“Miss Eastwood . . .” Gemma blinked, poking her head round her door into the hall. “What on earth are you wearing?”
“My hiking wear, since I’m just back from a botanical expedition up in the hills.” The older woman paused on her way downstairs, looking down at her skirt: sun-faded blue denim with leggings underneath. “I designed it myself, after I was once nearly swept over a cliff in a waterfall in Denver—that corduroy skirt down to my boot tops would have dragged me down if I’d gone over. This may not be fashionable, but it’s much more practical for striding up and down mountains, Miss Garland.”
Do call me Gemma, Gemma nearly said. Most theater people just swan about calling each other darling, with a terribly affected drawl. It would be so easy to say that, to ask Alice to give her a hand with her corset strings, perhaps share a cup of tea . . . But that was how you became friendly with your boardinghouse mates, and that wasn’t such a good idea. At her last boardinghouse in New York, Gemma had made friends with the entire building—how many hours had she spent making sympathetic noises about unreliable men or tightfisted employers, how many loans had she floated of two dollars here and five dollars there? And how many of those “friends” had come to her defense when she needed it so badly those last horrible weeks?
None. Not a single one. So it really was better to keep your neighbors at a distance. Alice Eastwood seemed perfectly pleasant, but so did almost everyone up until you had to rely on them. Then they let you down.
“Will you be joining the rest of the boarders for dinner downstairs, Miss Garland?” Alice was asking, and Gemma cut her off.
“No, I have plans of my own.”
“Then perhaps you’ll join us in the parlor for a little music later. We like to sing a few songs round the piano in the evening—Mrs. Browning was so hoping you might lend your voice, but she’s too shy to ask—”
“I’m a professional, Miss Eastwood, I don’t have time for amateur musicales,” Gemma made herself say firmly and shut the door to wrestle with her corset strings herself, looping them around her bedpost and leaning hard until her waist squeezed down. She wasn’t ever going to make a fashionable seventeen inches, or even twenty-seven (a soprano needed to breathe) but dinner out with an interesting man, no singing required? “That’s worth squeezing down to twenty-three,” Gemma gasped out to Toscanini, who had been let out of his cage for the evening and was perched on top of her mirror.
Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti, he sang with a flip of green wings, perfectly on pitch.
“Stop showing off,” Gemma scolded, shrugging her bodice up over her corset cover and struggling to fasten the hooks. The room smelled faintly of linseed oil, as all Nellie’s old rooms did, but Gemma had unpacked her mother’s old patchwork throw, her stack of tattered scores, the pretty painted tins of lozenges and tea she kept on hand to soothe her throat. Performers learned to make a home wherever they went.
Of course, a home wasn’t the same as home.
You’re going to have a home, Gemma told herself grimly, looping jet beads around her wrists. A sunny city apartment with a screened terrace for Toscanini, and a concert grand in the salon for practicing. Pearls in the jewel box and money in the bank and no one, ever, to tell you you’re a stupid caterwauling bitch.
“Heavens!” At the kitchen door downstairs Alice Eastwood paused with a plate of hasty pudding in hand, on the way to the dining room where the other boarders were clinking and chattering. “You look very smart, Miss Garland,” she said, looking at Gemma’s sheer black mousseline over electric blue silk, the band of blue silk sashing her waist, her pearl earbobs, and the black velvet ribbon around her neck. “On your way to a party?” she asked, not seemingly put off by Gemma’s earlier terseness.
Gemma flipped her train over her arm—the best of her dinner dresses, two years old but every singer knew how to keep her wardrobe freshened up. A diva who didn’t present herself like one was soon just an out-of-work singer. Someone who could be flicked into a gutter. “I am going to hear a business proposition, Miss Eastwood.”
Or at least get some free oysters and try not to get her rump pinched.
“You’re probably used to being offered diamonds,” said Henry Thornton, “but I’d offer you kingfisher feathers.”
“I beg your pardon?” Gemma tilted her head, bemused.
“Kingfisher feathers are just the color of that gown, and Chinese royalty used them in jewelry for at least two thousand years. The feathers are cut and glued onto silver gilt, then set into haircombs, brooches, crowns . . . They’re so delicate, only the best artisans can work with them. The electric blue in the feather will never fade because it’s an optical illusion rather than a dye.”
“Heavens, I had no idea. Your business is railroads and foundries; how did you come to know about kingfisher feather jewelry?”
“Chinese art fascinates me. I’ve been collecting pieces for years—jade, porcelain, screens.” He showed her his white jade watch charm. “My very first piece. It brings me luck.”
