June 23, 1911
Paris
“Vin rouge,” Gemma told the hovering waiter. She had been sipping ink-black French coffee while she waited for the others, but something stronger seemed called for now that they had all arrived, considering the discussion ahead of them.
No one, however, seemed eager to begin. They sat there, a silent quartet of women on a busy Paris street—late-afternoon sun slanting in dusty summer rays, striped awning flapping overhead, the hoot of French traffic and the rapid babble of French voices flowing past like a busy river. Alice’s telegram from London sat in the middle of the café table, and for a moment they all just stared at it.
Gemma finally took the plunge, pearls swinging in her ears as she turned toward Alice. “You look marvelous, Alice. Like no time has passed at all.” A few more threads of gray in the botanist’s hair, perhaps, but otherwise she was exactly the same from her neat pompadour to her crisp shirtwaist to the lens around her neck. “And all your botanical globe-trotting lately! Are you looking forward to taking up your old position at the California Academy?”
Alice’s smile disappeared. “I haven’t formally been offered the position yet,” she said briefly. “And going back to settle in San Francisco . . . I’m not sure I can make myself do it.”
Suling blinked. Reggie cleared her throat. So much for small talk, Gemma thought. Alice looked away, clearly uncomfortable, so Gemma turned to Suling this time. “You’re looking so elegant, Suling. Paris clearly agrees with you.”
Suling nodded her sleek black head. There was nothing of the silent San Francisco seamstress with her girlish plait and buttoned tunic here: the self-assured young woman across the table had glided up to the café in the tiny fluid steps demanded by the most fashionable of hobble skirts, her glossy hair was shingled to outrageous shortness, and her lightweight summer coat was turquoise silk exquisitely embroidered with almond blossoms. But the minutely examining gaze she turned on Gemma was so very Suling, scrutinizing every stitch of Gemma’s black-and-white-striped walking suit, the cameo at her throat, her enormous black straw hat with its striped taffeta bow.
“Very fashionable,” Suling approved. “Buenos Aires is clearly no more than six months behind Paris. Hobble skirts will be hitting your shores any day now.”
“Look out, Buenos Aires.” The bright social smile Gemma had pasted into place turned more real when Suling’s assessing black eyes shifted to Alice. I know just what you’re going to say . . .
“Alice, that hat,” Suling said with dismay. Knew it, thought Gemma. “It’s the same one you had in San Francisco, and even then you said it was ten years old.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Alice plucked off her flat pancake of a hat. “You sent me a hat last Christmas for fancy occasions. This is my everyday hat.”
“It’s dreadful, Alice,” Gemma agreed. “Let Suling do whatever she wants to it.”
“I was bringing these in for Madam Lydig’s latest opera gown . . .” Rummaging in her handbag, Suling produced a tiny sewing kit and a handful of beaded silk flowers. “But this is just too dire to let stand.” Alice’s hat was whisked into Suling’s lap, and soon a silver needle was flashing. Gemma felt herself exhaling. That uneasy, fragile silence that hovered over the table was ebbing away.
“She’s never happy unless she’s stitching something.” Reggie flung a careless, bony arm across the back of Suling’s chair, grinning with pride. No hobble skirt for Reggie—Gemma’s oldest friend wore a man’s trousers and waistcoat like a bohemian, her dark head bare to the summer sun, a red scarf about her neck, her collar bordered with embroidered red poppies that were unmistakably Suling’s work. “She may not be the head embroideress at the atelier, not yet, but half the traffic at the rue Taitbout is there for her needle. Not to mention that Paul Poiret himself is trying to poach her for his own atelier.”
“Quit bragging,” Suling scolded, sounding very wifely.
“Yes, bao bei.” Reggie dropped a kiss on her knuckles, quite openly, and no one at the café seemed even to notice. The French, Gemma knew, were far more blasé about this sort of thing than Americans. Or perhaps people were simply blind. Men who made lives together had to be much more careful how they conducted themselves, but if two women made a home together, why, everyone knew it was only for reasons of safety and economy. Women could break a great many rules as long as they did so quietly. And thank goodness, Gemma reflected.
“You look like Marcello in La Bohème,” she told Reggie now, reaching across the table and giving her tanned fingers a squeeze. “In Paris at last, the way you always dreamed! Your letters haven’t mentioned any showings; what have you been painting?”
Reggie’s smile disappeared. “This and that,” she said briefly. Gemma would have pressed further, but the waiter arrived with a carafe of red wine. There was a bit of fussing until they could get rid of him; then Reggie downed half her wine at a gulp, Suling continued to whip stitches into the band of Alice’s hat, and Alice rotated her wine stem between ink-stained fingers. How very far they’d come, Gemma thought, from the fire-singed and exhausted quartet sitting in a dark San Francisco bedroom, watching one of the rarest flowers in the world open its white petals.
“Oh dear,” she heard herself sighing. “This isn’t how I envisioned the four of us meeting again.”
“We meant to catch up with you in New York.” Suling’s eyes flickered. “But somehow the timing was never right . . .”
