“Well,” Gemma greeted her husband, unpinning her big black hat and tossing it onto the bed, “they’re all on the verge of cracking up.”
“What’s that, corazón?” George called absently from the desk. He was practicing—their hotel room didn’t have a piano, so he was playing the rolltop desk instead, working from memory. Judging from the way he was sweating through his linen shirt, and from that right hand rattling triplets against the desk edge at blurring speed, Gemma guessed it was Schubert’s “Erlkönig.” She had a lieder concert this autumn in Manaus, and she liked picking repertoire that showcased George’s playing, not just her voice. A pianist as good as her husband deserved better material than just plinking arpeggios as the soprano soared. He banged out the last climactic chords and swung around, raking his sweat-damp black hair out of his eyes. “Franz Schubert can rot in hell for those moto perpetuo triplets,” George said, pulling her into his lap. “And what gave you that idea about your friends?”
“Alice can’t bring herself to go back to San Francisco and her old botany department. Reggie isn’t painting. Suling looks tremendously elegant and successful, but there’s something just a bit lost there.” Gemma sighed. “Or maybe I’m imagining things.”
“You all survived an inferno. Give them time.”
“We’ve had five years. Why is everyone still so . . .” Gemma nestled her head into his shoulder, wrestling to find the right word. “Stuck?” Henry Thornton had reared his head and it was like they all froze in response, each suspended in their own nightmare like insects in amber. We shouldn’t have left one another back in San Francisco. We should have stuck together.
George threaded a hand through Gemma’s hair. “Next time you meet up with them all, let me come with you?”
I needed to prove I could do it alone, Gemma thought, but didn’t say. George adored her, stem to flawed stern; he was only too happy to be leaned on, and for so long she’d had to lean on him—recovering from the octagon house fire, rebuilding her career, fighting always to balance her work with her migraines. But it would be a very bad decision to go on leaning forever, letting him carry her the way his piano carried her voice in so many rehearsals and recitals and practice sessions.
“Not quite the way we envisioned seeing Paris, is it?” Gemma said now, her tone deliberately light. Their room was small, a second-floor bedroom in a cheap Left Bank pension. Alice had found it—she was in a corner room two doors down—and Gemma had been happy to stay somewhere that Thornton (or van Doren or whatever he was now calling himself) would never dream of setting his expensively shod foot.
“Next year when you’re back here singing Marguerite in Faust, we’ll stay at the Ritz and have champagne every day,” George said.
“You know I can’t take that role, George.” Gemma slid off his lap and came round behind him, digging her thumbs knowledgeably into the broad muscles of his shoulders—he always got knotted up after he’d been practicing too long. Especially Schubert and those moto perpetuo triplets.
“You could sing Marguerite in your sleep.”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. The Paris Opera—everyone says their management’s brutal on new singers. If I get a migraine during a run of Faust and can’t go on, they’ll end my career.”
“The migraines are getting better. The new medicine—”
“It’s half laudanum. I don’t like relying on it.” And the migraines were worse than they’d been before San Francisco, not that she’d told her friends that. No, she’d put her best face forward at the café today, the elegant diva in her prime. She hadn’t said I’m only getting good roles now because I found a sympathetic conductor who doesn’t mind calling my understudy whenever I’m laid out flat in a darkened room with a cold cloth over my head. And her friends didn’t think to ask why she wasn’t working elsewhere, because she’d always written so glowingly of the Teatro Colón, one of the best opera houses in the world, so why would she want to take on roles with other companies?
Fear. That was why. She didn’t dare risk the Paris Opera or the Staatsoper, even now that she was starting to get inquiries. She’d carved out a place for herself since San Francisco, and she was just barely able to hang on to it. She didn’t dare move outside it. If she felt ashamed of herself, well, nearly being burned alive left its mark on a person’s soul. She had her life, she had her friends, she had her voice, she had George—if she’d lost a little of her courage, maybe that was the price.
George groaned as her thumb found a particularly stubborn knot over his shoulder blade. “How long will we be in Paris, do you think?”
“A few weeks? We’ll know more when Clarkson arrives. His ship lands in Le Havre tomorrow, late morning. Do you think you could . . .”
“Yes, I’ll meet him when he disembarks. I doubt the man speaks a word of French. Then I’ll drop him off to plot and scheme with you four ladies . . .” George tilted his head back and tugged her head down for a kiss, then another.
“I can feel a migraine coming,” she murmured against his mouth. Just the earliest signs—the slight initial stiffness in her neck muscles before the pulsing began, the urge to yawn though she wasn’t remotely tired.
“Coming quick?” He knew the different varieties as well as she did: the ones that roared in like a freight train, the slower ones that sank deep and lasted so much agonizingly longer.
“It feels like it’s taking its time. So—” She peeled him out of his rumpled shirt, let his deft fingers work the buttons on her black-and-white suit, the laces on her corset, her garters. He could play her every bit as well as his piano, fast or slow, surging and crashing or sustaining soft to the last gasp. This afternoon was fast and delicate, a Chopin nocturne, rippling and soothing, as if he could stop the tense rise of pain in her skull by his hands alone.
By the time the migraine hit full force at twilight, the Serranos had the curtains drawn and the cold packs ready, the strictly measured dose of laudanum that could take the edge off. I hate this, Gemma thought, curled in a ball on the bed, I hate this, I hate this—because why had Henry Thornton and his attempt to kill her made these attacks worse? What did the random pain in her head have to do with him? She’d put him behind her; she’d survived and even managed to thrive, so why couldn’t she conquer this?
George was talking softly, rubbing a hand along her scalp under her hair, trying to distract her. “Hopefully we’ll be back in Buenos Aires by the end of July, in time to see the new Puccini opera premiere. Even if it won’t be Caruso starring like he did at the New York premiere.”
“Caruso,” Gemma mumbled hazily as the pain sank its claws in. “I wonder if we’ll ever sing together again. I still think he might be the one who got me that first Queen of the Night at the Teatro Colón.”
“Maybe he did,” George said. “But anything afterward you earned on your own, corazón.”
“Maybe.” But she had still been lucky, so lucky. She knew it. And, lying in bed in the darkened bedroom, wincing every time the pipes rattled, thinking of Henry Thornton hanging over everything, Gemma wondered if now was the time she was about to pay for all that good luck.
So she wasn’t really surprised when Suling came hammering on their door the following morning, wild-eyed and gasping, having run all the way from her apartment in Montmartre, to say that Reggie was gone.
“Oh God.” Gemma was still blinking sleep out of her eyes, fragile-headed as she always was the morning after a migraine. George had already left for Le Havre early that morning, to meet Clarkson’s boat.
“She’s stolen my invitation to the Poiret ball in Versailles,” Suling said desperately, Alice already at her shoulder. “Thornton will be there. He can’t see her, he can’t—”
Gemma’s hand stole up to her loose hair, nearly grown out to the length it had been before it burned off in the octagon house fire. She took a deep breath, trying to banish the fear, reaching for Suling’s shoulder and then Alice’s. “How on earth do we get to Versailles?”