For a moment, they all just stood staring at each other. Gemma felt her heart pounding slow and hard. Thornton came slowly down the last few stairs, narrowed eyes flickering between her and Nellie. Nellie was drawn stiff and quivering at her side, clutching the canvas laundry bag. Suling stood like a waxwork in the middle of the atrium.
Then a pane of glass from the listing cupola five stories above them suddenly fell inward, splintering on the black-and-white marble floor behind Gemma, and they all scattered. Suling stepped toward them, moving to Nellie’s side. Gemma found herself thrusting Nellie behind her—too late, of course, too late, he had seen her. Thornton was looking only at Nellie now, fiddling with the white jade charm on his watch chain. “Well,” he said. “What do we do now?”
Gemma wanted to scream. Less than fifteen minutes she’d been in this house; another five and they would all have been gone . . . She opened her mouth to speak, but a roaring wave of betrayal and outrage and fear had ripped the voice out of her throat. She’d scaled six stories of stairs this morning and sung the whole way, and now she couldn’t push out a single word. The sight of him, still in his evening clothes from the midnight ball, now smeared with brick dust and soot, turned her to stone. Just yesterday I trusted you—liked you—maybe almost loved you . . .
Suling spoke first. “Please let us go. You don’t have to pay me. Just—let us go.”
“I’d agree if it was just you, Susie.” His eyes were still fixed on Nellie, distantly, as if he was flipping through options in his head.
“Her name is Suling.” The words erupted out of Nellie in a snarl. “Suling.”
“What are you even doing here? How did— Never mind.” Thornton cut himself off, eyes finally shifting to Gemma. “I came back for you.”
“You came for your money,” Gemma managed to say. Alice, she had a splinter’s time to wonder—where is Alice? “You know the fires are coming up Nob Hill. You came for your cash and your Chinese Room loot.”
“Well—” He gave her that rueful grin that transformed his lean, almost homely face into handsomeness. “That too.”
Gemma managed to take a step forward, disentangling her arm from Nellie’s. “Please let them go. The others. I-I’ll go with you.” She could hardly hear her own heart over the pounding in her ears. Nellie hissed something at her, but Gemma ignored her. “Just let them go.”
“I think we’re past that.” He hesitated another moment, running a hand through that hair that was always rumpled, and Gemma had a flash of the man who had charmed her so utterly at the Palace Grill: so hard-edged and cynical, but so fiercely devoted to everything the world of art and music had to offer.
“Henry,” she said softly.
He sighed, and then he reached for the small of his back and produced the pistol Gemma had seen him load early this morning. “I feel a little absurd waving this around,” he said, “but I need you ladies to step into the conservatory.”
Another of those hideous silences. The thing looked like a toy in his hand. This is not happening, Gemma thought. “You couldn’t kill Nellie,” she heard herself say. “You couldn’t do it. You can’t kill me either. Not women you used to care for.”
“No.” Were his eyes a little misty?
Gemma took another step toward him, heart hammering now instead of thudding. “Henry, please—”
A loud clatter at the front door, making them all jump. “Mr. Thornton?” a woman’s voice called. “Mr. Thornton, I saw your automobile, sir.” Thornton’s head jerked toward the sound, and for a moment Gemma wondered if they might all rush toward him, swarm him, knock the pistol out of his hand. Suling jerked as if she was thinking the same thing. And then the front door creaked and a woman came bustling in—a Chinese woman, older than Suling, in a Western-style green suit and a fashionable rose-laden hat. “Ah, Mr. Thornton,” she said in excellent if accented English.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said, but she kept going stubbornly.
“The payment for my girls, for your party last night—”
He shot her.
The crack of the bullet echoed through the atrium. The Chinese woman dropped like a stone. Thornton was turning away from her before she even finished sliding to the ground.