“I somehow missed seeing any of you when I first came to Europe, too . . .” Alice’s voice trailed off in a very un-Alice-like way, and they were all staring into their wine again.
I didn’t mean to lose you all after San Francisco, Gemma almost said. But life had a way of happening, and before you knew it five years had passed and in place of the most important friendships in your life, all you had was a handful of letters where the four of you talked too brightly of your new lives and never, ever mentioned the thing that had sent you scattering in all directions in the first place. I wrote to tell you three about the good things, Gemma thought. My wedding; the fourteen curtain calls I got on opening night of Tosca at the Teatro Colón—but did I write about any of the bad? Like the fact that her migraines were more frequent than ever, and she now missed about one performance in fifteen? No, she had not. She’d simply pretended the bad things weren’t there.
Maybe they were all doing that. Alice’s reluctance to return to San Francisco when her letters were always so cheerful; Reggie’s reticence about her painting when all her scribbled correspondence was full of art world gossip . . .
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Alice said at last. “Maybe this isn’t how I hoped to meet the three of you again, either. This certainly isn’t how I planned to see Paris—I always swore the first thing I’d do in this city was visit the Jardin des Plantes and investigate the varieties of evening primrose, to see if the edges of the petals are rounded or emarginate. Instead, I’m scrambling to bring a murderer to justice.” Alice rummaged in her handbag and slapped a worn-out news clipping down on top of her own telegram in the middle of the table. “Ladies, let’s quit dawdling and address the elephant in the room. The elephant named Thornton.”
A brief silence as they passed the society column around. The one Alice had spotted in London.
“It doesn’t say the name Thornton.” Gemma pushed the clipping away with a black-gloved fingertip. “The name here is William van Doren.”
That name meant nothing to her, but the rest of the breathless write-up did: New York millionaire traveling in Paris, having recently gifted his fiancée with a phoenix crown of blue-and-white jade, fifty-seven sapphires, four thousand pearls, butterflies fashioned out of kingfisher feathers, and carved Queen of the Night flowers. That meant something to all of them. What man would own that crown except . . .
“Clarkson looks for Thornton for five years and doesn’t find a whisper, and Alice stumbles over him in a gossip column.” Reggie shook her head. “I’d laugh if it were funny.”
“Michael wants to know how we can be sure van Doren and Thornton are one and the same,” Alice said. “We exchanged a positive flurry of telegrams. Without proof, he said he can’t involve the gendarmes—”
“It’s the same man.” Suling raised her dark eyes at last from the hat. “Two days ago, I took a stack of dress boxes to the Ritz for a delivery, and I managed to loiter in the hotel court drinking tea for half a morning. He passed right by me, nearly close enough to touch. Thornton is in Paris.”
Reggie looked at her, outraged. “You didn’t tell me!”
“Because you’d have insisted on coming along, and I wasn’t going to risk that. He knows your face, Reggie, but I was just a Chinee sewing girl to him; he never really paid attention to me, and he certainly never saw me in that crowded court at the Ritz. Afterward, when I asked the desk clerk who it was, he confirmed it: Mr. William van Doren.”
“How did you know he was staying at the Ritz?” Alice asked.
“Some American ladies were having costumes made at Callot Soeurs for Paul Poiret’s Oriental Ball in Versailles tomorrow night.” Suling held up Alice’s hat, examining it. “They gossiped during their fitting about the van Doren party that’s staying at their hotel, the Ritz. All I had to do was volunteer to make the delivery of their costumes and sit discreetly behind a potted palm.”
“It really was him?” Gemma said, low-voiced.
Suling’s eyes met hers. “Yes.”
Another silence fell. Gemma knew they were all imagining the same thing: the almost-homely, always-charming face of the man who had tried to burn them all alive.
“I wonder if van Doren is his real name, or another nom de plume,” Alice mused.
“I think it must be his real name.” Gemma rummaged for some clippings of her own. “Before I sailed from Buenos Aires, I went looking in the New York society pages—”
“You can get those in Buenos Aires?”
“Of course; you know how many wealthy expatriates there are in Argentina? I found a gushy write-up of his engagement: ‘William van Doren of the New York van Dorens, replenishing the straitened family finances after spending a decade in Europe.’” Laying the clipping down. “Refurbishing the family home around the corner from Astor House on Fifth Avenue, planning a summer cottage in Newport as a gift to his bride—there were so many details. Whoever wrote it knew a great deal about the pedigrees and lives of the elite New York families.” Gemma took hold of her wineglass, feeling her fingers tighten around the stem. “But they didn’t know that William van Doren left New York for San Francisco, not Europe. That he took a different name to make his fortune as far from home as possible, then came home to take it all up again.”
“But if anyone saw a photograph of him from his San Francisco days—”
“He was very careful about that.” Reggie’s voice was flat. “He never had his photograph taken. I used to wonder why.”