Gemma smiled. He wore dinner dress this time, but as casually as he’d worn his morning suit yesterday; his tie was carelessly knotted, his dark hair rumpled and still in need of a cut. Yet the staff of the Palace Grill turned nearly invertebrate in his presence; he had only to raise a finger of that burn-scarred right hand to send them leaping in all directions. They leaped now to freshen the champagne flutes with more Veuve Clicquot, and Gemma let her eyes drift over the marble columns lining the walls of the dining room, the coffered ceiling, the lights sparkling on a roomful of dazzling white-clothed tables and bejeweled diners. “What else has your lucky piece brought you, Mr. Thornton?”
“An octagon house on Hyde Street, up on Nob Hill.”
A much more moneyed part of Nob Hill than Taylor Street, Gemma guessed. “Octagon—your house has eight sides?”
“Eight is a lucky number, in Chinese lore. Ever since I moved in, I’ve been filling it with beautiful things.”
“Such as?”
“Paintings—I’m partial to art nouveau; I have a Toulouse-Lautrec and a Beardsley. Rare plants—I’ve put in a conservatory to house my botanicals. One is a Queen of the Night plant”—he raised his glass to her in toast—“which produces one of the rarest blooms in the world. It blossoms only for a single night, did you know?”
“No, I didn’t.” Though Alice Eastwood probably would have.
“You’re an orphan,” Thornton said suddenly. “Aren’t you?”
Gemma blinked. “What?”
“An orphan. There’s a certain look orphans have, weighing everything as it’s set before you, because you’ve learned it might be snatched away.”
The soup course arrived—gumbo for Thornton, cold creamy vichyssoise for Gemma, giving her time to parse a response. “On the contrary, I had a lovely childhood,” she said in composed tones, very careful not to look at her bowl as if it might be snatched away. “The sort of rural Nebraska farm everyone thinks of when they say ‘backbone of the nation.’ Milkmaid calluses, ice cream socials, and singing in the church choir. So I’m afraid you’re quite wrong, Mr. Thornton.”
“Pardon me, then. I have a bad habit of reading people at a glance—useful in business, but I’m told it’s very rude.” He picked up his soup spoon, eating left-handed—the right, she’d observed, did well enough for his champagne flute and water glass, and he used it without any self-consciousness, but clearly the fine manipulations of cutlery were painful. “I did warn you I have no manners.”
“How is it that you know what orphans look like?” Gemma parried hastily, before he could take another stab at her past.
“Because I see the look in my mirror every day,” he replied, no evasion or self-pity. “My father was a wastrel, Miss Garland. He died with a fine New York name and a great many debts. My mother died not long after of shame, and a boy who sees everything in his childhood home go under an auction hammer soon learns that there is nothing in life that cannot be taken away from you, except what you build and safeguard yourself.”
Not so very different from how Gemma’s own childhood had disintegrated, though there had been no fortune or old name involved—only a small farm, a few small lives at stake. The destruction had been just as complete, however. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Thornton.”
“I’ve come out all right.” He sat back, toying with the spoon. “I suppose it hardened me, but is that a bad thing? We live in a hard world, after all. Soft people are crushed by it. So I make sure that will not ever be me.”
“Or me,” Gemma heard herself say. “The stage is such a capricious world in which to make one’s way . . .” From the very beginning she’d known just how precarious it was, the lifeline of her own voice and talent that she had hoped might haul her out of Nebraska and a lifetime of hired-girl drudgery. But it was the only lifeline she had, the only thing she could do besides roll out piecrust and milk cows, so she’d thrown it out there and prayed. “I’ve seen so many singers fall by the wayside. They sink into the same old traps: greedy husbands, spendthrift friends, dishonest business managers, bad investments. Before they know it they have nothing.”
“And you determined that would not be you?”
Gemma raised her chin. “Just so.”
They drank to that. He stretched his arm along the back of his chair, and Gemma couldn’t help but notice how many eyes covertly watched him in this big dining room full of San Francisco’s finest. He was far from the handsomest man in this room, and certainly not the best-dressed . . . But everyone here, not just the waitstaff, seemed to know who he was. “This idyllic Nebraska farm family of yours,” he said now. “What do they think of their very own Jenny Lind?”
“My mother had a glorious voice, probably better than mine will ever be—she taught me to sing, and then when I was old enough she even allowed me to get proper lessons with a good teacher in the next town. But she never thought I’d want to do anything more than sing in the church choir. By the time I was fourteen, she was beside herself. She couldn’t understand why I dreamed of the stage, when I could have Arne Nilsson from two farms over, and eventually fat babies who spoke Swedish as well as English, and win a blue ribbon every year at the county fair for my apple butter.”
