April 17, 1906
Twenty hours and three minutes before the earthquake
“You look pale, mademoiselle,” ventured the girl who had been assigned as Gemma’s lady’s maid at the octagon house. Not the chatterbox Kathleen, who had innocently confirmed so many of Gemma’s fears. This maid was French, or said she was—sometimes her accent slipped but her hands never did as she piled Gemma’s blond hair into a pompadour while Gemma sipped tea and tried to keep from shaking. “Are you feeling up to the rehearsal today?”
“I’m quite well, thank you.” Gemma had begged off dinner at the Palace Grill last night, claiming a migraine when Hen—Mr. Thornton; she refused the intimacy of using his first name, even in her mind—knocked at her bedroom door. He hadn’t been terribly pleased. “I have a treat for you,” he cajoled through the door, like he was dangling a bone before a dog, and Gemma’s stomach roiled. She made some retching noises as if she were vomiting her guts out, just to make him go away . . . But that was just postponing the inevitable. Tonight was the midnight ball—and before that, Carmen. She’d promised Suling she’d get Henry Thornton out of the house; the only way that was happening was if he was seated in his box in his carelessly donned evening clothes, watching her flutter a fan to Bizet’s brilliant faux-Spanish melodies. She’d promised Suling. She owed it to Nellie.
Nellie, oh God, Nellie. Reggie. Whatever she was calling herself now, she was still Gemma’s Nell. I should have known you wouldn’t have left town like that. I should have known. Nellie’s dark curls and Bronx clip, the crackle of energy she gave off like sparks of electricity, the dab of red or yellow paint always clinging to her cuticles, the trousers and the poet’s shirt she liked to wear to shock men. Did Henry buy you French gowns, too? Or did you laugh and tweak his nose and tell him you’d never wear such beribboned rubbish?
Gemma squeezed her eyes tight shut, aware that the maid was putting the final touches on her hair. No time to think of Nellie, not now. She had a performance to put on—three of them, in fact. Tonight in Carmen, then at midnight as Thornton’s Queen of the Night . . . And over it all, she had to act as if nothing was wrong. She’d never before wanted so badly to just crawl into bed and stay there with her burning eyes, her betrayed heart, her scared bones. But she thought of Suling’s voice: How much does Reggie mean to you? The way her own face softened at the name.
Hard to believe that was the woman who had somehow won Nellie’s elusive heart. Nellie had always liked women—something that had shocked Gemma at first; of course it had. Don’t worry. Nell had laughed, kissing her latest model and seeing Gemma’s face afterward. You aren’t my type, farm girl. Though you really should give it a try. Men might be useful, but women are fun!
Fun was not exactly the word Gemma would have used to describe the cool, polite Chinese seamstress with her impassive face. Hard would have been the word she chose, once she saw those dark eyes drop their studied blankness and suddenly blaze like a phoenix. Well, maybe Nellie would like that. She was hard herself, in so many ways.
Gemma was the weak one.
She flinched, drawing another curious look from the maid. Tried to smile reassuringly, as the words screamed inside her head: Nellie, where are you? What did he do to you?
Well, tonight they might have answers. And all of today, with the flurry of the coming rehearsals at the Grand Opera House, Gemma at least had a reason to be good and far away from Henry Thornton. Yesterday she’d been looking on the rehearsal as a chore, having to rehearse the en masse routine of castanets and skirt swishing—right now, it sounded like a blessed relief.
Until she got to the opera house and faced a barrage of cold stares.
“Good morning,” Gemma said to the stagehands smoking outside the street entrance, getting down from Thornton’s very new, very modern Rolls-Royce, which had chauffeured her over from Nob Hill. They all stared, not replying. “Good morning,” she tried to a group of laughing women near the dressing rooms, who looked like they might be fellow chorus singers. “I’m Gemma Garland, do you know the rehearsal order for today’s—” But her voice faltered under their suddenly cool gaze. She’d come in a pleated street suit of plum cheviot with an Irish lace blouse, smart enough to impress, not so smart she couldn’t get it a bit dusty onstage when the blocking rehearsal began. Why did they glare as if she had a scarlet A on her chest? Yes, she was new here; yes, she had a rich patron and gossip had certainly spread about that, but hers was hardly an unusual situation. Three-quarters of the women here undoubtedly had a stage-door admirer or two they relied on for rent money and expensive late suppers—who were they to judge?