“He certainly looks well now.” Suling’s needle paused for a moment in its rhythmic flash. “Healthy. Laughing. A whole party of gentlemen and ladies scurrying after him, pretty fiancée on his arm, an expensive automobile waiting . . .”
Very nearly in unison, the four women raised their glasses of rough red table wine and took long swallows.
“We cannot confront him,” Alice said at last. “I don’t know what any of you have been thinking, but we cannot.”
Suling shivered, visibly. Reggie crossed her arms across her waistcoat as though she were cold. Gemma made a face. “For heaven’s sake, I don’t want to confront him.” The thought made her skin crawl. “I don’t ever want to see him again, unless it’s in a courtroom on trial for the murder of Madam Ning and that Pinkerton detective.”
“Not that anyone will care he murdered a Chinese brothel owner,” Suling muttered. “They’ll all focus on the Pinkerton.” She looked brittle suddenly behind her fashionable facade, and Gemma wanted to reach across the table and touch her hand. But Suling didn’t look like she’d welcome it, her dark eyes suspiciously shiny. Perhaps you have a few cracks, too, under all that gloss of elegance, Gemma thought with a twinge.
“Michael Clarkson thinks there is a chance the man can be brought to trial,” Alice said. “If things are done properly. We’ve confirmed van Doren is Thornton; all well and good. We keep our distance until Clarkson arrives in Paris—he’s a Pinkerton detective himself now; he can involve the authorities and the police here for a proper arrest.”
Reggie looked dubious. “Men like Thornton buy police. And trials.”
“And how long will it take for Clarkson to get here?” Gemma asked, as Reggie signaled for another carafe of wine. “If Thornton and his party move on from Paris—”
“They intend to stay through the end of July,” Suling said. “If Clarkson is already on his way—”
“He is; he cabled nearly a week ago that he was sailing from New York,” Alice said. “He arrives tomorrow morning.”
“—then there should be plenty of time since the van Doren party is in Paris through July.”
Gemma blinked. “How do you know that?”
“Gossipy American ladies again.” Suling sipped her wine. “Poiret is making the trousseau for Thornton’s fiancée, but it’s taking so long, they’ve all decided to stay in Paris another few months.”
“I wonder . . .” Gemma realized her fingers were drumming nervously and stilled them. “Do you think he believes we’re all dead? We haven’t exactly tried to lead quiet lives these past five years. We haven’t heard hide nor hair of him until now; all Clarkson’s inquiries were about a man named Thornton, and we never heard a whisper of him. But has he had any whisper of our survival?”
“He never knew my real name,” Suling said, plucking a loose thread off her turquoise silk sleeve. “So he’d only know me if he saw me—maybe—and he hasn’t seen me.”
“He never knew I was in the conservatory that day at all,” Alice said. “So if he’s been collecting rare botanicals again in the last five years and came across my name, well, he wouldn’t blink at it. And you perform under your married name now, don’t you, Gemma?”
Thank God, Gemma thought. “For nearly five years, and mostly in Buenos Aires. But what if he’s seen one of Reggie’s paintings? He has such a good eye; he’d know her style.”
A long look between Reggie and Suling. Reggie seemed to shrink, as Suling said briefly, “She hasn’t painted seriously since San Francisco.”
They all let that lie, painfully, where it had fallen. “I think we can at least be sure Thornton doesn’t know we’re seeking him,” Alice said, clearly realizing Reggie wouldn’t welcome questions. “So—”
“So we wait for Clarkson,” Gemma finished as the new carafe arrived, “and Clarkson has until the end of July to initiate a proper arrest.”
They sat sipping their wine, deflation hovering in the air along with the white dust of a Paris summer. That’s all? Gemma knew the others were thinking. A slim hope of an arrest, against the man who had left them all to die in the heart of San Francisco’s fires, and who could buy judges the way children bought lemon drops?
Reggie spoke, for the first time. “What about his fiancée?”
“Let’s see—” Gemma rifled through her collection of news clippings. “Viennese nobility. She’s come to Paris for her trousseau, of course. Her father is Baron August Friedrich Arenburg von Loxen—who knows if I’ve got the title right, but he used to be a field marshal for Emperor Franz Josef. One of those ramrod-straight old soldiers with a dueling scar. Supposedly he dabbles in chinoiserie and antiques—”
“That must be how he met Thornton,” Suling mused.
“That’s the father,” Reggie said sharply. “What about the daughter? Thornton’s future wife?”
“Miss Cecilia Arenburg von Loxen,” Gemma read. “Or maybe it’s ‘Lady,’ I don’t know. Eighteen, educated in Switzerland, speaks perfect English, so she’ll do well in New York.”
Suling tied off one last thread and held up Alice’s flat black hat, which now sported a scattering of exquisitely beaded silk flowers across the band. “There you go, Alice. Much improved.”
“So now I suppose we’re in a waiting game,” Gemma said, as Alice took the hat back and turned it over with a pleased smile. “When Clarkson arrives, do we—”
That was when Reggie shoved back her chair with a clatter and stormed away from the café without another word.