Prima Donna

by Megan Chance

  I stared at her in stunned surprise. “Mr. Clemmons? Are you … are you certain?”

  “He gave me his notice this morning. Ain’t that good news? Now you needn’t share.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “That’s good news indeed.”

  “Thought I’d tell you right away. I know it’s been a trial, waiting this long, but now you can have your room to yourself again.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t hear her words any longer, only a slow buzzing, and when she said her good-byes and left us again, her footsteps clattering down the warped boards of the hallway, I closed the door and turned back to Charlotte, who was looking as stunned as I felt.

  “Mr. Clemmons is leaving,” I said, as if she hadn’t just heard the same words I had.

  “Your own room back at last,” she said, smiling weakly. “I guess it’ll be a relief.”

  The lilac bloom was fading in the harsh sunlight; its scent was suddenly unbearable, too sweet, almost rotten. “A relief,” I agreed.

  From the Journal of Sabine Conrad

  JUNE 11, 1873—Today, flowers from Leonard, along with a small box from Tiffany with a diamond pavé barrette. Very beautiful, though Gideon turns his nose up at it and says “Jerome had best do better than that if he wants to keep Belmont at bay.”

  Leonard also pens that he must leave town for a few days and so will not see me before I go on tour, and the clip is “for good luck.” Gideon has me write him back to say that I shall think of him, and hope that his affections do not diminish in the coming months, as mine will not.

  All nonsense, of course.

  SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 20, 1873—The tour has been a resounding success. I have been too busy to write, and now we are in San Francisco, where I can hardly move without being nearly assaulted by a mob. They have thrown flowers at the stage every night, and I have sung so many encores I must drink warm honeyed water each night to soothe my throat. There have been too many dinners and toasts and prominent people to remember them all. I have received jewels in nearly every city—a diamond star with a ruby in the center, a pearl fan, and three diamond rings—oh, and a brooch in the shape of a butterfly and studded with jewels of every color, from a French marquis who was visiting New Orleans and happened upon my performance and came every single night. My notices have been too many to mention and all good. But here in San Francisco, I am more adored than I could have imagined!

  Last night there was a crowd gathered at the backstage door when I came out, which is not so unusual, except that they had unfastened the horses from the carriage that was to take me back to the hotel so that they could draw me there themselves!!!! “We shall act as your horses, Miss Conrad,” said one young man, and then they harnessed themselves and took me through the streets of San Francisco. Oh, I never laughed so hard, and even Gideon was moved by it. When I arrived at the hotel, they waited below, shouting and refusing to leave until Gideon said I must say something to them, so I stood on the balcony and threw flowers and Gideon whispered in my ear: “Look at them. They’d eat you alive if they could, sweetheart.”

  Barret is becoming known as quite the impresario for arranging this tour. Even the newspapers mention him as being the force behind my success, which is ironic, because it has all been Gideon. Everyone in the business already knows this, of course, though none of us say it, and the papers can only state what is publicly advertised.

  AUGUST 22, 1873—I have insisted on having our photographs taken—me and Barret and Gideon together—in a little shop near the hotel. I wore the double strand of pearls that Gideon bought me for my nineteenth birthday (how old I am now! I shudder to think it!). I sent the one of me and Barret to Papa and Mama (in the hopes that they will remember how they love us), and Gideon had the one of me alone made into some cartes de visite for us to hand about, but my favorite is the one of Gideon and me together. I have framed it and my own copy of me and Barret, and I mean to put them on my bedside table in every hotel I stay, but I confess I put the one of me and Gideon forward so I can see it better. We look like we belong together, and he teases me every time he sees it and says that now I will not forget him. As if I ever could!

  NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 24, 1873—We returned home earlier than we meant because of the disaster the world is so suddenly in thanks to Jay Cooke & Company’s bankruptcy, and because Gideon could not get all of my money from the bank and Chicago is in such disarray that there was no coin to be had at all. I read of two suicides in the newspaper. On Friday there was a terrible mob in Broad Street that was so large no traffic could move, and on Saturday the Exchange shut down trading. Gideon says either we will recover quickly or the banks and insurance companies will be ruined and we will go into a depression and thank God I was paid in coin and not cheques. He says he will never accept cheques again. He rescued as much of my money as he could, and thankfully, we finished most of the tour before the worst hit and it was very lucrative. I have a great many jewels, and Gideon says that many of the rich are still rich enough to buy me more, and the opera season will go on regardless, because those who are most affected by this panic will not be the ones buying subscriptions anyway. Gideon has spoken to Mr. Strakosch, who is not worried, and says that the Italian is so well liked we should have no fear for audiences. It seems Mrs. Astor will get her way about Mozart, because Don Giovanni is to be sung in October, and I am to do Zerlina instead of Christine Nilsson—she is Donna Anna this year.