“George, good morning,” Gemma called across the busy corridor inside, spotting her accompanist hurrying somewhere with a folder of sheet music, but he just gave her a long look before disappearing into one of the rehearsal rooms.
What in the world, Gemma wondered—George giving her the cold shoulder, when he’d never once gotten censorious about her move into the octagon house and up the ladder? Trying to ignore the sliver of unease threading her stomach, Gemma took herself out to the main house to see if she could track down the chorus master. As usual on the day of a performance, all was chaos: the spotlight wandering all over the stage like a stray cat as the lighting technicians practiced their cues, stagehands cursing as they attempted to unfurl a stuck backdrop, prop swords for the smugglers and prop wine bottles for the tavern scene being tripped on right, left, and center . . . And onstage, Carmen’s two leads: a buxom brunette in a Spanish shawl and a foul temper, snarling at a tubby man with curly dark hair and a round red face. “—supposed to appear onstage with a soprano who screeches like a hoot owl?” the great Enrico Caruso was screaming.
“You’d screech, too, if the stagehands nearly collapsed a backdrop on you, you overpaid Neapolitan windbag,” shrieked the singer Gemma assumed was the Olive Fremstad, Gemma’s heroine in the flesh, those world-famous lungs expanding like a bellows as she jabbed a pointed nail into Caruso’s puffed-out chest.
“Overpaid?” howled the great tenor, dancing up and down like a scalded alley cat. “Whose name draws the le folle to this theater? Answer me that, you fringed Nordic cow—”
“If your fees weren’t sucking the budget dry we could afford stagehands who knew their way around a theater,” the diva bellowed back. “A thousand three hundred fifty per performance, and you have the gall to— Get that spotlight out of my eyes!” she shouted up at the lighting booth. The wandering spotlight froze, then inched offstage as if trying to be casual. Carmen and Don José continued spitting epithets at each other, and Gemma tiptoed around the orchestra pit where a cluster of bored violinists were completely ignoring the fight as they yawned over their instrument cases and their morning coffees.
“Do you know where I might find the chorus master?” Gemma began to ask, only to run nearly headfirst into the conductor. It wasn’t hard, when you’d been in as many traveling opera companies as Gemma had, to identify the conductor. It was always the man shaped like a barrel who looked like he hadn’t slept in a year and was about three missed oboe entrances away from an apoplectic stroke. “Maestro?” Gemma made the little reverence always owed to the man with the baton. “I’m Gemma Garland, the newest chorus—”
“So you’re the trouble,” he barked, face going as plum as her skirts. “Caruso and La Fremstad are already going at each other like dogs in a ring, and then they saddle me with you.”
Gemma stared, forgetting for an instant about the troubles back at the octagon house. “I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t care how much Mr. Thornton’s paying management,” the conductor snapped, “this kind of thing is bad for a company’s morale. But it’s out of my hands, so get yourself onstage in twenty minutes, and we’ll run you through ‘Je dis que rien.’”
“I’m not singing Micaëla, I’m in the—”
“Don’t think for a moment we’ve had time to get the programs reprinted with your name,” the conductor said, and he rushed back toward the stage as if his hair were on fire. “Olive, cara mia, put down the prop sword, Enrico didn’t mean it, please don’t stab him—”
Still mystified, Gemma plunged backstage looking for a rehearsal room to warm up—and stopped. The dressing rooms, all in a row: the largest bearing the name Don José/Enrico Caruso; the second Carmen/Olive Fremstad . . . and the third largest bore a sign saying Micaëla/Bessie Abott. Only the name “Bessie Abott” had been crossed out, and “Gemma Garland” had been scribbled in. Micaëla. The second female lead; the primary soprano part in Carmen. Gemma knew the role; she’d sung it before. A rather boring village girl part—the good girl to Carmen’s bad girl; no surprise which one the tenor picks—but Micaëla had a lovely aria and an even lovelier duet, and you could work some fire into the village maiden if you weren’t hamstrung by a director who wanted you to simper. And she was singing Micaëla tonight?
