Gemma was still humming a bit of Verdi when she walked Alice Eastwood out at the end of the party. Her train rustled deliciously over the Savonnerie carpets as they descended the winding staircase toward the front doors—every painstaking minute she’d spent this morning pressing each frill of her biscuit faille reception gown with its bands of bronze velvet had been worth it, worth it, worth it. The afternoon, despite the previous day’s migraine, had been an utter triumph.
“I know opera singers frequently have admirers,” Alice Eastwood was saying as they reached the big entrance hall. “You didn’t mention yours was the man who owned the octagon house botanical collection!”
She cast a longing glance at the glassed doors to the conservatory, and Gemma laughed. “I didn’t know you’d be here, Alice, but I’m glad you were.” She’d made an effort to be more friendly tonight, feeling a flush of embarrassment that Alice had seen her be so abrupt with their landlady yesterday, but Gemma still hadn’t been able to hide her surprise to see the botanist among Mr. Thornton’s high-society guests. Alice stood out in her old-fashioned black dress like a musty silk flower in a bouquet of hothouse blooms, but Mr. Thornton had greeted her with hands outstretched. We last met at my fundraiser for the Academy, didn’t we, Miss Eastwood? I sent you a cutting afterward of one of my new succulent varietals. How is it faring? . . . He’d drawn her out respectfully about her latest expedition, asked about the Academy’s newest acquisitions, answered her questions about the reblooming yellow rose in his front garden.
“Most men would regard Alice Eastwood as a fusty old maid with an odd hobby,” Gemma had said afterward, as Alice went back for another look at the Queen of the Night plant. “You treated her like a queen, Mr. Thornton.”
“I prefer her to half my guests here,” he replied. “I like to surround myself with people who have a purpose in their life—a passion. There’s nothing more boring than people who are perpetually bored.”
“Share my cab back to Taylor Street?” Alice asked Gemma now, shrugging into her old cloak. Carriages were pulling up in front; Thornton’s guests were already streaming out to their theater engagements, their dinner invitations, their evening parties.
“You go on, I need to make sure my accompanist receives his fee.” Gemma waved Alice off into the late-afternoon sun and went in search of George in the trail of departing guests, still trying not to gape at this incredible house. The onyx marble floors, the polished mahogany paneling glowing with jewel-like tapestries, the crystal chandeliers throwing off a million diamond points of light . . .
“There you are,” George said, music folder under his arm, meeting her halfway down the spiral of stairs. “You weren’t climbing all this way back up this man-made mountain to find me, were you?”
“I don’t mind climbing a staircase like this.” Gemma gave a twirl on the landing. “Men ask themselves what women want—well, I have never met a woman who didn’t yearn to sweep up a really magnificent staircase in a really elegant gown.” She swirled her velvet-banded train so it flared like a toreador’s cape.
“Easy there.” George caught her arm before she missed the step. “How much of that champagne did you swig?”
“Hardly any, I’ll have you know.” She’d been too busy getting her hand kissed by half the room, after her final encore. The director of the Tivoli had actually had tears in his eyes as he told her he’d never heard a better Violetta. He’d pressed his card into her hand and asked if she might come to his office to discuss her future plans in San Francisco. It didn’t do to leap too eagerly on such openings, so Gemma thanked him with a demure smile and tucked the card in her sleeve, but her heart had been thudding with triumph. She might have awakened this morning with a migraine-tender head, but she had never sung better.
“You aren’t leaving, too?” George asked as she passed over the envelope with his fee and made to head back upstairs. “You don’t have your cloak.”
“Mr. Thornton can call me a hansom cab, after I’ve collected my fee for performing.” The old Gemma would have waited uncomplainingly until her host felt like paying her, even if that wasn’t for days or weeks. The new Gemma wasn’t going home without extracting the payment she’d earned, and she’d make no apologies for it, either. And she grinned a little, because she thought Mr. Thornton would approve. You know what you’re worth, he’d probably say with that glint in his eye. Make me fork over.
She intended to.
George was still studying her, leaning against the mahogany railing. “You sang beautifully today.”
“Yes, the voice behaved herself tolerably well.”