“Your career is clearly a great loss for the county fair and the church choir,” Thornton said piously.
“Arne Nilsson, at least, was not inconsolable.” Gemma spooned up some vichyssoise, which slid down her throat like satin. “He married my cousin Etta.” Once the influenza had taken Gemma’s parents and everything else followed like crashing dominoes, Arne had somehow disappeared as well. He wasn’t so keen to come calling on a girl who lived in an orphanage, and no one else had been, either. Strange how an entire town full of friends could disappear so completely, even when you all still lived in the same town.
“Clearly a man of no taste.”
“He’s stuck with Etta, which is punishment enough. She raises prize goats and her blueberry cobbler is famous across three counties, and she has a tongue that could strop a razor.”
Thornton laughed. That lean, almost homely face was very nearly handsome when he laughed. “Did you ever find a replacement for Mr. Nilsson?”
“No husbands so far, if that’s what you mean.” And she was not going to answer questions about lovers, if that was what he meant. She was thirty-two and she worked in the theater; she’d never let herself be taken up by a wealthy man as so many singers did, to pay their bills, but that didn’t mean she’d spent all her nights alone, either. She’d come a very long way from the starry-eyed nineteen-year-old from Nebraska, after all. But none of that was any of his business.
“No temptation to marry, then?” he persisted.
“I did get rather close to tying the knot with a tenor from Swampscott,” she said. “We sang a lovely Susanna and Figaro together in a Worcester Nozze di Figaro, and it’s easy to fall in love during a performance run. It’s a very intimate thing, making music. All that time spent getting yourself into a perfect rhythm with someone else, all those late postrehearsal suppers.” That tenor, he really had wrung Gemma’s heart rather badly—her first serious love affair at twenty-four, after holding herself so cautiously in reserve for years. He’d kissed her wrist after the last performance of Figaro and taken off to sing a Messiah in Boston just as she left to perform a Fledermaus in New York, and he’d promised to write so they could discuss marriage plans, but never did.
Darling Sal, they never write, Nellie had said when Gemma cried into her lap, running her fingers consolingly through Gemma’s hair. Men in the arts are horribly unreliable for romance. Get what you can out of them, but don’t expect them to stick around.
I don’t see any of your endless parade of girls sticking around, either, Gemma had replied, scrubbing her eyes. Nellie went through gallery owners and art collectors on one side, curvaceous dancers and clay-smeared sculptresses on the other (and hadn’t that shocked little Sally Gunderson the first time she saw a half-naked artist’s model come yawning out of Nellie’s bedroom in their Bronx flat!). You have a new amour every week, Nell.
Maybe it’s just artistic types in general who make for unreliable lovers, Nellie admitted. Men or women, it’s all “I love you forever” when you’re sharing rehearsals or studio space, but then they’re gone to the next show without a backward glance. You forget that tenor, farm girl. He isn’t worth your tears.
Well, he hadn’t been. A lesson Gemma had learned well. “It’s a bad idea, singers marrying each other,” she told Thornton now, brightly. “Scarves and jars of throat lozenges on every surface, and a lot of squabbling about who gets the piano first to warm up. Just dreadful.” Short affairs during a production were all right, perhaps. No one got hurt as long as no one fell in love. But in the long run, theater men let you down twice as reliably as the ordinary kind.
“You’re married to your career, then.” Thornton nodded, spooning up the last of his gumbo.
“Most men disapprove.”
“Most men are idiots. They have no idea how hard it is for a woman to smash her way to the top.”
“And you do know?” Gemma raised her eyebrows.
“Not in the slightest. I know how hard it was for me, though, as a young man with nothing, to smash my way to the top. I can only imagine it would have been doubly hard for you, a young woman with nothing. At least I have the law on my side, the world made conveniently for me and those like me. Nothing in this world is made convenient for women.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, Gemma wasn’t sure quite how to respond. “I thought you had a business proposition for me tonight, Mr. Thornton,” she asked, laying down her spoon. “Perhaps you’d better make it.”
One side of his mouth quirked upward. “In time.”
“You’ve already heard a great deal about my work.” The early days rooming with Nellie in the Bronx, the auditions and lessons, the chorus roles leading to larger roles. Now Gemma marshaled some questions for him, but Mr. Thornton was signaling for the soup plates to be taken away.