Suling let out a strangled sound and rushed toward the woman’s prone figure. Thornton yanked her back easily, cuffing her across the ear with the butt of the pistol. “The conservatory,” he said, “all of you, or Susie here is next—” And they were stumbling around the stairs, toward the back of the eight-sided atrium through the glassed double doors to the plant-filled room. Gemma wanted to fall on him, claw his face open with her nails, but he had the pistol at full extension now, keeping his distance from Suling, whose eyes were filled with tears and who had clapped a hand to her bleeding ear; from Nellie, who had flung her arms around Suling; from Gemma herself, who lost her footing and fell to her hands and knees on the conservatory’s threshold. She felt Thornton’s hand in her hair, the sparkle of pain across her scalp as he hauled her upright and sent her stumbling inside after the other two. She had a disjointed memory of him this morning, saying he’d drag her to bed by the hair—and during their first conversation, telling her Pelléas et Mélisande was his favorite opera. The opera where the soprano is dragged around the stage by her long blond hair, crying, “Ne me touche pas.” I should have known then not to trust him, Gemma thought dizzily, hearing the conservatory’s double doors lock with a click.
Then he was gone, footsteps running lightly back up the stairs.
Suling was rattling the doors, shouting in Chinese. They couldn’t see the woman who had been shot; she’d fallen in the arch of the front doorway, on the other side of the staircase. She wasn’t making a sound. Nellie was cringing against the glass-paned wall, rocking back and forth. Gemma found herself stumbling backward, farther into the long conservatory, trying to pull Nellie with her. “Get back,” she shouted at Suling, “come to the back, we don’t know if he—” If he what, was going to shoot them once he came back down? She couldn’t think, her head was one huge roar.
“What’s happening?” a voice whispered, and Alice stumbled out from behind a potted palm. Cradled in her arms like a baby was a blue-and-white pot overflowing with spiky green fronds—the Queen of the Night, trailing its unopened blooms. “I was all the way at the rear, I didn’t hear anything until there was a shot. Is it looters?”
“Stay back, keep out of sight, it’s Thornton. Don’t let him see you—”
“Are we locked in here?”
“We can break the glass,” Gemma began, but her voice trailed off. The iron framework between the conservatory’s glass panes was sturdy, the grid too small for any of them to slip through.
“Wait, there’s a door at the back. By the oleander shrubs.” Suling, tearing herself away from the locked doors at the front, came flying back down the brick-paved floor, past Gemma and deeper into the conservatory. “I used to sneak in that way.” They heard a cry of triumph, then a scream of frustration. Gemma and Alice came running to find Suling beating on a green baize door. She had unlocked it, the key had been on the inside, but the door wouldn’t open. Through the glass panes they saw that a section of garden wall had toppled over in the earthquake, bricks and stones heaped against the back of the conservatory. The door was blocked as tight as though it had been mortared in place.
“We’ll call for help when Thornton’s gone,” Alice said in her bracing voice as Suling rattled and shoved. “Someone will hear, surely. Someone will come let us out.”
“You think he hasn’t thought of that?” Gemma snapped. “Why did he herd us in here?”
Nellie’s voice from the front of the conservatory, full of dread: “He’s coming back.”
Alice began to say something, but Gemma whispered at her to stay back, then forced herself to advance toward the locked conservatory doors. Thornton’s dark silhouette, a little wavy through the distortion of the glass. A bulging satchel over his shoulder, a crate in his arms . . . Gemma saw a flash of brilliant kingfisher feather blue from the crate, a trailing strand of pearls swinging an ivory flower. The Phoenix Crown, and whatever other valuables he could save from the Chinese Room. He was juggling something in his other hand—a bottle, a can, something trailing behind him as he came down the stairs.
Then in a moment of time-slowed horror she smelled it: lamp oil.
“No, no—” Gemma shrieked, rattling the door handles, drumming her fists against the glass. A pane broke, shards tinkling on the bricks below. A sliver pierced her hand, but she didn’t feel it. “Henry, no—”
She didn’t think he would stop, but he did. Looked at her with those dark eyes that used to make her shiver, the satchel over his shoulder crammed with whatever cash and securities he’d yanked from his safe; the crate in his arms brimming with looted Chinese treasures. The things he actually valued, unlike human life. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, and to Gemma’s astonishment he looked apologetic. His face was pale and sweating as he looked from Gemma to Nellie and Suling where they huddled at Gemma’s shoulder. “Insurance, you know . . .” His burned hand trembled as he hefted the bottle of lamp oil.