“Why do singers do that?” He spread those huge piano-playing hands. “I don’t say ‘The hands behaved themselves’ when I play well.”
“Hands are external. With voices, it’s like you’re housing a tiny ill-tempered god in your throat, one that might just decide to take the day off if you displeased it.”
“You clearly made it just the right offering today.”
“Flatterer!” Gemma waved goodbye to George, then waltzed back upstairs with a rustle of taffeta petticoats.
The last guests had gone, and servants were sweeping away the detritus of the party: marble-topped buffet tables cleared of silver dishes, discarded champagne flutes whisked off mantelpieces. One of the ever-present clerks was locking up his employer’s private office on the second floor, wedging the key in the potted palm by the office door—he looked stricken when he saw Gemma watching. “Don’t tell Mr. Thornton? I’m not supposed to leave it out, but the other clerk needs it and I’ll be waiting hours—”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” She put her finger to her lips with a smile as he shoved the key farther back at the edge of the pot, and Gemma went up the next turn in the staircase. On the landing she saw the Chinese girls headed for the servant stairs in a line, their faces still painted but their sumptuous blue silks changed for ordinary cotton robes. As they stood back for Gemma to pass, one lingered behind the others, eyes suddenly panicked as she began searching the floor. She asked something of the other girls in rapid Chinese, then turned to a parlormaid carrying a tray across the landing. “A ring, did you see a ring?” the Chinese girl asked in English.
“No.” The parlormaid shrugged, not bothering to look. The Chinese girl dropped to her hands and knees, feeling along the carpet, and Gemma couldn’t help but flinch, her soaring mood darkening for a moment. She knew exactly what it felt like to be down on your hands and knees scrabbling for your things as people stepped past in complete indifference and your toes curled in shame. If you could just give me a week to find the rent, ma’am, Gemma had asked her landlady back in New York after she’d been cheated of her savings, never anticipating she wouldn’t get that week’s grace. She’d been a model tenant, after all; she’d never once been late with rent until that day; she kept her room immaculate; she’d spent hours over cups of tea sympathetically listening to the woman complain about ungrateful children and slovenly boarders. Surely a week is no issue, ma’am?
Gemma had just lost her job at the opera house; she was still reeling from realizing how her agent had robbed her blind. She barely had more than ten cents to her name, but she had an audition for the Metropolitan Opera chorus in five days. All she needed was a week’s grace. A week, that was all.
And the woman had walked upstairs to Gemma’s room with a face like stone and begun physically tossing her clothes out onto the grimy stair landing. Get out, you stupid caterwauling bitch. I don’t run a charity. Getting down on her hands and knees on that oily scrap of landing carpet had been the worst moment of all—worse than realizing she’d lost her job, head still rolling sickly with postmigraine tenderness as the house manager told her to clear out; worse than realizing her savings were gone. Gemma had scraped up her scattered belongings as fast as she could, eyes burning as the other women in the boardinghouse averted their gaze. Not one offering to help—not one. She’d felt ashamed, somehow, like it was her fault she was there. Stupid caterwauling bitch.
“Here,” Gemma said quickly now, dropping to her knees on the landing next to the frantic Chinese girl who was still running her hands over the rich Savonnerie carpet. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
A ring on a cord, just a little thing—Gemma hardly got a look at it before the girl snatched it with palpable relief. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said in perfect English, slipping the cord around her neck and tucking the bauble under her collar. She looked somehow familiar, though Gemma couldn’t be sure with all that white powder smoothing her face into an ivory mask. A small bow, and the girl dashed away with the rest of her friends. Gemma continued up the stairs, forcibly putting the ugly memory aside. Stupid caterwauling bitch. She wasn’t that woman anymore, and she never would be again. Not ever.
“There you are.” Thornton stood alone in the Chinese Room, hands in his pockets, gazing at his collection. His back was to Gemma; he must have known her by the click of her heels. “I love a party, but I love it even better when all the guests go home.”
She found a laugh, feeling the lightness of her afternoon’s triumph come fizzing back with the sound of his voice. “I’m afraid you won’t get rid of me until I receive my fee, Mr. Thornton.”
