By the time Gemma and Alice managed to follow the whisk of the blue dragon robe upstairs, fighting their way up the thronged staircase into the salon, Suling was shouting.
“What got into you?” Her short black hair trembled as she looked down at Reggie, who had sunk inside her red caftan on the nearest daybed. “What did you tell that Viennese girl? Why did you—”
“I-I just wanted to warn her.” Reggie looked so small and frozen, Gemma thought. Trapped in amber, still fighting to get free of the octagon house. “That the man she wanted to marry was a murderer. I didn’t—”
A giggling woman in a kimono coat and ropes of jade beads stumbled into the salon with one of the limber cancan dancers from downstairs. Alice whipped around with a glare; the woman squeaked and backed out. Gemma banged the salon door shut and locked it. Reggie looked up, seeming to register Gemma and Alice’s arrival for the first time.
“That girl will warn Thornton,” Gemma burst out. “He tried to murder us and now he knows we’re still alive—”
“I didn’t give her our names—”
“He’ll still figure it out once she tells him about you! What were you thinking?”
“I wanted to save her.” Reggie shrank even further. “I tried to save you, Sal—in San Francisco, I tried, and you didn’t need it. You saved all of us instead. And Suling had to save me from the asylum, and I didn’t help . . . anyone. So I wanted to . . .” Reggie trailed off a moment, then her chin lifted. Tears glittered in her eyes. “You all want Thornton to pay so badly, you’re ready to write that girl off. His fiancée. Well, I can’t. She matters.”
“And you have put her in danger,” Suling snapped. “Thornton was willing to do anything in San Francisco to cover up what he’d done. What will he do to her if she knows—”
“But she’s not like us.” Reggie’s voice rose. “Her father is a powerful man, he’ll protect her. I was just hoping I could make her wary of him so she’d break the engagement—”
“Ladies.” Alice stood there in her black-and-gold caftan, glaring. The sounds of the party below filtered through the door: the shrill laughter of guests, sitars and pipes playing what the musicians had probably assured Monsieur Poiret (with much eye-rolling) was authentic oriental harem music. “What’s done is done. Mr. Thornton at least hasn’t seen any of us yet, and I suggest we keep it that way. Put your masks back on and let’s leave this place.”
They hurried out of the salon, past a gilt stand where a pink ibis irritably rattled its leg chains. At least in these harem pants she could move freely, Gemma thought as they moved into the crowd that surrounded an aerialist languidly spinning midair through a ribboned hoop. She followed Alice’s black-and-gold shape down the thronged stairs—until she crashed into Alice’s back.
Across the floor of whirling dancers below, the hypnotic kingfisher blue of the Phoenix Crown flashed, and a man leaned down toward the girl wearing it: Thornton—van Doren—in dark evening dress, cigar between his fingers as he turned away from a cluster of men idly watching an Indian contortionist twine herself into knots. A black eye mask was Thornton’s only concession to fancy dress, but he was perfectly recognizable. Gemma hadn’t seen him arrive with his fiancée—this was the first time she’d laid eyes on him, in fact, since the octagon house.
As clearly as if he’d whispered in her ear, Gemma heard his voice: I’m sorry, as the whoosh of fire roared up to lick around the conservatory doors, as she pounded and shrieked against the glass. I’m sorry, Gemma.
His blond fiancée was pulling at his sleeve, the pearl strands of her crown swinging violently. Thornton covered her hand with his own, smiling, but she wrenched away, saying something Gemma couldn’t hear. A flicker of annoyance across his face, eyes darting to his friends, who were starting to glance over . . . The Viennese girl was demanding something now, gesturing toward the stairs.
And Thornton looked up.
Gemma and Alice were concealed behind the spinning aerialist. Reggie’s hair was hidden under her scarf and her face behind her mask; his eyes went over her without a flicker of recognition. Yet Suling was on the bottom step, masked, but the lustrous splendor of her dragon robe was like no other, and Gemma saw Thornton’s eyes freeze on it in a sudden ripple of shock.
A heartbeat later Suling disappeared behind a throng of shrieking women toasting one another with crystal coupes of some lemon-yellow liqueur. Thornton’s eyes hunted for her, his face suddenly pale, and Gemma reached out to grasp Reggie’s wrist, yanking her down.
