by Megan Chance
The memory of Goldie’s voice, mine, as we looked over the drawing in my sketchbook, that same drawing reproduced here in marble and stone, wood and glass. The only thing missing was my signature. “They are so beautiful you must claim them as your own.”
I could not breathe. I put out my hand, thinking to touch it, but it was not paper.
“It’s yours, isn’t it?” Dante asked quietly.
Mine, yes. My imagination somehow made real. My throat was so tight I could only nod. This was impossible. How could it be?
As if he’d read my mind, Dante inclined his head toward a bronze plaque on the wall.
Designed by Ellis Farge, 1905.
Shock first, then disbelief and pain. Ellis’s flattery, his admiration, my gratitude at the chance to learn, and all the time, this was what he’d intended. Stealing what was mine. Everything I had been through, everything I had borne, and yet this . . . this was the worst of it. He’d taken something no one had ever touched, because how could they? How safe and certain and unreachable I’d thought it, my mind and my history, and yet, how easily he’d stolen it, and how much more it was than simply a design. My solace and my hopes. Everything. More than he could possibly know. Furious tears blurred my vision.
Dante took my arm, steady and solid, and my rage gathered and hardened, no longer a hot burning, but icy and growing more frigid every moment, a rallying force, a foundation. My family had begun my destruction; if Ellis meant with this to finish it, he had done exactly the opposite. My voice did not sound like mine when I said, “I’ve made him an artist, you said. This is what you meant.”
Dante nodded. “I suspected it, but I wasn’t certain until now. Over the past year, he’s reinvented himself. He’s doing interiors. They’re different from anything he’s done before. Because they’re yours. Tell me how he’s doing it.”
“My sketchbooks.”
Dante frowned, not understanding.
“I had sketchbooks. A dozen at least. He asked to see them. I wanted his opinion.”
“He still has them.” It was not a question.
“Well, I don’t. So . . . He told me once that it was a pity I was a woman.”
“A pity for you. Not for him.”
“He stole my drawings.” No wonder Goldie had been so insistent that I show them to him. Her words that night in my bedroom as the Blessington attendants waited to take me away echoed painfully. “She knew of our attachment, and . . . tried to come between us.”
I remembered Ellis in the camp at Nob Hill, coming to speak to Goldie in the communal kitchen.
Goldie had entangled Ellis in her plot against me because they were together. Yet I’d thought she hadn’t even known him. In the asylum, I’d dismissed Ellis as a pawn. Everything made sense now, except—“But why? Why did he need them? He’s an architect himself. They say he’s a genius.”
“Yes, that’s what they say.” Dante’s voice dripped sarcasm.
“You hate him,” I remembered. “He hated you too. I knew it even at Coppa’s. Why?”
“I don’t like him because he’s a liar. Because he’s weak. Because he pretends to be something he’s not, and he doesn’t care who he hurts to get what he wants. He’s a hophead, you know.”
It was hardly a surprise, given what I knew about Goldie. Their attachment. The way they’d kept it so quiet. But of course Dante would know that about them.
“When he first came to San Francisco, everyone loved him,” Dante explained. “That was six years ago, maybe seven. He was already well regarded in Philadelphia, and John McKay had seen one of his buildings there and hired him to build the Yeller Block here. Farge came out and stayed. I have to admit that he was worth praising. But then he smoked away his talent and his buildings became disasters. Have you ever seen the Hartford? It looked like an Egyptian nightmare, with all these corridors and tiny rooms. You expected to come upon a secret entrance guarded by a mummy. The earthquake is the best thing that could have happened to it. I wrote the review of the reception for its opening, and I reported what everyone was saying. He never forgave me for it.”
I remembered the drawing of the building framed on Ellis’s wall, my own comment that it seemed a prison.
Dante went on quietly. “I didn’t mean to destroy him. That wasn’t my intention. But that’s what he thought.”
“What happened?”
“He wrote a letter to the paper attacking me. Older told me to apologize. I did but not in the way Farge wanted. I think I said something like, ‘People can of course discern the truth for themselves.’”