“How very hardheaded of you.” He turned with a grin, passing over a white envelope from his pocket. “Be sure to count it.”
“Why? Have you cheated me?”
“No, but you should always assume someone is going to.”
Gemma opened the envelope and flipped through the bills. Accurate to the last dollar, of course. “Did anyone break any of your curios?” she asked, moving closer to the lavish display shelves full of jade and porcelain and lacquer. “I was holding my breath every time my skirt brushed past all these priceless relics—you have an astonishing house.”
“I can’t claim to have built it.” He came to join her, burned hand turning his jade watch charm over. “I bought it off a silver magnate who’d gone bankrupt, stripped everything out as I began building Thornton Ltd., and filled it with everything beautiful I could find. I wanted it the moment I saw it was an octagon.”
“Why?”
“Eight means good luck in the Chinese tradition, and a businessman needs luck. These Astors and Rockefellers may boast about building their empires by the sweat of their brow alone, but they’re idiots. Hard work is required, yes. But no empire is built without luck.” He nodded at his display cases. “What’s your favorite piece here?”
Gemma pointed to a watercolor on a scroll of silk, hanging down a strip of wall. “That one.” A trio of Chinese women in layered court robes and elaborate piled hair, making music—one had some sort of pipe, the other a stringed instrument. “The third woman—I want to know if she’s the singer, or if she’s the audience. I wonder what she’s thinking, because the oddest things sometimes go through my head when I’m performing, and I wonder if it was the same for them all those centuries ago.” The woman had painted peony lips and perfectly arched eyebrows, like the girl she had spoken with on the landing. “What’s your favorite piece here? The dragon robe?”
“Mmm, no.” He led her to the display at the center of it all, opening the cabinet that had been closed during the party. Gemma caught her breath at the sight of it: an ornate jeweled crown in shimmering, iridescent, electric blue. “From the Old Summer Palace in Beijing—a phoenix crown, and a very unusual one. Seven phoenixes, blue-and-white two-tone jade, fifty-seven sapphires, thirty-six rubies, and over four thousand pearls. And these loops of pearls dangling from the crown, with the carved pendants?” He lifted one for her to examine. “They’re Queen of the Night flowers, carved out of ivory. That’s why I wanted a Queen of the Night for my conservatory.”
Gemma touched the crown with the lightest fingertip. “Who was it made for, I wonder?”
“An empress.” He turned away from the shimmering thing, looking down at Gemma for a moment. Then he said, “Wear it.”
“What?” She tore her eyes out of the grasp of that hypnotizing kingfisher blue. “I’m no empress.”
“Do you want to be an empress of the stage? It can happen. This, today”—gesturing at the detritus of the party all around them—“this is just the beginning of what I can do for your career.”
“What are you offering?” Gemma kept her voice brisk, businesslike. “Let’s be clear with each other, Mr. Thornton.”
“By all means.” He squared off against her as though they had a phalanx of lawyers each and a contract on a board table between them, looking as though he was going to enjoy every minute of the wrangling before they both signed it. Gemma squared off, too. Hadn’t part of her known this was coming? It hadn’t only been her performance fee she lingered to collect after the party, had it? She opened a hand in invitation: Your offer, sir?
“I heard you sing in that empty opera house when you first arrived in this city,” he began, “and I knew that voice was something special. Watching you mesmerize an entire room today, I knew it for certain: you can be a star. And I want my name known in this city as a patron of the arts, so allow me to make you one.”
Gemma couldn’t help a faint, reflexive bristle. “You think I can’t make myself a star?”
“I think you’ve been trying. By your own admission, though, you’ve been unlucky. But that’s not your fault,” Thornton said, forestalling her objections. “Why not let me balance the scales? With someone like me behind you, no opera house would dare fire you for having to cancel when one of your migraines hits. They’d send roses and apologies to your room instead, and they’d kick your understudy off the stage the moment you were well again.”
What would it be like to rehearse a role in that kind of security? Gemma wondered. Not always balanced on a knife edge, wondering if her own body was going to betray her and then if her employers were going to punish her for it.
