April 17, 1906
Five hours and twenty-two minutes before the earthquake
“Bravo! Bravo!”
Gemma drew a shuddering breath as the curtain came down for—hopefully—the last time. How many times was the audience going to call Caruso back? How many times was he going to step forward in his velvet breeches and sash, chest heaving with emotion, and make his sweeping bow?
As many times as he wants was clearly the answer. He’d brought the entire theater to its feet in a roaring storm of applause the moment his final hair-raising cry sang out and he slumped over Olive Fremstad’s body on the stage. The society matrons in their diamond tiaras and pearl dog collars, the groundlings who had packed into the back seats—all had risen as one throughout the orchid- and narcissus-decked terraces, applauding till the roof resounded. And that applause had washed over to the rest of the cast: even Gemma had received a generous hand when she came forward in Micaëla’s blue peasant skirt and took her curtsy, and she knew she hadn’t sung particularly well.
“Goddammit,” Olive Fremstad snarled as soon as that curtain looked like it was going to finally stay down, stamping offstage, hurling her Spanish fan somewhere off into the wings. But Caruso paused in that sudden onstage crush of chorus members trailing off to their dressing rooms and stagehands rushing to secure the props and gave Gemma a pinch on the chin.
“Very nice, carissima,” he said kindly. “Next time not so nervous, sì?”
“You carried me out there,” Gemma told him with complete honesty. The tantrum-throwing boy-child of the day’s rehearsal had completely vanished by the time the curtain went up; during their duet he’d been quick to cover up her blocking mistakes and effortlessly melded that glorious tenor with hers even though they’d only had a single run-through that morning. The company’s star had been the only one not ignoring Gemma onstage or actively trying to sabotage her—the chorus baritone who pulled her hair unnecessarily hard during the scene between Micaëla and the teasing guards, the stagehands who hid her prop basket from her until she missed her entrance cue.
“Don’t mind the bitches,” Caruso told her now, kindly. “Another scandal comes along, they forget you.”
“And I won’t forget that I’ve sung with the great Caruso,” Gemma answered. Something any soprano would have walked on broken glass to say. She just wished she could be prouder of how it had happened.
“I will see you after at this ballo on Snob Hill? I promised I stop by.” Caruso gave her another pinch (this one not on the chin) and swanned off to his dressing room, which was undoubtedly already packed with adoring admirers. Gemma went off more slowly to her own dressing room, dreading who she’d find there—she hadn’t looked for Thornton in the dazzle of the stage lights, but she’d felt him up there in his box, devouring her with his eyes. The pride of a creator, Dr. Frankenstein gazing down at the creature on his laboratory table: I made that.
You didn’t make me, she thought with a spurt of anger, heading backstage, yanking off Micaëla’s namby-pamby blue headscarf. And you don’t own me, either.
“Miss Garland.” Thornton’s chauffeur waited by her dressing room door. “Mr. Thornton will be heading directly back to Hyde Street to see to last-minute preparations for the ball, but he’s left the Rolls for you. I’m to drive you back as soon as you’re ready.”
“And my pianist.” Gemma vibrated between relief at not having to see Thornton quite yet and apprehension that he’d return to his study before Suling was done searching it. “I’ll be quick.”
It didn’t take long to scrape off her stage makeup and climb out of her costume: no line of admirers waited for her as they did for Caruso or Fremstad; she had no friends in this chorus to breeze in and out of her dressing room wanting to borrow a hairpin or ask for help with their laces. As she hurried into her clothes she could hear the others chattering and making plans down the corridor: a group of chorus singers were heading to Zinkand’s where they’d heard the macaroni was cheap; some of the dancers were arguing for the Oyster Grotto on O’Farrell Street. No one invited Gemma along. Why should they? She’d stolen someone else’s role, and then she hadn’t even sung well enough to justify stealing it; of course they all despised her. Some probably envied her, too—I wouldn’t mind heading off to a swanky ball in my honor, she could imagine the other chorus sopranos thinking resentfully. But right now, Gemma would have traded Thornton’s ball in a heartbeat for one of those laughing postcurtain midnight suppers: a cluster of friends and a plate of macaroni, everyone laughing too loudly and looking forward to the rest of the run.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen, and she still had a very long night to get through.