I couldn’t help smiling.
“Yes, you see? The damage was done. He lost commissions. I don’t know how many. Farge wasn’t my main focus, then or now. I saw him at Coppa’s, he was drinking and depressed and nasty; if I knew he was there I tried to stay away. Edith—I think it was Edith—told me to make amends because he was making everyone miserable and she was afraid he might try to hurt himself.”
I thought of that day at the baths, when I’d first met him, his agitation and desperation. Now I understood. He had lost his way, and he was afraid. I had trusted my uncle and Goldie when they said he was talented and important. That he was coasting on his reputation, I hadn’t considered, even when I saw his work. Nor did it occur to me to suspect what was so obviously true in retrospect: Goldie had seen that my work could save Ellis, and she had managed to make certain it would. Her “These are perfect!” when she’d first looked at my drawings, the compliment I’d taken it for, so ominous it seemed now, and then the way Ellis began to appear. His return from Del Monte that Linette had commented upon at the Cliff House, his weird presence at Sutro’s, so out of place. How had I not seen?
“I didn’t understand at first.” Dante sighed. “But then I did. That day—do you remember?—when everyone was drawing on the walls? I saw it then. Your talent and what Farge wanted from you. It explained everything, because otherwise you weren’t his type.”
“No. My cousin is, however.”
Dante looked sympathetic. “They married while you were away.”
That surprised me, though it explained his presence in the Nob Hill relief camp. “I didn’t know. Well, they deserve each other. You were right when you said I was easily manipulated. I had no idea they had any relationship at all.”
“No one did. Well, some of us did. It had been going on for some months. I don’t know where they met—maybe China Joe’s, but you could see them circling one another at events if you watched them. I wanted to see how it would develop before I wrote about it. It must be true love.”
“She can control him,” I said. “Better than she could Stephen Oelrichs.”
“Oelrichs. Now that was interesting too.”
I took a deep breath. “Goldie has ambitions.”
“I guess it’s up to us to make sure they’re foiled. And Farge’s too. When do I see China Joe?”
“As soon as possible. Shin will take you to him. He’s expecting you. You look nervous. He’s actually very reasonable. If I can beard him in his den, you certainly can.”
Dante laughed. “I’m not so pleasing as you. Nor as persuasive.”
I was not expecting the compliment, and it flustered me. “If I were that persuasive, I would have been able to convince everyone that I didn’t kill my aunt.”
His smile faded. “You’re playing a rigged game, May. Your uncle has the police in his pocket. There was nothing you could have done. Not then. You didn’t have enough information. But now . . .”
“Now what?”
“Now, you do.”
“Their secrets, you mean.”
He shook his head. “You’ve always had those. But no one’s going to listen to May Kimble. Especially when she’s a lunatic poor relation.”
“That hasn’t changed.”
“Oh, but it has. You’re not May Kimble, are you? Or at least, not only that.” When I frowned, he continued, “Your inheritance. Your father. The telegraph is up again. It shouldn�
��t be difficult to discover what rich man died in New York City—when did your father die?”
“Mama made it sound recent. Just before she died, I think.”
Dante took out his notebook and scrawled something. “You said his name was Charles, right? I’ll send a telegram to a friend of mine at the New York World. He’ll check the obits. If your father is as important as your mother said he was, he’ll be mentioned there.”
“It seems so . . . easy.”
“If you know the right people, it is. It will take a couple of days. Once we have your real name, we’ll find a lawyer here to handle it.”
To think that in a matter of days I might have the answer I’d been waiting for my whole life felt impossible. But Dante seemed to think it nothing. I wanted to believe him. “Now it’s getting late, and I’m hungry. Where are you staying?”
The change in subject momentarily jostled my thoughts. “Staying? Around. Here and there.”
“Here and there,” he repeated. “You know it’s dangerous, don’t you? There are robberies and murders every night even with the soldiers about.”
“Believe me, I know. I’m safe enough.” I pulled out the metal rod and showed it to him.