“In eight days, Caruso and your new company arrive in San Francisco and open with Carmen,” Thornton went on. “You can sing in the chorus and travel on afterward to Kansas City or wherever else is on the schedule, hoping that the director sees the gift you have in your throat and promotes you. Or you can let me sponsor you instead, knowing you’ll rise up the ladder a great deal faster with my patronage. You decide: What do you want?”
I wanted to do it on my own, Gemma thought. But where had all that independence gotten her? Knocked down the ladder over and over again, cheated by people she trusted, and still singing in the chorus at thirty-two when singers with half her voice went waltzing on to bigger roles and private terraced apartments and jewel boxes full of pearls. They might only have half her voice, but they knew how to play the game better than good little Sally Gunderson from Nebraska who would never compromise that fine upbringing of hers and let a man pay her way.
Well, maybe she was tired of being good. Maybe she wanted to play the game for once, and play it for all she could get. So that she’d never be on her hands and knees again, scrabbling on a greasy hallway carpet for her scattered underclothes and burning with shame.
“I accept, Mr. Thornton.” Gemma stepped forward and wound her arms around his neck, drawing his lips down to hers. She’d been wanting to kiss him since the Palace Grill, had been wondering since that night why he hadn’t made the slightest attempt to do so for all his evident admiration—but now her toes left the floor altogether as he collected her against him in a grip like a steel bar.
“I don’t mix business with pleasure,” he said eventually, once his mouth released hers.
Her lips felt bruised. “I think I want to, Henry.”
“Gemma.” He said her name lingeringly, but released her waist. “Don’t feel you have to buy my patronage with anything but your voice. I may be a tough trader, but I don’t attach those kinds of strings to my deals.”
Gemma shrugged, feeling giddy. She’d just launched herself off the cliff, and now she was flying instead of falling. “You want me; I want you. You want to make me a star; I want to be one. That’s a deal I’m more than happy to make.”
“Then drive a hard bargain with me.” He bent his head with a low laugh, nibbling along the line of her neck. His burned right hand wound around her wrist and found the mother-of-pearl buttons on her glove. “What do you want, Gemma? Rake me over the coals. Don’t be nice.”
“I’m not breaking my contract with the Met. And I’m keeping my room at Taylor Street, paid in full in my name.” Trusting men and their promises blindly, that was how sopranos ended up singing in bottom-level music halls. She was keeping something in reserve, a fallback no one could take away.
“Good girl.” He thumbed open one glove button, then two, still nibbling along her neck below her ear. “There will be a suite here in the octagon house at your disposal: pianos, gowns, maids . . . But a woman should always have something of her own that no one can touch. What else do you want?”
“A voice teacher, the best in San Francisco. Lessons every day. I can’t always be singing for you and your friends; I need time to practice and improve on my own.” Time and leisure to make herself the best she could be.
“A voice teacher, language coaches, a daily pianist to rehearse you. Done.” Thornton tugged off her glove and dropped it to the floor. “What else?”
“A role.” She took a deep breath. “Buy me a role, while the Met is in San Francisco. I’ve been bumped off the stage for so many understudies—I want someone bumped off the stage for me for once. I want to sing opposite Caruso while he’s in town.”
“Ruthless,” Thornton approved. “I like it.”
“I think I do, too,” Gemma breathed, standing on tiptoe to kiss him again. She bit at him and he bit back, the two of them swaying and clinging.
“I’m not going to be content seeing you go when the Met traveling company leaves town,” he growled in her ear. “That’s only a few weeks away. Are you sure you won’t break your contract?”
She pulled back and looked him in the eye. “You arrange a series of solo concerts for me here in San Francisco, in the best theaters in town. Advertising. Posters and billboards. Whatever it takes to sell out every single one. When you show me the signed contracts with the theaters, and I meet with the theater directors myself to know they’re serious about showcasing me, then I’ll know I have a reason to leave the Met chorus and stay here. But I won’t break one contract without more in hand.”
The flare in his eye was pure, naked admiration. “You drive a hard bargain.”
“I learned from the best.”
“You haven’t asked for jewels yet. Don’t you want diamonds?”
“Right now what I want is security, as much of it as I can get.” Gemma wasn’t fool enough to think this was going to last forever, but when you never had any security at all, security for now was good enough. Maybe it would only last a few months—she’d still take it with both hands and eyes open. What did she have to lose?