  I returned to find four letters from Leonard waiting for me, along with a pair of golden earrings and a brooch, and I hear that Belmont is buying stocks as the prices hit bottom, so he cannot be too badly off either.

  OCTOBER 23, 1873—The newspapers say Mme. Nilsson and I are to be considered the “finest sopranos in the United States today, and one might be tempted to say the world”! Well, that should show P. Lucca and Clara Kellogg too! I confess I had not been looking forward to singing with Christine, as she is so fine, and I thought I would suffer in comparison, but she is very generous, and it has been a pleasure.

  Gideon has asked me to speak with Leonard about financing a new tour this summer, one with a troupe put together by Gideon himself, as his experience now with Mr. Strakosch has made him see that becoming a true impresario—as I once told him he should be!—is the way we will make a fortune.

  Barret told me that Gideon will have to think twice if he believes I will condescend to head a troupe. He says it is my career we should be worried about and not Gideon’s, and Gideon should focus his energies on getting me a position at Covent Garden or La Scala or the Theatre Italien in Paris. Adelina Patti and Christine Nilsson are both recognized worldwide and I should be as well, and though I can’t deny I would like to go abroad, there is time enough for that. If Gideon grows very powerful and influential, it can only help me too.

  NOVEMBER 4, 1873—Barret has told Gideon I will not head his troupe, which made me angry because he had no right to do so. Gideon was so furious he did not come backstage as he always does before I go on, and I was desperate without his good luck kiss and I didn’t perform my best. Leonard, of course, did not seem to notice. When he came to my dressing room after, he said I was as lovely as ever, but I declined to go to supper with him and went back to my rooms, where I am now and am very dispirited. Barret has gone off somewhere, and I have not seen Gideon at all.

  NOVEMBER 6, 1873—Gideon has been gone two days! I have been so miserable and sick I could not go on, no matter how they all begged me. Where is he? Has he abandoned me? I’ve been staring at our picture for hours in the hopes I can somehow wish him back to me but he does not come and I HATE

  Barret for doing this to me. I would kill him if he were here, but of course he has disappeared as well and left me here on my own.

  I would do ANYTHING to have Gideon back. Anything.

  NOVEMBER 7, 1873—Tonight Gideon returned. He sleeps beside me now as I write this, and to look at him gives me a terrible pain and longing at the same time, because it is nearly dawn and soon he will w
ake and ask me to decide.

  When he came back, he looked tired and distraught. He told me that he had something to show me and to dress in my plainest gown and come with him. I was so happy to see him I didn’t question him at all, and then he told me to wear a cloak and a veiled hat, and took me out of the hotel and called a carriage. When he gave the driver a direction, the man protested, but Gideon offered him a bonus, which he could not refuse, of course, not in these terrible times. I asked Gideon where we were going and he would say nothing, only to wait and see, and he was so terse and angry that I was afraid. For a moment I thought he meant to take me back to Kleindeutschland, but we didn’t go there. I didn’t know where we went, the way had so many turns. When he rapped on the ceiling of the carriage to tell the driver to stop, I thought he had made a mistake. There was nothing before us but saloons and concert halls—we were somewhere off the Bowery, I thought, but I wasn’t sure, and certainly in one of the worst parts of the city. The buildings were all grimy and run-down, and there were drunks and men lurking in the shadows who eyed us when we came out of the carriage, which drove off quickly. Gideon told me to be quiet, and to pull the hood of my cloak over my head, even though I was already wearing a hat and veil, and then he took me to these narrow dark stairs between two saloons that went down into a basement, and knocked sharply on the door at the bottom.

  It was opened by a Chinaman wearing a black cap and tunic. When he saw Gideon he opened the door farther, as if he recognized him. When the door closed behind us, the Celestial said, “Back here,” and led us down the hallway toward a dim, flickering lamp shaded by a red scarf, so the place looked eerie and strange. As we drew closer to the light, I began to smell smoke—not tobacco, but something else, and I recognized it as the same scent I had smelled on Barret before, and on Gideon sometimes too. A little flowery, or even sweet, like burnt sugar but very heavy and odd.

  At the end of the hallway, the Chinaman turned, and there were two doors, one of which he opened, and then he stood back and gestured for us to go inside.

  The room was large—the main of the basement—with damp stone walls, and there were two other lamps turned down very low, all with scarves like the one in the hallway, and pallets with men lying upon them. Other men were huddled about smaller, open-flamed lamps that sat about on low tables. The room was so heavy with that smoke it made me dizzy.

  Gideon took my arm and led me past men who gazed blankly up at us, smoke curling from pipes loose in their hands, and I knew already what I would see before Gideon stopped, and I was looking down into the open-eyed face of my brother, slack mouthed, his eyes nothing but iris, while a Chinaman sat at the table next to him, boiling something tarry-looking on a needle, a fat, pulsing glob of what I realized was opium.