Fire. He was going to burn down his own house. Gemma could smell it, hear it, much closer than the billows of smoke coming from south of the slot: the octagon house was already burning. But he’s terrified of fire, she thought inanely, still banging at the iron-framed conservatory doors, more glass panes shattering and slicing her knuckles, even as a razor-sharp recollection of the night at the Palace Grill flashed in her mind, Henry Thornton recoiling from the flare of flame in a crêpe pan. He couldn’t set his own house alight—
But her former lover set down the crate and satchel, methodically splashed the rest of the lamp oil on the carpet runner at the foot of the great stairs, managed flinchingly to strike a match—and threw it down.
“I’m sorry,” he said, words almost drowned out by the great whooooooosh of fire that leaped up. He stumbled back from it, burned hand flexing and unflexing, his face greenish and dripping sweat. “I’m sorry, Gemma.”
He shouldered his treasures again, picked up the crate, and hurried away, even as she was rattling the doors and screaming, even as Nellie and Suling threw themselves against the glass to do the same. He turned his back on them and left the octagon house. The last thing Gemma heard was his muttered curse as he stumbled over something, probably the woman he’d shot as she came through his doorway. “Dammit, you stupid cow . . .”
Then he left them all to burn.
They went mad. There wasn’t really any other word for it, Gemma thought, some distant part of her brain observing even as she flung herself against the glass-paned walls. Take four women as different as four women could be—an opera singer in her thirties, an emaciated artist from the Bronx, a capable middle-aged scientist, a Chinese seamstress not even twenty—and threaten to burn them alive, and they shed everything that made them individual, everything that made them uniquely themselves, and reverted to animals. Gemma was hurling herself against the iron-framed conservatory wall like her bird when he flung himself against the bars of his cage; Nellie was howling and trying to pry up a brick to smash the door handles; Alice was cradling her potted Queen of the Night and keening; Suling had smashed the rest of the glass around the front door lock and had threaded her hand through to jiggle the handle from the outside, like a fox gnawing off a paw caught in a trap.
And fire was running along the staircase all the way up the octagon house, clear to the cupola, and the huge central atrium was filling with dense black smoke.
“There has to be a key,” Alice was saying, her voice thin, looking frantically under plant pots. “You would put a key here. If we had a key, we could unlock the doors from the outside—”
“We cannot die here,” Nellie was saying over and over in a flat, gulping voice, still heaving at the paving stone with her thin, trembling hands. “We cannot die—”
“We are not going to die,” Gemma snarled, but she didn’t believe it, even as she ran back to the end of the conservatory to hammer again on the blocked back door. It refused to budge an inch. Its key fell out with a plink onto the floor, and Gemma kept attacking the door, panting without words now. If they could get the attention of someone passing by—
But the conservatory was set too far back in the octagon house’s gardens for anyone on Hyde Street to see, and no one was going to hear their shouts in a city whose air was already thick with pealing bells, roaring fire, and the cries of the injured.
“The back door key.” Alice couldn’t have heard the sound of the key hitting the bricks at Gemma’s feet, but suddenly she was speaking in her mild I-wonder-if-this-is-a-new-varietal-of-mesquite tone. “Is there any chance it opens both the back door and the front?”
A split second’s frozen silence, and then Gemma was scooping up the key in shaking hands and rushing through the oleander and ginger lilies toward the front, stumbling over cracked bricks. Suling tore it out of her fingers and threaded her small, glass-scratched hand back through the broken pane beside the door handle, maneuvering the key toward the lock on the other side with exquisite care. It slipped through her fingers to the carpet on the other side, and they all moaned, a unison sound from four throats. Alice ripped a slender bamboo rod out of a pot where it was holding up a staked vine, and Suling wiggled it under the door, sweeping back and forth until she could inch the key back underneath and into her fingers. “Hurry,” Nellie muttered, and Gemma swept her into a violent hug, all their eyes glued on Suling’s blood-laced hand as she worked her way even more carefully through the broken pane and inserted the key again. They were all starting to cough now from the smoke oiling its way through the broken glass panes.