“How lucky I am that this friend of yours praised San Francisco to the skies and lured you out here,” he said as the waiters disappeared again. “I’ll have to thank her if I ever meet her.”
“Perhaps you already have. A female artist, who tends to make a splash wherever she lands. Dark-haired, wears trousers—” Gemma listed off half a dozen of Nellie’s various artistic noms de plume. If her new dinner companion turned out to be the one who could tell her where Nellie had flitted off to, rather than Nellie herself, Gemma really was going to give Nell an earful when they finally met up.
“I haven’t seen anyone like that in San Francisco.” He refilled her champagne himself this time, clearly not interested in Nellie. “May I ask you something? It’s not a nice question, and I’m not really sorry for that, because I already warned you that I’m not very nice. Why aren’t you a star, Miss Garland?”
Gemma’s smile faded, and she felt her cheeks heat. “If I knew the answer to that, wouldn’t I have done something about it by now?”
“I’m quite serious. That instrument you have is extraordinary. Someone else by now should have recognized it for what it is.”
“There are a great many sopranos in New York.”
“Not like you. You should be headlining opposite Caruso, not swishing your petticoats in the chorus.”
Gemma rotated her champagne flute. She was used to flattery, stage-door suitors gushing over your brilliance, Miss Garland, quite incomparable!, and she knew how seriously to take such words. She wasn’t used to praise stated as fact rather than flattery: The sun rises in the east. Chinese royalty wear kingfisher feathers for jewelry. You are extraordinary.
“I work hard,” she found herself saying. You weren’t supposed to admit that; a voice was supposed to be a gift from God, or maybe more like a god itself—a capricious, fickle deity of skin and cord that had been whimsically placed in your throat, which it was your duty to nurture and placate. “People think a singer’s life is all champagne parties and lovers, but I sing nearly two hours a day, and I easily spend another four studying roles, languages, diction. Training my lungs.”
Delicate Meissen platters arrived: hers golden-skinned squab swimming in mushrooms and madeira, his blood-rare filet mignon béarnaise. Gemma’s menu had not listed any prices, but she was willing to wager the entire meal cost more than the month’s rent she’d just put down for the room on Taylor Street. Mr. Thornton sliced into his filet, manipulating the knife in his scarred hand without much grace but with long practice. “How exactly does one train lungs?” he wanted to know.
“I go out to the nearest park for a run every morning—”
“A run?”
“Yes, running. Only I do it holding my breath between lampposts, and seeing how many I can rack up before I have to take a breath.” She picked up her fork, trying a bite of squab. It all but melted on her tongue. “Olive Fremstad trains her lungs that way, and so do I.”
“You should be putting Olive Fremstad out of a job, not copying her practice methods.” He was making short work of the filet mignon, eating like a man who appreciated his food. He took a moment to savor the béarnaise on his tongue, and the small sound of appreciation deep in his throat mesmerized Gemma just slightly. “You were on your way to leading roles in New York, if the night I saw you sing Zerlina is any indication. So why are you singing in the chorus in San Francisco eight years later?”
“It’s the Metropolitan Opera.” Gemma sipped the claret that had come with their dinners. It was like drinking a ruby, but suddenly her tongue only tasted sourness. “Hardly a career slide.”
“It’s still the chorus. Some might say your time is running out.”
“Being a singer isn’t like being a dancer or an actress, Mr. Thornton.” Gemma allowed her voice to cool. “Voices mature later, and so do careers. A soprano of my age has her best vocal years ahead of her, not behind. I have plenty of time left in my career to reach the spotlight.”
“But if you haven’t made it out of the chorus yet, in a decade of singing . . .” He sat back in his chair, eyes unwavering. “It tells me either that you aren’t very good—and I know you are—or it tells me something else.”
“What?”
“That you have been unlucky.”
Gemma watched a woman in a wine-dark Worth dress glide past, watched a waiter present a platter of crêpes suzette to another table with a flourish. “Yes,” she said at last, pushing the final bite of squab around her plate. “I have been unlucky.”
“How so?”
She was trying to find a polite answer, something to get around the ugly truth of it, when a whoosh of flame sounded at the next table: the sauce for the crêpes suzette had been lit with a flourish. Gemma had never seen the point of food that had to be set on fire and turned back toward Mr. Thornton with a shrug—only to see that his face had gone white under its tan, and his scarred hand balled into a fist on the tabletop.