Buy me a role, while the Met is in San Francisco, Gemma remembered saying to Thornton. I’ve been bumped off the stage for so many understudies—I want someone bumped off the stage for me for once. She hadn’t thought about it since then, that particular request made in the middle of their giddy negotiation on the way toward a bed. She’d assumed the matter of a role would be discussed after the ball—not sprung on the entire production this way, clearly forced down from on high with no tact whatsoever.
I would have hated anyone who swanned into a new company like this, Gemma couldn’t help but think. Feeling dizzy, she struck the dressing door open and saw the room was filled with red roses. The card on the nearest one was in Henry’s bold slash, and it read simply Surprise!
“That’s one way to get into the spotlight,” she heard someone snicker behind her, not very softly. “I wonder what he paid?”
“Her? Or the management?”
More snickering.
“If I can take your measurements for Micaëla’s costume, Miss Garland?” A wardrobe assistant, looking harassed. “We’ll be hours letting the hems down. You’re two inches taller . . . have to let everything out, too. Miss Abott is slimmer,” the woman said with a hint of spite, whipping her measuring tape around Gemma’s waist, her rib cage.
I didn’t want it like this, Gemma wanted to protest. But she had asked for it, hadn’t she? All part of her plan to be more hard-edged. To look out for herself, no one else.
“Did you know?” George leaned against the doorframe, music folder under his arm.
“No.” Cheeks flaming, Gemma shook her head. “I mean, I wanted a role, but—” At the other end of the corridor she thought she could see the displaced Bessie Abott—whom she recognized from opera photographs and posters, who had reigned over the Paris Opera for years; a career Gemma would have given her eyeteeth to have—standing in a cluster of angry friends, crying. I’m sorry, Gemma wanted to tell her, but who was going to believe that? She was a soprano promoted from the chorus to second lead, she had a dressing room full of roses with her name on the door—and by now, the company would have heard about the ball in her honor tonight. “I didn’t want it,” she managed to say, gesturing at her name on the dressing room door, the roses. “Not like this.”
George sighed. “Come on,” he said gently. “You’ve got a lot of blocking to learn before curtain-up tonight.”
No, Gemma almost said. I can’t go out there. But she’d made her bed and now was the time to lie in it, so she gulped some cold tea and started warming up.
“So you’re the one with the patron,” Olive Fremstad greeted Gemma in the wings, sweeping off in her fringed shawl as Gemma waited in a peasant skirt and a prop basket to go on and run her aria. The diva’s heavy lashes swept her up and down, and Gemma shriveled. The one with the patron. Not the one with the thrilling high F’s or The one with the electrifying stage presence, but the one with the patron. Had she actually realized how crushing that would feel, when it was applied to her and not to someone else?
But Olive Fremstad looked almost approving. “You burned some bridges today,” she said. “A real diva needs to be willing to burn things up, if she has to.”
“Is it worth it?” Gemma heard herself ask. Somehow she doubted Olive Fremstad had ever had to tell herself to be more hard-edged.
“It’s worth it if the man keeps his promises.” La Fremstad shrugged. “My new husband, he owns every gold mine in Tierra del Fuego. That’s worth any number of friends in this business.” She checked the watch pinned to her bosom. “Don’t try to maneuver me out of the center spotlight in Act III, will you? I don’t care if the director wants you downstage, you stay out of center.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gemma said meekly and shook out her hair to wander onstage as Don José’s lost, desolate village fiancée. How she was going to get through an entire day of learning this role and then the performance tonight, she didn’t know, but she was going to do it—even if the thought of facing Henry Thornton afterward made her skin crawl.
Suling, she prayed, arrowing the thought at the slight Chinese seamstress, you had better find what we’re looking for.