“This is probably what a beautiful cloudless day in hell looks like,” Nellie observed, looking at the sickly orange dawn. Reggie, Gemma reminded herself. She’d have to get used to calling her friend Reggie now. Though there wasn’t much time left to do it.
This morning they were all parting ways.
“You could come with us,” Reggie urged. She and Suling stood with Gemma on the sidewalk, the boardinghouse behind them boiling like a frantic beehive. The tenants who had stayed the night were now all fleeing, and so were the neighbors; cats yowled and children cried and their landlady sobbed in her kitchen as she tried to pack a lifetime’s worth of possessions into a trunk. The inferno would reach Taylor Street today. San Francisco’s fires were eating their way up Nob Hill like a mammoth, implacable dragon, not quickly but steadily. “We’ll be in Oakland,” Reggie went on. She stood clutching a tiny pot with a cutting of the Queen of the Night—Gemma had one, too; Alice had been up half the night preparing them. For our new homes, wherever they are, she’d said. It looked like Reggie and Suling’s home would be in Oakland, at least for a little while. “We’ll be with Madam Ning’s girls,” Reggie said. “We’ll find room for you—”
Gemma shook her head. “I need to find George. And the rest of the Met cast. I still have a job there . . .” Her tattered Met contract, something she’d achieved herself without Thornton’s poisoned assistance. So much had been lost, but she still had that. It seemed wrong to let it go, when she now had so little else. And George, how could she go off without knowing if he was alive or dead? She looked at the waves of acrid smoke and hungry crackling flames rising to the south and shivered.
Reggie sighed, not trying to persuade her. Suling didn’t say anything at all. Her eyes were sunken, and she kept staring in the direction of Chinatown. Chinatown, which was now utterly gone. Gemma had heard her muffled weeping in the bedroom an hour ago—steely Suling, weeping like a child when word came just how far the fires had advanced in the night. “Old Kow and Third Uncle, the Mission Home. My poor cousins . . .”
“We’ll find them,” Gemma had heard Reggie murmur back helplessly, but Suling still looked like a ghost, clutching Madam Ning’s valise and peering through the smoke for a desperate glimpse of her lost world. Gemma reached out and hugged her awkwardly—felt those slim arms grip her back with fierce strength, and Reggie’s arms loop around them both. “Are you sure you won’t come with us, Sal?”
“Please come,” Suling added, but Gemma shook her head again. Another flurry of hugs and farewells, then Suling and Reggie were making their way up the street. Reggie’s big troubled eyes looked back once over her bony shoulder. “Write,” she called, “promise you’ll write!” And Gemma forced a smile and a little wave.
The smoke-filled air swallowed them all too soon.
It shouldn’t end like this, Gemma thought, smile fading away as she clutched her birdcage and her Queen of the Night cutting, thinking of last night’s moment of fragile beauty as the plant bloomed. But fire devoured beauty, it devoured peace, it devoured everything. At least it hadn’t devoured her friends, even if they were all scattering to the four winds.
“Success!” Alice Eastwood’s voice was as brisk as ever as she came round the corner dusting her hands off on her ashy skirt. She’d already bid the others farewell earlier, before plunging out into the chaos to find a wagon out of the city. “The driver’s agreed to take me as far as Fort Mason, along with the Academy’s botanical samples. We can squeeze you in, too, Gemma.”
But Gemma shook her head. “Where will you go after Fort Mason?”
Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. What I’ve built was mostly here. The Academy. My work.”
We’re all orphans now, in a way, Gemma thought. Herself and Alice, Reggie and Suling—none of them had homes anymore. “You still have your work,” Gemma said, helplessly.
“It was a joy to me while I did it. I can still have the same joy in starting it again!” Alice tried to smile but her chin wobbled. For just a moment the older woman sagged utterly in despair, and Gemma stepped forward and held her tight.
And then police were shouting for everyone to move it along, move it along, the fires would be eating their way through here in another hour, and Alice was on the wagon, the Queen of the Night clasped to her breast, wilted flowers spilling over her arms, and Gemma was trudging in the other direction with a birdcage dangling from one hand and a tiny pot in the other.