“Excuse me,” he said rapidly before she could utter a word. “I need a moment—just please give me a moment.” His eyes squeezed shut, and she could see the pulse of his throat. He sat with his head turned slightly away from the crêpe pan where the flames were already dying down, his hand flexing on the table, scars ugly in the candlelight. Gemma hadn’t meant to, but she reached across the plates and covered his hand with her own.
It all happened very fast—she doubted anyone else in the restaurant had seen a thing. At the next table, the guests were tucking into their crêpes. Thornton opened his eyes, seeming to feel her hand for the first time. Quietly, Gemma pulled back. His thumb squeezed hers in a brief, fierce pressure, and then he let her go. “You’ll have noticed these,” he said with another painful flex of his hand.
“Yes . . .”
“Thank you for not asking. I’m amazed how many people think it perfectly within the bounds of propriety to gape and make rude remarks.” He raised the hand in question, signaling for their plates to be taken away. “The injury happened at the Park Avenue Hotel fire in New York, in ’02.”
Gemma had heard of that particular disaster. A fire at one of the city’s finest hotels raging out of control; men and women stumbling through smoky corridors in their nightclothes, choking and looking for a way out. More than twenty people had died. “You don’t need to explain anything to me, Mr. Thornton,” she said, but he was already speaking.
“It leaves me vulnerable. I wish it didn’t. I don’t mind the hand; what I mind is quivering like a child whenever the smell of fire surprises me.” He tried to smile, but he was clearly still shaken; color was only slowly coming back to his face. “A fire in a bedroom grate or a kitchen stove is one thing, but that rushing sound when flame goes up unexpectedly . . .”
He trailed off—something Gemma already sensed he did not do often. She looked down at her lap, pleating her napkin between her fingers. “To be vulnerable is not the same as being weak.”
He cocked his head. “I don’t follow.”
“I am an orphan, Mr. Thornton. You were right about that. Around the time I lost my parents, I began to suffer from migraines. Not headaches,” she said, heading off the inevitable question, “migraines. Quite different. They go on for hours and hours, and all I can do is lie in a darkened room until they finally go away again. That’s why I’m not a star, Mr. Thornton. I never know when these attacks will hit, but if they do, I can’t go onstage. I had to cancel at ten minutes to curtain-up, the day I was due to sing my very first Countess in Nozze di Figaro. The next year, my understudy had to go on for me when I was in the middle of a run of La Bohème, and the conductor said I was being lazy and fired me. I lost out on a contract in Boston last year because the director had heard I was a drunk, or maybe a hysteric—someone who couldn’t be counted on, anyway.” She raised her eyes to his. “Being unreliable, that’s the great unforgivable sin in the theater, Mr. Thornton. Opera companies will forgive you for throwing tantrums or slapping your pianist or demanding roses in your dressing room—that’s what divas do—but they won’t forgive you for being unreliable. There’s always another soprano, and maybe her voice isn’t as good but she won’t collapse into a shivering heap because her brainpan is on fire when she’s supposed to go on in twenty minutes. So she’ll get the job, and you’ll still be singing in the chorus at the age of thirty-two.”
Gemma couldn’t tell what the look on his face was. Concentration? Fierceness? She looked back at the napkin twisted in her lap. “But it isn’t my fault,” she said with some difficulty. “It’s not something I can stop from happening, if I were just a little more disciplined or harder-working. I get migraines, and I can’t perform. You were in a fire, and now you need a moment to breathe when the smell of smoke surprises you. That’s a vulnerability, Mr. Thornton. Not a weakness.”
It wasn’t the sort of thing she usually shared with men—with anyone, really. Nellie was the only one who knew how bad the migraines were; Nellie would darken the room and rub Gemma’s temples gently with lavender oil when the pains hit their worst. This isn’t your fault, Sal. She’d been the one to say that first, to make Gemma believe it. Everyone else just seemed to think Gemma was faking it, somehow. Or that if she just applied herself sufficiently, the pain would go away. Prayer will ease your discomfort, the matron at the orphanage had said when fifteen-year-old Gemma had vomited from the agony right in the middle of catechism. From the doctors in New York she’d consulted one after the other, it had been These female vapors go away in time or It’s just headaches, m’dear, have you tried willow-bark tea? or There’s one surefire cure for womanly agues, Miss Garland, and that’s marriage and motherhood!
“How do you make a career with”—Mr. Thornton made a wordless gesture—“that hanging over you?”
“The best I can.” A shrug. “I try medicines that don’t work. I pray it won’t hit at the worst time possible. I live with it. What else is there to do?”
