July 1910
Buenos Aires
Gemma set down Toscanini’s birdcage and turned a slow circle on the sun-drenched terrace, shading her eyes against the riot of blue sky and brilliant blooming bougainvillea climbing the walls. “George, please tell me again that we can afford this.”
“We can afford it,” he called from inside. Their bags were littered everywhere, their furniture was still on a cart rumbling its way from their old two-room apartment on the other side of town, but the piano was here and he’d already sat down and thrown back the lid. “You’re signed to sing Tosca this fall, and the Countess after that. The conductor at the Teatro Colón worships the ground you walk on. Quit worrying, corazón.”
And what if I get a migraine on opening night of Tosca and ruin everything? Gemma couldn’t help thinking, but pushed the worry away. It was a beautiful day, George was rippling out a Granados fandango, and Toscanini was already fluffing his feathers and cheeping inside his cage. There was no point borrowing trouble, so Gemma moved to the dusty terrace table, already imagining the dinners she and George would eat out here on warm nights. Glass tumblers of malbec and plates of matambre arrollados, blood-rare flank steak rolled around sweet peppers and hard-boiled eggs, the sound of Spanish drifting up from the street below . . .
“There you go,” she told the potted Queen of the Night plant, setting it down and fluffing its leaves. It had barely survived its first year, Alice’s fragile cutting drooping on the windowsill of their rented New York apartment, and Gemma had fussed over it with a care she refused to call superstitious. But it had finally produced its first bloom on an absolutely fetid late summer night, that extraordinary fragrance drowning out the smell of garbage and horse manure from the streets below. And not long afterward, she’d gotten the offer that brought them to South America: the offer to fill in for a Queen of the Night who’d unexpectedly flounced out of a Buenos Aires Zauberflöte.
Gemma still thought Caruso might have had a hand in that. Had he dropped a word in someone’s ear, somewhere on tour after the earthquake? If he had, she’d owe him forever for opening that door: the conductor at the Teatro Colón adored both her golden voice and her golden hair (she had to swat him off a few times, but he took it with good humor), and the company appreciated the easy Argentinian-accented Spanish Gemma had picked up from George by then. “Most of the sopranos we get from America can’t even be bothered to say thank you, much less learn how to say it in Spanish,” Gemma’s dresser had snorted, pinning the Queen of the Night’s starry crown into her hair. “Those rude bitches!”
And now Gemma had a contract here, a good one. Whether it was a whisper from Caruso or Alice’s cutting finally blooming that brought the stroke of luck, Gemma would seize her good fortune with both hands. She had starring roles at last, she had a sun-drenched apartment with a terrace to share with the best man in the world, and she didn’t have to supplement the month’s income by singing hymns in a church choir in Queens.
“Are you rehearsing tonight with those wind players you met during the Zauberflöte rehearsals?” she asked George, giving the Queen of the Night’s pot a final pat and coming in off the terrace. Half the apartment’s main room was taken up by the grand piano, but neither of them would have it any other way. “What was it they wanted you to fill in for?”
“K. 452. The Mozart quintet in E-flat Major, for piano and winds.” George’s hands wandered briefly from Granados’s fandango into Mozart’s Larghetto as he grinned up at her. He never seemed to worry about work, but somehow he always found it. He’d wander in behind Gemma when she arrived at a new production, and ten minutes later be filling in for the rehearsal pianist or running recitatives at the harpsichord in the pit, after which he’d inevitably be new best friends with the second violinist, who would invite him to join a local chamber group. He’d play Mozart and Brahms for three months in a small ensemble, wearing concert dress, then spend the next month playing ragtime in bars in his shirtsleeves. “And I already have an offer from the café across the street,” he added. “I got to talking with the owner, and he asked if I’d play on tango night—”
“You are too good to be playing in cafés,” Gemma scolded, winding her arms around his neck from behind.
“But I like playing in cafés. I don’t have to wear a damned tie . . .” He spun around on the piano stool, his big hands sliding around her waist. She lowered her head and kissed him, long and leisurely. The first time they’d kissed had been as they got off the train from San Francisco at the station in New York: filthy, exhausted, still smoke-grimed, Gemma knowing she stank of burned hair. She’d kissed him anyway, surprising herself, and his fingertips had rippled up and down her spine like a piano’s keys, melting her against him as she thought, Home.