Thornton swept his eyes across the room again, almost frantic. His fiancée in her looted crown plucked at his sleeve. He made a decision, taking her by the elbow and marching her through the crowd, toward the Pavillon’s vestibule and the fragrant gardens outside. Gemma saw his fingers sinking into her flesh above the lace glove, thought she could hear the girl cry out, before the sound disappeared into the night.
“He saw me,” Suling was whispering as they tumbled down the last few stairs to join her. The party roared around them like a carousel careening off its wheels. “He saw me.”
“He only saw the robe,” said Alice. “We can still get out of here.”
They could, Gemma knew. Slip out through the kitchens and then to the road. Head back to Paris and meet George and Clarkson, who had to have arrived from Le Havre by now, with his badge and his warrants and his legal shields.
Reggie was staring toward the gardens where Thornton had yanked his fiancée. That doe-eyed little eighteen-year-old. “I don’t like the way he was dragging her.”
And I don’t like being afraid, Gemma thought. Afraid for five years. Afraid of this man hanging over them. And here he was.
“I’m tired of it,” said Suling, suddenly. “I’m tired of being frightened.”
“So am I,” said Gemma, and ran down the steps into the garden.
They followed her, all of them.
The perfumed gardens were overrun by now with tipsy men in caftans and women in bejeweled costumes, flirting and drinking and gawking at the moon. Gemma crossed the dark lawn, Suling and Reggie in her wake, past a row of Persian silk tents carpeted with oriental rugs, under a brace of torches in dragon-mouthed brackets that a designer had probably deemed more exotic than mere candles.
“I don’t understand.” Cecilia Arenburg von Loxen’s fretful voice sounded from somewhere behind a potted myrtle tree and a fire swallower’s iron brazier still glowing with hot coals. “The things this woman was saying, I don’t understand at all. You said you’d never been to San Francisco!”
“I never have.” Thornton was trying to sound amused, but there was a thread of tension in his voice that raised the hair on Gemma’s neck. “Darling girl, let’s join the crowd on the other side of the fountain. Monsieur Poiret has promised Régina Badet is going to dance on the lawn. The prima ballerina of the Grand Theatre of Bordeaux—”
“I don’t want to see a ballerina, I want you to answer me! An octagon house in San Francisco, your last mistress—you know how my father feels about men who carry on with loose women. You promised him you never—”
“Who exactly have you been listening to, little goose? Don’t be so gullible.” He chuckled, taking off his half mask with a casual rake of his fingers, but then his smile froze utterly as he saw the women melting silently out of the blackness around the brazier and into the light of the torches. An extraordinary pang of savage rage and equally savage satisfaction wrung Gemma’s stomach as she watched all the remaining color drain from his face.
“Good evening, Henry,” she said in a steady voice, discarding her own mask.
A burst of applause exploded across the big circular lawn before the Pavillon: the crowds of costumed guests gathering, oblivious, for the Bordeaux ballerina. But here, they were all gripped in the silence of Thornton’s stunned gaze traveling from Suling in her dragon robe, to Reggie with her embroidered caftan and haunted eyes, to Gemma in her Poiret harem pants.
Alice, Gemma had an instant to think. Where is Alice? Because somehow the botanist had faded away and it was just Gemma and Suling and Reggie staring Thornton down, but there was no time now to wonder any further.
“I have no idea who these women are,” Thornton said to Cecilia. He managed to give his words just the right touch of polite bemusement, but his gaze kept stuttering between them in jerky disbelief. Three women, whole, unburned, when he’d left them all for dead.
At the octagon house they’d all run from him rather than confront him, and they’d all nearly burned alive. Now they all took a step toward him instead.
And he took a tiny, involuntary step back.
The Viennese girl’s voice was small. “William, why did she call you Henry?”
“I don’t know any of them,” he repeated, his voice firmer. “Why don’t we go back inside, my dear? Your father will be wanting to take you home, now that things are getting a bit wild—”
“You like wild parties,” Reggie interrupted. “Remember the artistic soirees you used to take me to, back when I was sharing your bed?”
“Or the midnight ball, when I was sharing that bed?” Gemma said. “It was me wearing that phoenix crown, then. I imagine you haven’t told your fiancée that.”
Suling finished, her voice low, “Or that you locked us all in a burning house to die, after we saw you shoot an innocent woman in cold blood.”
“This is absurd.” Thornton hitched a convincing look of exasperation onto his face, but he didn’t seem to be able to step toward them. And Gemma and Reggie and Suling wouldn’t move out of his path. Gemma could feel something stoking between the three of them, rising higher and hotter like the torches flaming in their dragon-mouthed brackets.