She had, she realized, absolutely nothing else. She’d borrowed some clean clothes from Alice, but everything else Gemma owned had burned in the octagon house. Two nights ago she’d been draped in pearls and velvet, singing for San Francisco’s diamond-decked elite. Today she trudged through a ruined city with barely more than the clothes on her back.
You are not the only one, she reminded herself. Everywhere she looked, people were toiling along with the blank, shocked faces of those who had lost everything. A mother with a little girl on her hip, the girl clutching her doll, the mother pushing a baby buggy piled high with clothes . . . A man with one leg, doing his best to navigate the rubble of the streets on crutches . . . A drunk sitting on a crumbled wall outside a bar, swigging from a salvaged bottle of whiskey . . . An ancient Chinese matriarch supported by her grandsons, tottering on bound feet no bigger than Gemma’s palm . . .
“Vee-vay-vah-vo-voooooohhh,” sang Toscanini, imitating Gemma’s morning vocalises.
“Oh, shut up,” Gemma said, realizing she was weeping.
She’d decided to make for Golden Gate Park—the policemen were directing refugees there; they said the park had a camp set up with tents and cookstoves and soldiers keeping order—but somewhere around burned and desolate Union Square, Gemma wound down. Found herself sitting on a discarded trunk, dragged from who knew where and finally abandoned in flight, sitting and blankly staring at the burned shop opposite. A piano shop . . . She thought of George with a spasm of grief, looking at the burned shells of the instruments in the window, scorched piano keys grinning like blackened teeth.
“Buongiorno,” a familiar voice said. “Micaëla, I forget your real name. What are you doing here?”
“I could ask the same, signore.” Gemma blinked up at the great Caruso, hatless in the smoky morning light, his nightshirt stuffed into a pair of trousers, overcoat hanging off his shoulders. She was too weary to muster much surprise at the sight of him. “Where’s the rest of the company?”
“Some here with me, we sleep here last night. Some at Jefferson Square, some at Golden Gate . . .” The tenor rubbed a hand over his dark hair. “When the hotel she evacuates, we scatter. The fires come through here in the early hours. My valet, he goes to find me a wagon now. I came back here, there was a trunk I thought I left behind . . .” He looked around at the wasteland of ashes, shrugging. “You, you were safe on Nob Hill I should think?”
Gemma ran a hand over her own hair, mirroring his gesture. So much of it had burned, coming away in great ashy handfuls last night when she tried to ease a comb through the crisped strands. She was lucky the fire hadn’t scorched her scalp, but it was hard to feel lucky when she smelled the stink of burned hair and felt the singed ends of that waterfall of corn-blond hair now wisping dully around her ears. “No, I wasn’t safe on Nob Hill.”
“San Francisco . . .” Caruso sat on the other end of the trunk, beside Gemma. “’Ell of a place. I’ll take Vesuvius.”
“Vesuvius?”
“I am supposed to sing in Naples this spring, but I say no. Vesuvius, she is right next door and she is grumbling lately. I think I rather sing somewhere the earth doesn’t erupt and throw fire into the sky, so I come to San Francisco instead.”
Gemma managed a watery chuckle. Caruso laughed a belly laugh, looking at the ruin of Union Square. “I’ll be glad to see home again. Italy, my wife, my boys . . .” He began humming the duet he and Gemma had sung two nights ago in Carmen, where the tenor yearns for home: “‘Ma mère, je la vois! Oui, je revois mon village’ . . . Come on,” he scolded when Gemma failed to come in on Micaëla’s entrance. “Why aren’t you singing?”
“I can’t.” Her throat was too raw, and her heart was so heavy.
“You’re a singer, aren’t you? Or are you a performer?”
Gemma gazed at him, utterly exhausted. “What do you mean?”
“A performer does it for the spotlight.” Caruso whipped a little notebook and a pencil out of his pocket and began sketching, apparently idly. “That civetta Fremstad, she is a performer—it is all her. Her voice, her spotlight, her stage. A great performer,” he said, sounding pleased with himself for being fair. “But she does it for herself. A singer, now, they do it for the music. Because they love it. You know I cry every time Don José stabs Carmen? Every time I think, Bastardo, let the poor woman live, she’s not for you. Because the music, every time it fools me. I love being fooled. I love singing it, and always it is fresh to me.” He kept sketching, and soon he was singing again. “‘Ma mère, je la vois! Je revois mon village’—”
Gemma joined in. She couldn’t not join in. “‘Ô souvenirs d’autrefois! Souvenirs du pays’ . . .” Oh, memories of bygone days, memories of home . . .