“Suling?” Gemma called as soon as she slipped back into her huge ice-blue bedroom at the octagon house. She’d heard Thornton’s voice in the conservatory when she entered the front doors, but the whole place was in enough of an uproar (kitchens sending out a steady stream of dishes to be carried upstairs, guests arriving any minute) that he hadn’t noticed her slide past up the main stairs. Toscanini greeted her with a vocal trill; someone had brought him back from the conservatory to his birdcage for the night. “Suling? Did you find anything?” Gemma had checked Thornton’s study door as she passed it: locked, and the key was in the pot, so surely—
But Suling wasn’t waiting for her, here where the embroidered dragon robe hung on the dressmaker’s form, or in the octagonal pink dressing room or pale green bathroom. Gemma took a deep breath and began to search. She was rifling the last of her bureau drawers when she noticed the embroidered evening slippers set below the dragon robe—one had been placed at an angle, not carefully in alignment as the maid had done earlier.
The note was stuffed into the slipper’s toe. Suling’s handwriting was copperplate, and the brief message had Gemma’s skin trying to crawl off her body and slink cringing under the bed:
He’s had her committed to the asylum at St. Christina’s. I’m going there now. If I manage to get her out, I’ll take her to Alice Eastwood on Taylor Street.
An asylum. Vibrant, irrepressible Nellie in a madhouse. “No,” Gemma heard herself muttering, “no, no.” Nellie was mercurial, impulsive, reckless, but unstable? Never. If he’d committed her there, it wasn’t for her well-being. It was to get her out of the way.
What made him turn on you, Nell? What did you see, hear, find out? What—
Oh, for God’s sake, why did it matter? Thornton had turned on Nellie, for whatever reason, but he hadn’t killed her. Hadn’t been able to kill a woman he’d admired, bedded, been fond of . . . Or maybe, with his intense love of beauty, he hadn’t been able to destroy an artist like Nellie who had brought such color and life into the world through her canvases.
But locking her in a madhouse—trapping Nellie inside bleak colorless walls, no vibrant vistas to paint, no palette knives and brushes at her disposal . . . she would rather, Gemma knew, be dead. It really would be a fate worse than death to Nellie.
“Mademoiselle?” A knock at the door; the French maid’s voice. “Shall I help you dress?”
“A moment, please.” Gemma turned the note over, but there was nothing more. Suling was supposed to be working the ball tonight, but Gemma knew she wouldn’t be among the cluster of Chinese girls who’d be arriving shortly to take up their serving-girl robes and champagne trays. The seamstress was long gone, off to St. Christina’s, wherever that was.
I should have gone with you, Gemma thought, crumpling the note, but that small, brutal voice at the back of her mind demanded, Really? What good would you be, exactly? The old Gemma had been too softhearted and trusting to be useful; the new Gemma she’d tried to create was just the same, only more selfish. She should have known from the beginning that Nellie wouldn’t have left her in the lurch. She should have known, because Nellie for all her faults had always been the most loyal of friends—just as she’d said to Suling. You knew that, but all you did was wallow in self-pity instead of trying to find out what really happened.
The guests were arriving downstairs, judging by the rising buzz of chatter and the swirl of orchestral music starting up from the ballroom. Gemma put her head down and cried three or four hard, gulping sobs—mostly for Nellie in her cage, one tiny sickened thread for herself. For how horrendously, how shamefully she had failed her friend.
Well, she could still keep Henry Thornton busy, his mind very far away from his office or his former mistress. Until the small hours of the morning, if necessary. How much time did Suling need? How could she possibly extract Nellie from—
“Mademoiselle?” the maid called again.
Gemma smoothed her face. Another costume to put on, another performance to give. “Come in.”
She found herself staring at the dragon robe as the maid brushed out her hair from its Micaëla plaits and did it up in a low, elaborately braided knot. Or maybe it felt like the dragon robe was watching her. She remembered a night this past week, in Thornton’s bedroom, languid with poppy smoke, listening as he drew winding circles over her naked skin and told her where so many of his treasures had come from.
“The Forbidden City, at least my more recent acquisitions. So much collected from the imperial palaces after the recent rebellion. It’s said the British legation was holding auctions every afternoon. All those civilized lords and diplomats and their wives, bidding in a frenzy, then turning around and accusing the French and the Americans and the Germans of doing so much worse.”
“Looting?” Gemma remembered wrinkling her nose, heavy-eyed, nearly asleep.
“Spoils of war, pet. Even in civilized nations, it’s held that a city that doesn’t surrender and is taken by force can be looted.” A shrug. “Six years ago it was the Forbidden City; back in 1860, it was the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. My grandfather was there, he had connections in the British military, and he made good use of them. The Old Summer Palace, that’s a place I would have liked to have seen before it was all burned. Bronzes and porcelains three thousand years old, pleasure gardens where imperial beauties strolled in dragon robes like that one”—bending down and delivering a bite to Gemma’s shoulder—“jewels by the trunk-load. The things my grandfather brought home . . .”