“We should inform Monsieur Poiret that he has some uninvited guests,” Thornton said, taking a sidestep—and his sleeve brushed against the hot iron of the coal-filled brazier. He couldn’t possibly have burned himself through his jacket, but he still recoiled.
He’s still terrified of fire, Gemma thought. Remembering how he’d flinched at the Palace Grill from a crêpe pan en flambe. Remembering how he flexed his burned hand: It happened at the Park Avenue Hotel fire in New York, in ’02. Not mentioning, of course, that he’d been the one to set that fire that killed so many, all to line his own pockets.
Remembering his greenish, terrified face as he steeled himself to set the octagon house ablaze.
When Gemma’s eyes met Suling’s she knew they were thinking the same thing.
Suling moved cat-quick toward the bracket of torches, wrenching one loose. Reggie seized the startled Viennese girl by the arm and yanked her away from her fiancé. Thornton wrenched the girl’s other arm, trying to pull her back toward the Pavillon, but Gemma moved between them, the hot and violent thing stoking in her breast finally boiling over. She planted both hands at his shirtfront and shoved him backward so hard he released Cecilia. She shoved him again and he tripped, crashing down to one knee. When Gemma looked up, she saw Suling holding out the second torch. Smiling.
Gemma smiled back, taking it.
On one side of the big oval lawn and its banks of flowers, a gauze-draped ballerina glided and arabesqued for a crowd of rapt guests. On the other side, another circle of guests was listening agog as a French actor declaimed from A Thousand and One Nights. Here, past a string of Persian silk tents on the side lawn, Henry Thornton hauled himself upright between two women holding torches at full extension like swords, advancing on him with pitiless eyes, backing him against the heat of the brazier.
“Tell your fiancée,” Gemma rasped. “Tell her what you’ve done.”
“Tell her now,” Suling snarled.
Reggie finished it, still holding the stunned Viennese girl. “Or we burn you like you tried to burn us.”
“Dear God,” someone exclaimed. “What is happening?” A male voice, speaking English with an accent Gemma couldn’t place. Gemma couldn’t spare the second it would take to look for the owner of that horrified voice. Thornton didn’t seem to have heard the words; he was transfixed by the three women and finally talking, trying to placate, first her and then Suling. A flick of his gaze toward Cecilia standing frozen with Reggie, and he tried to bull past Suling and swat the torch out of her hands. Gemma whirled on him from the other side, jabbing the flames at his sleeve until the cuff caught fire, and he fell back again yelping and swatting until the lick of fire died. “You bitches.” He was half shouting, half pleading.
“Keep talking.” Suling poked the torch at him, jerking her chin toward Thornton’s horrified bride-to-be. “She doesn’t believe you yet, keep talking—” In her embroidered dragon robe, with her dark blazing eyes and her bared teeth, Suling could have been an empress from that looted Beijing palace, facing down the invaders and their torches. Only this empress had the torch in her hands, and she was the one advancing.
Thornton moistened his lips, looking at that flickering flame. “I didn’t mean it,” he said quickly, holding up placating hands. “It was an accident. I just didn’t want you women coming after me. I sent someone to let you out of the conservatory later—I didn’t mean for you to burn alive, I’m not a monster—”
“And the woman you shot on your doorstep, was that an accident?” Gemma thrust her own torch at him as he tried to edge away from the brazier. If Suling was a raging, blazing-hot empress, Gemma thought she could bring her Queen of the Night to bear, hurling thunderbolts and ice. “Tell how you shot her in cold blood.”
“She was just a Chinese pimp. A thief and a whore—”
“W-what?” cried the Viennese heiress. Reggie was holding the girl in fierce arms, protective as a lioness. A deep voice began calling something again, not in English, but Gemma still couldn’t turn. One slip of attention and Thornton could be on her like a rabid dog.
But he was mesmerized by the torches darting and jabbing so close to his flinching face and outstretched once-burned hand, spilling words quickly now. He probably still believed he could fix this, Gemma thought in some cooler corner of her mind. He’d assume he could smooth things over with his doe-eyed heiress, if he could only get away from the fires, from these women who probably seemed like they’d stormed straight out of his nightmares. So he explained and explained and explained, wheeling first to Gemma and then to Suling and then to Reggie and his fiancée. I didn’t mean and It wasn’t true and I had a reason. Explaining, explaining—until a cry burst out of Cecilia Arenburg von Loxen.
