him. I didn’t like him at first, but he warmed up after a while. You have a twenty-two-year-old great-great-granddaughter too, who is studying architecture at the Beaux-Arts. She loves old houses.”

“How interesting,” Gwyneth said, impressed by what Sybil had been able to find out, and so quickly. “I wonder what she looks like. She would be Lili’s granddaughter, since he’s Lili’s son and Bettina’s grandson.”

“He’s retiring shortly, and starting a book on some dull subject. He’s crazy about his daughter, and sounds very proud of her. He got married at fifty, and he’s divorced.” Gwyneth took it all in. Sybil had already put Bettina’s book away. She had never shared it with Gwyneth and felt strongly that she shouldn’t since it revealed far too much about what Gwyneth didn’t know. There were too many painful things in it about their future, and it wouldn’t be fair.

“I wish they’d come to visit. I’d love to see them,” Gwyneth said longingly.

“I wish they would too. I don’t know if they have the money or the time. Let’s see what he says.” She didn’t tell her she’d sent him Bettina’s book, since she’d never discussed it with her. “Maybe he’ll think about it and want to come. I could send him a photograph of you, maybe that would do it. Or one of your mother. Or a recording of Angus playing the bagpipes,” she teased her, and they both laughed.

“You’re a wicked woman,” Gwyneth said, and they chatted for a few minutes, and Gwyneth left, via the door this time, as Sybil smiled and went back to work on the final chapter of her book, since she was too wound up to sleep now. She was almost there. She wondered if she’d hear from Samuel. She had sown what seeds she could to inspire him to want to know more, and hopefully even see the house.

The weeks before Christmas were as busy as they always were. They got the giant Christmas tree up in the ballroom, which was a major feat. It had to come in through the windows, and it just grazed the eighteen-foot ceiling. And then they all decorated it, with tall ladders and much consultation with one another about which ornament should go where.

It was their third Christmas together. Andy and Caroline were coming home the next day, and Max and Quinne were joining them right after Christmas and would be with them for New Year’s. She had Bert and Gwyneth’s blessing for their visit. They liked them, and Augusta loved Quinne. It would compensate a little for Bettina and Lili’s absence. It would be their first Christmas without them, and Sybil knew that Gwyneth was sad about it. Sybil was grateful that with Bert’s help, Blake was pulling out of the financial disaster he’d been in, without too much damage, but it had been a very bad scare. He still wanted to open his own start-up, but was waiting a few months to do it. And he was exploring some new ideas on the subject.

Sybil was wrapping gifts in her office late one night when Samuel Saint Martin called her from Paris. She didn’t recognize his voice at first, until he identified himself.

“I’m sorry to call you so late,” Samuel apologized. It was eleven o’clock at night in San Francisco, and eight in the morning in Paris.

“It’s fine,” she said easily. “I’m wrapping Christmas presents. My children are coming home tomorrow.”

“How old are they?”

“Almost the same age as your daughter. My son Andrew is twenty, my daughter, Caroline, is nineteen, and my son Charlie is nine. They’re just a little younger than yours.” But he was thirty-one years older than Sybil since he had married and had his daughter so much later. “Andrew is at the University of Edinburgh and Caroline goes to UCLA,” she filled him in. “Have you read the book yet?” She hadn’t expected to hear from him for a month or two, till after he retired, and it had only been a few weeks now.

“I have, and so has my daughter. That’s why I’m calling you. She’s obsessed with it, with the house and the family. And I have to admit, I find them quite haunting too, if you’ll forgive the expression. We have all kinds of old legends about ghosts in my family’s château in Dordogne, and Laure is fascinated by them. She’s convinced there must be some in your mansion too.” He laughed as he said it, and Sybil grinned. He had no idea what he was getting into with the Butterfields. But that was precisely why she had contacted him. And he, or at least his daughter, sounded hooked, or intrigued at the very least.

“She’s spending Christmas with her mother in Normandy. But we have quite a long Christmas break at the university. She wants me to come over with her to visit you, sometime during the holiday. Perhaps around New Year’s. Would that be terribly inconvenient for you?” he said apologetically. “We would stay in a hotel of course, but it sounds like you have family plans.”

“It wouldn’t be inconvenient at all,” Sybil said, thinking about it and trying to decide just how far she wanted to go. And then she decided to go further. She owed it to Gwyneth and her family, to all of them, to make the meeting possible, and comfortable for them. She was the liaison between their two dimensions, and it was very important to her to do this right. “You can stay with us. You don’t need to stay at a hotel,” she said bravely, hoping that he and his daughter were up to it. “We have plenty of guest rooms, as you can imagine.”

“Your husband and children won’t mind? We’re strangers, after all.” He sounded cautious and polite.

“No, you’re not. You have more right to be here than we do. Ancestrally speaking, you’re Butterfields. We’d love to have you.” And so would all the others, once they met them. She knew Gwyneth would be happy.

“You’re very kind.” It was one thing he’d always liked about Americans. They were always so hospitable, even to strangers, if they had some common connection. But in his mind, this was a thin one, and Sybil had been charming to him since the beginning. And he had found the book riveting, as he read about all his distant and not-so-distant relations and how their lives had turned out and the challenges they’d faced at interesting times in history, the Great War, the Spanish flu epidemic right afterward, the Crash of ’29, the Great Depression that had swept away their fortune. Samuel knew the more recent history, about when his grandmother had bought the house back, and when his mother had sold it again, but he had known none of it from before that, until he read the book.

And Laure, his daughter, was even more excited about it than he was. Although he had insisted to her that Sybil had said there were no ghosts in the house, Laure was sure there had to be, with such an intriguing family once living there. She loved the idea of being related to them. And, despite his initial reluctance, so did he. He wanted to meet Sybil, and thought her a very interesting person too, for being so dedicated to them, simply because she and her husband had bought their house. He had looked Sybil up on the Internet, and was very impressed by her professional credentials as a writer and curator. And she had obviously researched the Butterfields carefully, since she knew so much about them. He had been moved by that too when they last spoke.

“Do you have the exact dates that would work for you?” Sybil asked him, wanting to pin him down.

“Perhaps we could arrive around the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth? We won’t stay for more than a few days.” It was six or seven days away, but it worked well for her too. She didn’t think Blake would mind, or her children. They would have Christmas en famille, with the Butterfields, and then Quinne and Max were coming anyway. The more the merrier, as far as Sybil was concerned, and she could hardly wait to tell Gwyneth that her great-grandson and great-great-granddaughter were coming. She just hoped the others would be willing to welcome them too.

“That’s perfect. Let me know your flight, and we’ll pick you up at the airport,” she said warmly.

“There’s no need to do that. I’ll rent a car. We’ll need one anyway, so we can see the city, and we don’t want to be a burden on you. I’ll let you know what time we’ll arrive at the house, and on which day.”

“I look forward to meeting you and Laure,” Sybil said, excited about it. “Have a lovely Christmas in the meantime.”

“You too, and your family. And thank you again for allowing us to make this pilgrimage,” he said, laughing. It was Sybil who had started it, and she was glad she had. Calling him had been so much the right thing to do. It would complete everything to have the last of the Butterfields come to meet their family. And maybe he would write the next book about them.

Sybil was excited about their visit, and she knew Gwyneth would be too. It hadn’t been a crazy idea after all. It had been inspired. She couldn’t help wondering what had impelled her to do it. Maybe even Bettina herself. But whatever the reason, her efforts had been successful so far. She sat in her office smiling after they hung up. Their visit was the best Christmas gift of all. And after that, she wanted him to write the book.