Dante’s eyes darkened. “Someone with more skill is just as likely to turn that on you, May. For God’s sake. You’ll be safer staying with me.”
“Staying with you? You must be mad. What will people say?”
“Says the woman who set the tongue of every gossip in the city wagging.”
“That was not my fault.”
“We’re in the middle of a disaster, or haven’t you noticed? No one cares except those up on Nob Hill, and I’m the only one watching them. Not only that, we can plan better if we’re together. And I have an idea for Farge that I think you’ll want to hear.”
“What idea?”
“Oh no,” he wagged his finger playfully. “Not until we have something to eat. Let’s go.”
I looked again at the library, my vision made real, beautiful yes, but a terrible betrayal. I would never be able to come here again, I knew. Goldie and my uncle had been cruel and avaricious, but their greed was not so personal as Ellis’s. Not so intimate. And yet, I knew also, in a way I had not known before, that its very intimacy made me stronger. I would not forgive him this, and this time, I was not helpless, and I was not alone.
Dante took me to the west side of Telegraph Hill, where he stopped at a cluster of small wooden houses that had been saved from the fire. One of them was a single-story house with a flat roof and narrow, slatted stairs that led to the front door. The windows were cracked and busted from the earthquake, and plaster had fallen from the walls in places to show the lath beneath. Other than that, it seemed mostly undamaged. A small front room fitted with a secondhand settee, a desk, and piles of books was to the right. To the left, a kitchen and a table with two chairs. At the rear were two bedrooms.
“I share it,” he said. “But Bobby’s to Oakland for a few days.”
“Bobby?”
“My cousin.” He motioned to one of the closed doors leading to the bedrooms. “You can stay in his room. He won’t care. But you might. He drinks too much and he’s a slob.”
Gingerly, I opened the door. The curtains were drawn. I saw a bed, a chair, lumpy shadows. It smelled sour, of dirty clothes and unwashed skin and yes—what was that? Spilled beer?
“I try not to go in there,” he said.
I closed the door again. He was in the kitchen. The stove had been pulled out into the street like every other in San Francisco, leaving only the cobwebbed, greasy wall behind it. Dante pulled things from a cupboard to set on the table: a half a loaf of bread, two tins of sardines and one of tomatoes, and—
“Where did you get wine? No one’s allowed to sell liquor.”
“They never said we couldn’t drink it.” He set the bottle down with a victorious thump. “I know the right people. Papa Gennaro down the street. I helped him save his place.” He shoved up his sleeve and held out his arm to show smooth olive skin. “Burned all the hair off my arms doing it too. Sit down.”
I took off his hat and put it on the desk, and then I took one of the chairs at the table.
“All the glasses broke in the earthquake. We’ll have to be bohemians and drink from the bottle. I know society girls don’t do such things, but . . .”
He pulled the cork and handed the wine to me, and I raised the bottle in a toast and took a gulp. I hadn’t tasted wine in so long that it burned its way down my throat, but it was a long and luxurious burn, and I closed my eyes to celebrate it and sighed. “Oh, that is lovely. It’s been so long—” I broke off, humiliated at unexpected tears. I dabbed at them with the edge of my sleeve, trying to be surreptitious, but when I looked up, Dante was watching me. I felt strangely, horribly vulnerable; I had to turn away.
Gently he took the bottle from my hand and took a gulp himself. Then, softly, “What was it like?”
I didn’t pretend not to know what he meant. “It was all right.” I blinked and tried to swallow the memory. “Fine, once I found my way.”
“What way was that?”
My attempted smile was a failure. “Secrets.”
“Ah,” he said. “Just as brave as I remember.”
It made me teary all over again, and he gave me back the wine. He opened the sardines, then tore off a piece of bread. He put a chunk of the oily fish on the bread with his fingers and handed it to me with a care and concern that made me laugh with embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I just . . .”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he offered, but it was his grace in relieving me of the obligation to say it that released me so I could describe that first horrible night when I’d been nearly strangled, and then the wretchedness of the toilet and the hoses and then finally the way I’d learned to be there, and he listened and made no comment, and my words spilled in a torrent I could not control, and when it was done, I felt as if I’d emptied an ugliness from inside me that I hadn’t known was there. I would not forget it, but the poison was somehow gone. I had not realized until then how sick I’d been with it.