That was when Gemma had fallen asleep, heavy-eyed from opium, his words sliding into the ether. They came back now with a vengeance as she looked at the dragon robe, and her stomach roiled. Had an empress worn that, a fierce-eyed woman like Suling? Or a concubine like Gemma—That’s what you are, the thought whispered viciously, a goddamned concubine—singing for her supper with one of those lutelike instruments she’d seen in scroll paintings? What had happened to the woman who wore that robe, once the British and French soldiers broke inside? Had she managed to flee, or had she met the fate so many women suffered when cities were sacked?
“Let’s just get you into this, mademoiselle,” the French maid said, moving to take the embroidered robe off the dressmaker’s form. “I thought the Chinese girl was going to stay and help you with it? Mrs. MacNeil is kicking up a fuss downstairs about her; the other Chinese girls arrived and not one of them speaks English, so if she’s not here . . .”
“I don’t know where she is,” Gemma said. “And I’m not wearing that. Too heavy.” Not just in gold and silver thread, but in history. It wasn’t hers, even to borrow, and it wasn’t Thornton’s to loan, either. Gemma was sorry to waste all Suling’s painstaking work with her embroidery needles, but she couldn’t put that robe on. It would feel like wearing a shroud.
“What’s this?” A disapproving voice sounded behind her as the maid was doing up the last of her hooks, and Gemma barely had time to school her face before turning. Thornton stood in his evening tails, tie carelessly knotted as usual, frowning at her midnight-blue velvet evening gown glittering with diamanté paillettes.
“Much more comfortable to sing in,” Gemma said brightly, pulling up one long kid glove. “How is the ball?” The clock had long struck midnight; the dancing should be in full swing. Her entrance, late and devastating, had been carefully planned.
“All the expected luminaries are present,” Thornton said, still frowning. “I suppose it’s too late for you to change.”
“I don’t wish to change,” Gemma said and saw the line between his brows deepen. She didn’t remember seeing that line when he’d been courting her attentions—was he just not bothering to hide it now, how much he disliked being told no? How often had Nellie seen that line groove itself, before he decided she was too much trouble and had her committed? Gemma had been too sick, too shaken, too shocked to feel much anger earlier, but now a curl of rage flickered to life in the pit of her stomach. She clung to it. Rage was much more stiffening than tears. “You don’t get absolutely everything your own way, you know,” she added coolly, pulling on her other glove.
“Cross at me for springing the Micaëla role on you?” His frown cleared; he sounded amused. “I wanted to see if you’d rise to the challenge. I must say, you didn’t sing at your best.”
Like she was an employee getting a mild reprimand. Gemma buttoned her glove, giving him a long, level stare. He’d been so good at egging her on when they were first getting to know each other—urging her to look out for herself, letting her be the one to initiate things between them, letting her be the one to take charge. Only after he’d gotten what he wanted did he get out this tone, the tone of an employer calling a paid subordinate to heel.
“Don’t pout, Gemma. It doesn’t suit you.” He came closer, kissed her bare shoulder over her midnight-blue bodice. “I brought something for you.”
“I don’t want—” But he wasn’t listening. He lifted his burned hand with a snap, and a footman came in with a velvet tray. Nestled on it . . .
“I can’t wear that,” Gemma said at once, looking at the Phoenix Crown. She wanted no part of it, any more than she did the dragon robe. Another beautiful thing from halfway around the world, the spoils of crowing men who’d wrenched it out of a woman’s jewelry box or off her head, seeing it only for its pearls, its sapphires, its kingfisher feathers in gold wire. “It will be too heavy, and—”
“I’m going to present you in it,” Thornton said, and the line was back between his brows. Something prickled in Gemma then, the warning not to deny him any more. Not to say no again. Not until she could get away.
And she was getting away. At dawn when the party wound down, when Thornton went to bed and the house was asleep, she’d pack her things and head to Taylor Street. She wasn’t taking one more crumb from Henry Thornton. The only thing she was going to take from him was Nellie, however it could be done, whatever she had to do to help Suling accomplish the impossible.
Nellie. It was Nellie’s voice now, rather than the poisonous one—Nellie’s dear, familiar voice whispering, Don’t make him angry. At least not yet.
So Gemma bit her tongue when he lifted the Phoenix Crown and lowered it onto her head. She shivered a little, feeling the weight of it, the heavy swinging ropes of pearls that dangled from its elegant points and swung carved ivory Queen of the Night flowers about her shoulders.
“Beautiful.” He stood back and admired her: the blue, jeweled gown; the blue, jeweled crown. “You’re going to dazzle them.”
I’m not going to dazzle this time, Gemma thought, making herself place her hand on his arm. I’m going to burn this thing between us to the ground.