They finished the duet, and Caruso presented her with his sketch. A caricature, deftly done, of a dejected soprano slumped on a trunk. But with a spotlight on her still, highlighting her in her surroundings. Gemma smiled. “Not only have I sung with the great Caruso, I’ve been sketched by him.”
“We sing together again someday, carissima. I think you make a ’ell of a Violetta. Ah—” Caruso bounced upright, stuffing the notebook back in his overcoat pocket. “My valet, I see him waving. Maybe he finds a wagon now. My trunks of things, I’m not leaving them behind. I leave this city, I never come back, that you can be sure. You come with me.” Giving her a pat on the rump as she rose—some men never changed, even in a crisis. “However small the wagon, we find room for you and your birdcage!”
Gemma pushed the folded sketch into her pocket and followed him tiredly, cage in hand, pot in the other trailing its dejected, withered flowers. They fetched up not at Golden Gate Park or the Presidio, but some smaller square where a cluster of refugees gathered around some makeshift morning cook-fires. She wasn’t sure where exactly; the fires now raging north of here had erased every landmark, and there was nothing left but shattered streets and burned black shells of buildings. But a cluster of chorus singers from the Metropolitan were there, and Gemma found herself greeted with hugs and exclamations. No more hostility toward the new soprano whose lover had bought her way into a starring role—that had been forgotten, given the disaster that had befallen them all. She asked after George, but no one had seen him.
Panic ensued as it became clear that the wagon procured by Caruso’s valet would not hold them all and would have to make two trips to the ferry where, apparently, they could rejoin the rest of the company. “Send the wagon back and I’ll take the second trip with the baggage,” Gemma volunteered and ended up waving Caruso and the others on their way.
Someone passed Gemma a pried-open tin of sardines with a few fish left in the bottom. She slurped the can down to the last drop of oil, wiping off her chin afterward and looking around. A woman in an elaborate ruffled walking suit and high-heeled boots sat on the front step of a burned-out store, drinking water out of a makeshift paper cone and passing it on to a soot-covered street urchin. An upright piano on casters sat incongruously in the middle of the square, canted to one side over a crack in the street—who would try to drag a piano away from a raging fire? A woman in an ash-covered toque stumbled past, and Gemma thought for a moment it was the Flying Roller—that stupid woman in the train car who had bleated about how hellfire and earthquakes would swallow the Cesspit of the West if the sinners of San Francisco did not change their ungodly ways. Not so stupid after all, Gemma thought, but the ash-covered woman wandered down the street before she could tell if it was really the Flying Roller or not.
A man with a bloodied bandage around his head like a pirate offered Gemma a heel end of stale bread, and she swallowed it down, feeding the crumbs to Toscanini. The budgie was hopping cheerfully around his cage, chirping away. You dim bird, she thought. Singing and singing, as if the world weren’t burning down around your ears.
Caruso’s voice: You’re a singer, aren’t you? Or are you a performer?
The grimy street urchin was crying now. The woman in the frilly walking suit tried to embrace him, but he shoved her away. Gemma shifted the Queen of the Night’s pot off her lap and went to the upright piano in the middle of the street, striking an exploratory chord. Horribly out of tune, of course. She upended a half-burned crate, sat down, and began the hymn that closed every church service in Red Hook, Nebraska. Even the wretched little services at the orphanage. “‘Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord with me abide . . .’” Singing steadily through all eight verses. She looked up at the last chord. The street urchin had his arms around his knees, watching her. So was the woman in the ruffles.
“Do you know any more?” the child asked.
So Gemma sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and then Handel’s “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” and the shepherd boy’s song from Tosca. She sang the Countess’s aria from Act II of Figaro, and “Amazing Grace,” and “Home Never Was Nothin’ Like This.” Her throat was sore and her voice scratchy, but she didn’t stop. Someone passed her a little water in a cone of paper, and as she drank it down she realized the square was filling up with more people, gathering silently around the piano. Her fingers, covered in glass cuts and soot, moved painfully over the soured piano keys, but she struck up Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum,” seeing a tear slip down the cheek of the man with the bandaged head. Maybe she was as dim as her bird, singing when the world was burning down around her ears, but she couldn’t do anything else. She was a singer. So she sang.