He opened the tomatoes. He had two spoons, and he gave me one, and we ate contentedly from the can until we finished them.
He took the notebook from his pocket, along with the pencil, and laid it on the table with a quiet deliberation I didn’t understand. And then suddenly I did. Suddenly I knew that he’d heard something in my story that I’d forgotten. He took out a precious cigarette, got to his feet, and said, “I’m going for a smoke,” and went outside, leaving me there. I stared at that notebook, the page with Charles written on it and then the dates I’d given him. I pulled it toward me. The stink of sardines was in my nose, their salty oil on my fingers. The wine was almost gone. I took another gulp and picked up the pencil, and turned the page. The imprint of the words Dante had written pressed through. He’d left the door open; the smoke of his cigarette drifted inside.
I rolled the pencil in my fingers. I had banished my talent. I had glimpsed beauty with a gnawing longing and let it go untouched and unheralded. I had gathered it for only the briefest of moments and determinedly ignored the ache it left behind, and after a time, not so long, the urge to capture such things had died from lack of nourishment. What if it meant to punish me by staying away? But there again, that touch, the familiar way the pencil settled into my hand, and the images I’d suppressed roused: the light from the thick panes of my windows reflected on the floor, the tea rose in Mrs. Donaghan’s garden, the orange smoke clouds against a starry sky, and the red roses in the alien light, those garishly gorgeous roses. At first tentative, waiting, hopeful. Now? Waiting for my no, as I had said no a dozen times, a hundred, in the past year, and there too, that prick of fear, the warning of complacency that meant defeat and acceptance.
But I was free of Blessington now. I was no longer a prisoner. I’d denied my talent and my comfort to save myself then, and I knew instinctively that to use it would save me now. The
earth had set me free. The city was at my feet. I forgot where I was and that I had not touched a pencil in months.
When I was finished, I let the pencil drop. The drawing was smudged, pressed hard into cheap paper to make it show, the edge of my hand smeared black. It was not my best drawing. The imprint of Dante’s words—Charles, the dates—made a palimpsest of my rose-bedecked bier, which blazoned richly in pencil, nearly glowing with release and with joy. I had not been defeated, the drawing said. I had not lost myself.
For the first time since the earthquake, I slept deeply, without waking at every noise, without being on the alert for any possible attack. I’d burrowed into Bobby’s blankets, which were musty and stinking of sweat, but I was warm for the first time in days, and when I woke, the sun was fully up and I smelled coffee.
When I stepped from the bedroom, there was Dante, again in shirtsleeves and sitting at the kitchen table, drinking from a tin mug and writing furiously in his notebook. He glanced up with a smile. “At least you don’t snore.”
“Does Bobby?”
“When he’s been drinking. Which is all the time.” He gestured to another tin mug on the table. “I brought you some coffee from next door. It might not be hot. And there’s no sugar, and no milk unless you’ve got children, which I don’t, so—”
“I don’t care.” I picked up the mug and took a deep and grateful sip. It was lukewarm, but it was coffee. I’d had it from the relief wagons, but somehow it was better gifted by a friend. “What are you writing?”
“Notes from last night. You do want me to tell your story? I wasn’t mistaken about that? You want me to help you ruin the Sullivans?” His eyes glittered; he was afraid I would say no.
“Yes. Soon. But the Chinatown articles first. Then we’ll have the evidence of my uncle’s corruption and Goldie’s gambling that China Joe promised, and that will give you more than just my word.” I sat down next to him. “Today, we’re going to see him.”
“Your servant, milady. I’ll send that telegram to my friend too. In the meantime, about Farge . . .” He grabbed the rest of the bread from last night, and set it before me for breakfast. “We’ll need Shin for my plan. Do you think she’ll help?”