My job in San Francisco burned up along with the Grand Opera House, he’d said back then, shrugging, making light of his decision to stay in New York—but it had been no small thing to Gemma. Singing in the Met chorus, early for every rehearsal, keeping her head down because she knew this was her last chance, her absolute last—George had been there for all of it, making her laugh with his stories. His first job playing piano at fifteen, in what he’d assumed was a seedy Buenos Aires lounge and which turned out to be a whorehouse; of playing his way to San Francisco on a luxury liner where the richest of the passengers tipped him in dinner rolls. Falling in love with George had been so simple; deciding to marry him had been the easiest decision in the world.
“I thought we’d invite your mother to lunch here tomorrow,” Gemma said, breaking the kiss. “We won’t be anywhere near unpacked, but she’ll enjoy scolding us. And I’ll make medialunas from her recipe.” George had fretted the way only an Argentinian son with a widowed mother could fret, introducing Gemma to his mother shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires, but Gemma had never worried. Mothers love me, she told George, and when she unpacked the wholesome farm girl from deep inside and begged in Spanish for an apron to help in the kitchen, the woman had melted. “In the meantime, have you seen my Tosca score? I want to work more snarl into the back-and-forth with Scarpia in Act II—”
“You can take a day to unpack, corazón. Even two.”
“No, I’m going to be sublimely prepared for that first Tosca rehearsal. They will never have another soprano as prepared as me.” Because the migraines would hit during the performance run, Gemma knew, and there would be times she’d have to cancel at the last moment, and you needed to build up a lot of goodwill in advance for something like that.
The migraines aren’t better since you left San Francisco, the thought whispered, insidious. They’re worse. But she pushed that aside, too, because what could you do? All you could do, living with pain, was live with it, as best you could. “We’ll have to write our friends,” she said, moving a box of George’s sheet music off the piano. “Tell them we’ve changed addresses—”
“I picked up a batch of mail at the old apartment before handing in the key,” George said, turning back to the piano and lilting out some more Granados. “In my jacket—”
Gemma dug through his coat pockets and turned up a clutch of battered envelopes. Paris postmarks and American postmarks, she was delighted to see.
“Suling is now a senior embroideress at Callot Soeurs,” Gemma read aloud, wandering back out toward the terrace as she read. “Reggie has all kinds of rude things to say about tourists in Paris. I wonder if she’s showing her work anywhere; she never answers when I ask.” Suling had enclosed an embroidered bookmark for Gemma to mark her scores, a beautiful strip of silk embroidered with scarlet blooms from the ceibo trees Gemma saw in the city parks here, but Reggie hadn’t included one of her funny little sketches. In fact, she hadn’t done that in quite a while. Gemma frowned, moving on to Alice Eastwood’s letter. “Alice’s eyes are bothering her . . . She’s traveling on the East Coast now, working at various herbariums, thinking about traveling to Europe. She wants to see if the English Wellingtonia is the same as the Sequoia gigantea—”
“What’s a Sequoia gigantea?” George asked, fingers tripping into a tango.
“Don’t ask unless you want Alice to send you an annotated copy of Hand Book of the Trees of California. I can tell Alice misses California, I wonder why she doesn’t go back.” Gemma turned Alice’s letter over to the next page. “She said Clarkson is finally with the Pinkertons in New York now.” Making inquiries about Thornton, though Gemma didn’t say it aloud. She didn’t want that name in this brand-new sunny space, this brand-new sunny home.
Just be dead, she begged silently, folding up the letters. Just let Thornton be dead. She knew Suling wanted justice for Madam Ning, she knew Reggie wouldn’t believe in Thornton’s death unless she saw a body, she knew Alice didn’t believe in it, either, because a scientist needed empirical evidence, but Gemma was willing to deal in hope. Hope that he was dead, that he would never trouble them again, that they could all just . . .
Move on.
They got one more year.
One year before Alice Eastwood went to London and, after a tour of Kew Gardens, saw an abandoned newspaper folded open to the society column, where two words caught her eye.
Phoenix Crown.
Two words to spark a flurry of telegrams across oceans and continents. Two words to spark frenzied plans, hasty boat tickets, memory-fueled nightmares.
Two words to spur everyone in a single, streaking drive toward Paris.