She could see him struggling not to say something—not to insist, probably, that there was a solution. Something she hadn’t tried. People so often told her that. But instead he shook his head a little and said, “I won’t offer you advice. I imagine you’re swimming in it. The well-meaning do love to give advice, don’t they? As if they know so much more than you, about something you’ve been living with for years.”
“Yes.” Gemma sat up straighter. “Yes, exactly. ‘Just will the pain away.’ As if I’ve never thought of that before—”
“Right. I’ve been afraid of fire since ’02, and somehow they think it’s never occurred to me to just control the feeling?” He smiled, and Gemma smiled back. “I hate idiots. Yet the world is so full of them . . . It was about that time I decided that I’d make a fortune, the kind of fortune that means I can say whatever I like to idiots.”
“And have you?”
“I have. I work long hours, I believe in being ruthless, and I don’t suffer fools. I’m not very kind, but I’m honest.”
“I will take honesty, Mr. Thornton.”
Dessert arrived at the table: crystal dishes of peach Melba, velvety vanilla ice cream and golden peaches with a lacework of raspberry sauce, accompanied by tiny cups of ink-dark coffee. “I have a proposition for you,” Thornton said once the waiter retreated.
Oh dear, here it came: the indecent proposal. Gemma sighed silently. And she’d been enjoying this dinner so much. Well, perhaps enjoying wasn’t the word. Old wounds and lonely childhoods weren’t exactly the happiest topics of conversation, but it was certainly the most interesting dinner she’d had in a long time. “Mr. Thornton—”
“I’m not offering to make you my mistress. You’re a lovely woman,” he added, eyes resting briefly on her bare shoulders over the gauzy black mousseline, “but I don’t mix business and pleasure, and my proposition for you is purely business. I’m hosting a small gathering soon to display some of my latest acquisitions—some rare chinoiserie, not to mention my Queen of the Night plant. Mayor Schmitz will be in attendance, also the Floods, the Kohls, the de Youngs—” reeling off more names that even Gemma recognized, little as she knew of San Francisco society. “I want you to perform for the occasion, Miss Garland.”
“So I’m to be the entertainment?” Gemma knew what that could be like. Shown to the servants’ entrance; made to wait hours in a stifling-hot corridor, then singing through a tired collection of opera standards while tipsy guests chattered to one another and chewed their apple tartlets.
“You’d be my guest of honor.” Mr. Thornton rotated his coffee cup. “A voice like yours deserves a setting worthy of a jewel, and an audience who can appreciate it. No one whispers during the concerts at my house, let me assure you.”
Gemma felt her pulse quicken. Something different, then, from the usual tired dinner-party entertainment. Maybe the kind of concert that changed careers. The right ears at the right time in a soprano’s life could make all the difference. “How many guests?”
“Perhaps fifty. I’ll invite the director of the Grand Opera House for you, and the directors of the Tivoli and Columbia theaters as well.”
“Why would you do that?” Gemma asked, thinking of gift horses. Am I expected to pay for the opportunity afterward, overnight? For all his fine words about not mixing business with pleasure.
“I’m just a businessman,” he said. “I can’t create art, but I can fund it. Rockefeller and Gould and Carnegie in New York put their names on concert halls and museums; I want to do the same in San Francisco. I’ve worked hard so I can be a patron of the arts in this city, and I’m perfectly willing to include you in that patronage.”
Just a businessman. Never in her entire career had Gemma heard a man describe himself that way. Businessmen were far more likely to say she was just a singer. A step above a racehorse, perhaps, but not quite a human being. “When is this party of yours?”
“Monday.”
She dropped her spoon into the half-melted ice cream. “Three days?”
“You’re a consummate professional, Miss Garland. Don’t tell me you couldn’t perform this minute if you had to.”
She could. Still, three days. She’d need a program, a pianist, rehearsals . . . “I am a professional,” she agreed. “So there is the matter of my fee for singing.”
He named a good sum, one that would handily pad out Gemma’s meager account.
“Thank you, I’d be happy to—”
“No.” He cut her off. “You would not be happy to. You know what you’re worth, Miss Garland, so double your fee. Rake me over the coals here; I can afford it. Extort me.”
She burst out laughing—she couldn’t help it. “Are you asking me to charge you more?”
“Begging you. You’re too nice for your own good, Miss Garland. You’d like to be hard, because you told me yourself that the world of the stage is a capricious one, but I don’t think it comes easily to a Sunday school farm girl like you.” He steepled his fingertips under his chin, gazing at her. “I am not nice, and you don’t have to charm me. Charge me double.”
Gemma looked him in the eye. “Triple.”
“Done.”