“It won’t work,” Gemma heard herself mutter, “it won’t work—”
But then the key clicked, and the door handle turned.
Suling gave half a sob as she wrenched the door open and flung it wide. “Cover your mouth first—” Gemma started to say, but a wall of roiling smoke met them and they all began to choke. Nellie fell forward into Suling, scooping up the canvas laundry bag she’d dropped by the door, and the two of them began to stagger ahead toward the atrium. Gemma pulled the collar of her blouse up over her mouth and headed blindly after them, throwing an arm around Alice’s waist when she saw the older woman stagger in the doorway. “Alice,” Gemma coughed through her blouse, “drop the goddamned plant—” But Alice clutched the pot stubbornly against her hip like a baby, and they staggered through the huge atrium, flames leaping overhead.
Forty steps. Forty steps to cross the atrium, hand at the wall to avoid losing her way, Alice lurching against her, blind in the smoke. Forty steps, around the staircase, to the wall—fumbling toward the front door of the octagon house, falling over something at the threshold—and then reeling outside, choking and coughing, into the daylight.
The first thing Gemma saw was the Chinese woman Thornton had shot. She lay where she’d fallen on the threshold, dead eyes staring blindly upward—I tripped over her, that’s what I tripped on. Gemma steeled herself to seize the woman’s limp arms. The muscles of her back shrieked. “Alice, help—” But Alice was on hands and knees beside her plant pot, coughing so hard her whole frame shook. Gemma gritted her teeth, heaving with all her strength, and managed to pull the Chinese woman clear of the doorway, out onto the veranda and then down to the grass. It didn’t seem right to leave her to burn in the house, dropped in her tracks where a murderer had shot her simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Straightening painfully, Gemma let go of the woman’s limp wrists and finally looked around her. “Nellie?” she called, voice scaling up. “Suling? Nellie—”
They were still inside.
There was a moment when Gemma’s whole being quailed, looking at the burning octagon house: its double doors retching black smoke, every window leaping with flame, the tilting cupola at its crown burning like a torch. I cannot, she thought, her scalp shrinking, the whole surface of her skin crawling. I cannot go in there.
But Alice lay half-stupefied by smoke, unable even to stand. And Suling and Nellie were inside.
I cannot do it. She was no good in a crisis, she wasn’t brave. She wasn’t Suling who had stormed a shattered madhouse to rescue the one she loved; she wasn’t Alice who had fearlessly scaled six stories to save her life’s work; she wasn’t Nellie who had endured two months in an asylum and come out sane and snarling. Gemma Garland wasn’t brave, she was selfish—the woman who tried to live by the motto Rely on yourself, no one else.
That woman wanted to cut and run in terror. Forty steps across that atrium? It might as well have been a mile. She couldn’t do it.
I cannot do it.
Strangely, it was George’s voice Gemma heard, complimenting the way she could sing a long phrase in one breath: You’ve got lungs like an elephant.
“Lungs like an elephant,” she said aloud, faintly. That doorway bellowing smoke. Just hold your breath.
She held her breath every day on her jogs down Hyde Street, didn’t she? Counting how many lampposts she could pass before she had to breathe. Her record was twelve. Forty steps across that atrium. What was that, two lampposts?
She took a series of long gulping breaths, each one deeper and longer than the last. She breathed in the last one like a sword-swallower, inflating her lungs all the way to the bottom of her rib cage, feeling her whole torso lift with air—and she strode in.
Dark as a tomb inside, smoke roiling. Her eyes began to water and sting, so she shut them. Right hand against the wall. Keep it there, keep going forward, and she couldn’t get lost. Follow the wall, half the octagon, around toward the back of the atrium where the conservatory entrance was. Gemma could feel the smoke prying slyly at her eyes, her mouth, her nose, but she sealed herself. Her lungs were full; hot air balloons floating serenely across a blue sky, floating her forward through the choking terror. Above she heard the rush of flames, the dangerous creaking of the staircase. She couldn’t look. Forward. Forty steps.