“Stop it,” she cried, “stop it, all of you, just stop—” The glittering Chinese crown slipped forward over her eyes. Stumbling blindly forward, she tore it off and hurled it away, straight into the brazier.
It went up so fast—the gold wires, the strands connecting all those pearls, the brilliant kingfisher feathers flaring up in hungry blue flames like the phoenix it was named for. They could only stare at it—and Gemma thought of beautiful, burning San Francisco, the city that had gone up in flames almost as quickly.
But Thornton looked at the crumbling crown, the treasure he’d rescued from that burning octagonal mansion whose eight sides hadn’t brought him as much luck as he’d hoped, and Gemma saw him snap. What a thing to break you, she thought. Murder hadn’t done it, even fire hadn’t done it, but a demolished crown did.
“You goddamned bitch,” he said and slapped Cecilia to the ground.
“That’s enough,” the deep voice behind Gemma roared, and a tall man with a leonine mane of graying hair and a dueling scar slashing one side of his aristocratic face stormed forward. At his side was Alice Eastwood, eyes gleaming like an eagle’s, an avenging angel in her damask and her rage.
“You see?” she cried in a voice like a trumpet. “You see how this man treats your daughter?” But Cecilia’s august father, Baron August Friedrich Arenburg von Loxen, had already seized Henry Thornton by the throat and began shaking him like a rat, at the exact moment the first of Monsieur Poiret’s magnificent fireworks blossomed overhead in a dazzling bloom of ruby sparks.
Gemma sat down rather suddenly on the damp grass as Reggie released the sobbing Cecilia to her father’s side, as Suling slid her torch back into its bracket and tripped over the hem of her robe, and Alice quickly steadied her with an outstretched hand. “Rosa alba,” Alice remarked, watching more fireworks explode into shapes like white roses. Then a series of golden bursts, like blazing California poppies. “Eschscholzia californica . . . I think the men are going to storm in and take charge now. Shall we let them?”
We needed a respectable witness, Alice told them a little later when they had a chance to catch their breath. Confessions are all very well and good, but the right people need to hear them. So when Suling and Gemma cornered Thornton, darling sensible Alice had gone arrowing back inside the Pavillon in search of the baron, a man who had fought duels for imperial honor, a former field marshal in the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A man whose word wouldn’t be disregarded the way the word of a Chinese seamstress, an out-of-work artist, an old botanist, and a loose-moraled opera singer would be disregarded.
“Alice, you genius,” Reggie said in admiration. “I want to paint you just the way you looked: the light flooding behind you, upraised hand like the angel of vengeance.”
“Arrests first,” Alice said composedly. “Paintings later.”
“You’re going to want to speak to a Mr. Clarkson of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who should be in Paris by now,” Gemma told the gendarmes once they arrived. “He has a great deal of information you’ll be wanting to hear . . .”
The men were indeed taking charge of things, everything being done very quietly at the insistence of Cecilia’s father. He’d produced several underlings who despite their Arabian costumes had the kind of straight-backed heel-clicking deference that indicated a great deal of time spent in uniform, and many things suddenly began happening at speed: an automobile came to whisk his crying daughter back to the Ritz in Paris; gendarmes were summoned to hold the protesting Thornton, all while the party still continued up at the Pavillon utterly unabated. Monsieur Poiret, once he had been summoned, seemed most anxious to avoid scandal, shooing curious guests away from the lower end of the garden with airy excuses about disorderly revelers being found by the gendarmes, nothing to worry about! More champagne and the promise of an impromptu cancan show had sent all the guests weaving back inside so Thornton could be whisked away toward a vehicle waiting at the end of the road.
And the four women sat on the grass watching the entire spectacle.
“Gnädige frau.” The baron waved the gendarme at his side away, making a very correct European bow toward Alice. “I do not even know who you are. Or what is going on, or anything,” he burst out, looking agitated the way only a military man finding himself on an unfamiliar battleground can look agitated. Gemma felt sorry for him, but she also felt far too tired to fill him in.
Alice took mercy, escorting him on a short walk around the lawn and clearly bringing him up to date on everything he’d missed. The baron looked stunned by the time they circled back around, muttering in German. “No use talking about it any further until Mr. Clarkson can arrive to verify everything,” Gemma heard Alice say, patting the baron’s arm. “Now, I understand you have a summer house in the mountains near Kitzbühel, sir. I don’t suppose you have an alpine garden?”