“Gemma!” She was between verses of “I Am Thine, O Lord” (the woman in the frilly dress had asked if she knew it; she was a good Nebraska church girl; of course she knew it) when she heard a deep voice shout her name. She barely had time to look around, mangling the hymn chords, when a man’s hands lifted her almost bodily off the crate and swept her into a hug. She was crying and smiling before she even saw his face, because she knew those huge cast-iron hands anywhere, those hands that could span an eleventh on a keyboard without even trying, those hands that were now spanned across her back.
“George—” She hadn’t seen him since the midnight ball before the earthquake, perfectly turned out in his dark suit with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and here he was big and disheveled in an ash-smeared shirt, scorch marks all over his forearms as if he’d walked through flying cinders. Gemma hugged him tight, throat gone thick. He was muttering in Spanish against her hair, and it was a while before he put her down and switched languages.
“I’ve been all over San Francisco trying to find you,” he said, pushing a singed lock of hair out of her eyes. “Up and down Taylor Street, Hyde Street, Nob Hill—”
You came looking for me. Gemma’s eyes filled, hearing it. You came looking for me. Just as she’d gone looking for him.
“—I went to the octagon house and it’s a heap of ashes. I thought you might have gone off to safety with Thornton.”
Thornton. Gemma’s very bones juddered, as if lead had sluiced into her marrow. “He’s gone,” she said briefly. Gone into the smoke, and who knew where. “Good riddance to him.” It was all she felt capable of saying right now.
George had gone to Golden Gate Park after his own street burned and took his rented room with it; he’d been helping to set up tents and carry stretchers and aided in beating out a few cook-fires before they could rage into more city-devouring maelstroms. “I was doing a sweep near the Palace Hotel in case you ended up there,” he said. “And I heard you singing from nearly a block away.”
Thornton was wrong, Gemma thought. I was wrong. All those hard-edged principles she’d been clutching as she rode into San Francisco, all those cynicisms of Thornton’s she’d soaked up . . . It wasn’t true, that the only person to ever rely on was yourself. It wasn’t true, that friends would inevitably let you down. Hers certainly had not. Not today.
And maybe I didn’t let them down, either, she thought, remembering her plunge into the burning octagon house after Reggie and Suling.
“I came looking for you, too,” she told George now, softly.
His hands tightened. “Gem—”
“Hey, mister,” the street urchin at Gemma’s side complained. “Let her keep singing, why don’t you?”
George grinned, teeth white in his soot-darkened face. He cocked his head at the piano, and Gemma made a be my guest wave of her hand. He flicked imaginary tails over the crate as he sat, flexing his fingers. “Any requests?” he asked the crowd, which was now six-deep around the out-of-tune piano.
Gemma was singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” the audience singing along on the chorus between fits of shaky laughter, when Caruso’s cart finally came back to take her and the rest of the baggage to the ferry. Gemma collected her birdcage, smiling at the thank-yous coming from all sides. She had sung herself absolutely hoarse—a lifetime of safeguarding her voice and she had spent it all in one go. She couldn’t think of a better thing to do with it. Much better than throwing it out for those oblivious millionaires in Thornton’s ballroom two days ago. Not one of those pampered, well-fed guests had had tears in his eyes like the man with the bandage round his head, who was now wringing her hand between his.
George handed her up into the cart, then climbed in himself after settling the birdcage and Alice’s cutting. Gemma wondered how on earth she was going to keep the thing alive, but clutched the pot anyway. “You think you’ll go back to New York?” George asked as the cart began jolting up the street. “After everyone assembles, wherever they are?”
“If that’s what the company decides.” She didn’t really want to go back to New York, but it wasn’t like she had much choice. “What about you?” Looking at him, thinking, You came looking for me.
“I don’t have much more to my name than the clothes on my back.” George picked her hand up and kissed it. “So New York sounds fine.”
He tucked her against his burly shoulder, and Gemma leaned back against his solid warmth, relief and fear and exhaustion making a stone ball in her chest, Toscanini twittering and hopping in his cage. “You dim, sweet bird,” she choked as the cart rolled on, as the fires roared and sent more billows of smoke skyward, as they left San Francisco behind.