Something at her feet, the softness of a body. She dropped to her knees, finally daring to open her eyes. She couldn’t see anything, only hear the sound of someone coughing hopelessly. She couldn’t see if it was Nellie or Suling. “Up,” she managed to shout without exhaling. “UP—”
Arms around her neck, someone coughing. Nellie, it was Nellie’s asylum-cropped hair against Gemma’s cheek as her head lolled. She couldn’t look for Suling; she was supporting almost all of Nellie’s weight, turning her by force. Left hand against the wall this time, right arm a band of iron around Nellie, whose feet floundered and wandered and barely supported her weight. Lungs aching now. One more lamppost. The wall was hot, the paper nearly blistering her fingertips. Forward. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight. Forward.
Gemma’s breath burst out of her as they cleared the threshold. The air tasted like wine. Nellie slipped from her arm’s grip and tumbled to the veranda, still clutching her laundry bag. She was coughing so hard her throat seemed to be turning itself inside out, but even so she was trying to crawl back toward the door. “Sul—” She coughed. “Sul—”
“I’m getting her,” Gemma said steadily, even though she had no idea if she could do that, if it was possible, if she could walk back into that inferno. Better not to think about it; better just to do it. She rested her shaking hands on her knees, breathing again in deep, rapid gulps, then slower, longer gulps. Then the last breath, in and in and in.
Lungs like an elephant.
She was lumbering like an elephant now as she staggered back in, scorching her hand on the wall, keeping it there anyway. The air, so much hotter now from one trip to the next. Timbers crackling overhead, glass panes bursting in their frames and showering heated shards of glass. She could feel her eyelashes singeing. Something white-hot hit her shoulder, slicing through her blouse. She kept going. Around the staircase, feeling frantically with her feet, but this time she felt no muffling human shape on the floor. She risked letting go of her contact with the wall, feeling along the carpet. One step, two—was that the sound of coughing?
And there was Suling, crawling blindly around the back of the staircase, coughing and blundering. Gemma managed to haul her up, no breath this time to shout anything. Her lungs were burning. Suling just barely managed to stumble against her, feet tangling. The wall, where was the wall? Gemma had lost the wall. She risked opening her eyes. The atrium was all fire and smoke, the staircase blazing, the drapes at the long windows now sheets of flame, the wallpaper crisping and kindling. She held her breath. She held her breath and moved into the center, dragging the reeling Suling along by the waist. Something fell from four stories up, spinning in the fiery air, a section of flaming newel post—it glanced off Gemma’s shoulder, and she heard a crackling sound. My hair is on fire, she thought, but all she could do was move forward. Thirty-four, thirty-five. Step, step.
Her breath gushed out. She couldn’t hold it anymore. She quickened her leaden legs, and Suling managed to heave a little more of her own weight forward. Another step, lungs burning. A roar, something falling—the staircase, collapsing behind her?—and they were out, bursting into the daylight, and Gemma felt her fallen, flaming hair blazing around her like a corona. She collapsed, coughing, the skin of her neck blistering, Suling’s weight sloughing away as she stumbled to where Nellie lay stupefied. Gemma felt Alice’s strong hands beating at her shoulders and head, beating out the fire in her hair, and Gemma hit the steps of the veranda and tumbled off them, falling in a heap on the grass below.
She coughed until her lungs felt like they were going to crawl up her throat and out of her mouth, her eyes watering and burning, rubbing at them with a soot-stained hand. When her eyes cleared, she didn’t know what she was looking at—bars across her vision, arching upward strangely. Then she heard a chirp and a trill, saw a green blur, and realized it was Toscanini’s birdcage. Her bag hadn’t made it out of the house, but here was her budgie regarding her beadily from his perch, and behind him she saw the octagon house rearing against the sky, burning like the world’s end in the last act of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Gemma lay gasping, fingers looped through the closest bar of the birdcage, wondering if the world really was coming to an end.