“I can give you security.” His rough, burned fingers sifted through her hair, dislodging hairpins one by one. “And I’ll give you something else. When the curtain comes down on Carmen in eight days, I’ll throw the biggest party San Francisco has ever seen. A grand ball to put this afternoon’s gathering to shame. I’ll deck you in that imperial dragon robe that matches your eyes and put the Phoenix Crown on your head, and I’ll introduce you as my Queen of the Night. Today’s performance whetted society’s appetite—in eight days, when I bring you out with that crown on your head, they’ll be clamoring for you. Every one of those concerts you’re asking for will sell out to the last ticket. By fall, the masses will be fighting to hear you the way they’re fighting now to hear Caruso.”
And everyone will say you bought it for me, Gemma couldn’t help but think. Harder to silence that little starchy voice inside than she’d thought.
“Gemma.” His thumb traced the frown that lined itself between her brows. “There’s no shame in an artist relying on patrons. It’s been that way for centuries. Who cares now that Michelangelo had sponsors for his paintings, his sculptures? People only marvel at the art. If you can demonstrate you deserve to be at the pinnacle—and you do deserve that—then no one will question how you arrived there.”
Gemma felt her eyes blur. A tumble of images whirled kaleidoscope-like through her head: curtain calls, encores, roses, her name on Dressing Room A . . . but the tears weren’t just for the dream castles he was conjuring up. It was for the belief in his eyes. Making a career on the stage was all about believing: that you were good enough, that your turn would come, that your time to shine was almost here. That until it came, the music was enough.
But at some point someone else had to believe, too, and had anyone done that for Gemma? Not since Nellie, and Nellie had traipsed off without caring, without a backward glance. It could wear down even the steadiest heart, trying to believe in yourself day after day, year after year, until you were no longer young and you’d just been beaten down until you no longer believed you were anything but a stupid caterwauling bitch.
And here was Henry Thornton, who believed she was a star in the making. And he wanted to do the making.
She twined her fingers through his burned ones and led him from the Chinese Room.
Much later, Henry padded naked across the Persian carpet of his bedroom and took a lacquered box off the mantel, opening it to show a jade opium pipe with a small lamp and a porcelain jar. “Did I wake up in a den of iniquity?” Gemma laughed, shaking back her loose hair over the sheets of the big bed. Her body was humming like a perfectly tuned harp. Not that harps were ever in tune—harpists did nothing but fiddle with their harp pegs, while the conductor looked increasingly incensed. But this harp, Gemma thought with a languorous stretch of her arms, is perfectly in tune.
“You haven’t been asleep yet, pet. We’ve been too busy.” He leaned down to softly bite the side of her throat, then opened the porcelain jar to show the small gummed balls of opium. “Have you ever tried the dream stick? I like to think an emperor dreamed grand dreams of celestial conquest with the aid of this one.”
Gemma looked at it and shivered, part pleasure and part something else. “I don’t think . . .”
“It’s not dangerous in moderation.” His hands were preparing it: the pipe bowl, the spirit lamp, the ball of opium. “And it might help with those migraines of yours.” He finished preparing everything, took a leisurely inhalation through the pipe, then lounged back in the sheets and drew her leg up over his shoulder, which tipped her back against the pillows with a shriek of surprised laughter. She inhaled, smelling the strange sweetness of opium smoke. “Try it,” he said, kissing the inside of her knee. “And dream of singing your favorite roles on all the greatest stages of the world . . .”
“Mozart’s Countess at the Vienna Staatsoper,” Gemma said, the pipe’s cool jade in her hand. “Gounod’s Juliette at the Paris Opera. Verdi’s Gilda at Covent Garden.”
“Keep going.” Kissing his way higher.
“Puccini’s Tosca at La Fenice in Venice . . . they call it the phoenix because it’s burned down so many times.” Gemma bent her head and took a long deep inhalation off the pipe, body juddering, Thornton’s mouth between her legs and his smoke in her lungs, and why had she ever hesitated? It was all delicious. A dream, a dream, a delicious dream with no end in sight.