  I said his name, and Barret turned his face to me and smiled and then he saw Gideon and he said, “Where’d you go to? Have another smoke.” His voice was so slurred, and he looked so dissolute, so awful. Nothing like the brother I love. I think he hardly realized who I was or that I was even there. Gideon whispered to me that this was where Barret came every night, and sometimes in the afternoons, and then he said with so much contempt it startled me, “Is this what you’d choose over me to manage your career, Sabine?” This, as if Barret was hardly human, and it was true, he didn’t look human lying there, but grotesque and unreal, waxy and drooling and so lost in dreams he seemed to have forgotten we were there almost the next moment.

  I felt as if my heart were breaking, and I feel it still now, because of course I know the choice I will make, and I hate Barret for forcing me to make it.

  NOVEMBER 8, 1873—Today I told Barret that I was giving control of my career and my money to Gideon, and that I have made Gideon my manager in name as well as in deed, and that I will have no more need of my brother.

  It was a terrible scene. First Barret raged until I thought the hotel manager would come, and then he railed at Gideon, who wisely stayed away, and then he cried. He sobbed so I thought my own heart would tear in two. He said I was making a mistake, that I would destroy myself without him. Then he said it was Gideon who had introduced him to the opium to begin with—to which I said that even if that were true, it was not Gideon who made him keep smoking it.

  Barret asked what would he do now, and I told him I didn’t know, but I still loved him, that I would always love him, because he was my brother. Barret called me some terrible things. He said I was not fit to be a Conrad, and that I had besmirched our family, and that I was a whore willing to do whatever I must to be famous, including killing those who loved me.

  I left him then. I was crying. I am crying still.

  NOVEMBER 9, 1873—I can hardly think.

  The world feels like a terrible dream. I wish I could wake up.

  My brother is dead. Someone in a room down the hall heard a gunshot early this morning, and the hotel manager broke open Barret’s door to find him there. He had shot himself in the head. I did not even know he had a gun.

  Gideon and I were at Delmonico’s when he died, drinking champagne.

  CHAPTER 11

  Seattle, Washington Territory—July 1881

  As the spring faded into summer, the stink of the sun-baked sewage and putrid mud of the tideflats was tinged with the fragrance of roses and sweetbriar and the blackberries that tangled at the fences of every yard and bordered the roads at the edges of town. Johnny went coatless, and both he and Duncan wore their shirtsleeves rolled up over their forearms, and men came into the Palace covered with sweat that soaked their long underwear, only adding to the stench that worsened twice a day, when the tide was out. The fish oil the peddling Indian women combed into their shining hair smelled so rank in the sun it was hard to stand near them. Smoke from the sawmill and the forges climbed into skies cleaner and bluer than any I’d ever seen, and dust rose from the streets to blanket everything. The Mountain loomed, some days hazy, some days so sharp and chiseled it looked as if someone had drawn it onto the sky with gray-blue ink.

  And I could not stand those late and early hours between leaving the Palace and going back again. Now that Charlotte had her own room at Mrs. McGraw’s, my own became unbearable.

  I felt the lack of her within it. I had never liked being alone, but now my solitary hours there seemed worse than ever. In my need to spend as little time with myself as possible, I began to eschew sleep. I went to bed just before dawn and woke only a few hours later, and then I went to her room and waited until she woke and asked if I cared for some breakfast as if she were unsurprised to see me there, as if she expected it. And I suppose, after I had done this nearly every morning our first week apart, she did.

  Even Johnny noticed it. One night, as we both leaned on the bar, watching the action, he said, “What’s got into your craw about the tall one?”

  “Her name’s Charlotte,” I said. “And I don’t know what you mean.”

  He shrugged. “You been watching her. Afraid she’ll steal us blind if you look away?”

  “Charlotte wouldn’t steal anything,” I said—a little too hotly, I realized, too late, as Johnny frowned.

  “You sound like you got an affection for the girl.”

  “She’s a friend. Why should that be so odd?”

  “A friend?” He laughed. “You ain’t ever had friends.”

  “Well, I do now.”

  He made a sound deep in his throat, doubt and disbelief, and then he exhaled and said in a low voice, “I think I might have our fellow. I’ll know better in the next day or two, but he seems interested enough in our prospects.”

  I was both relieved and dismayed at the change of subject. That Johnny had found an investor so quickly surprised me. I’d thought the search might take nearly a year. I’d hoped it would.

  Johnny’s gaze narrowed. “That don’t make you happy?”

  “Who is it?”

  “New money,” he said, pouring us each a drink. “Eager to find a way to show Daddy he’s a smart boy.”

  “Are you
certain he has what we need?”

  “Certain enough. You want to meet him?”

  “Should I?”

  Johnny laughed a little. “You’re my partner, ain’t you? Tell you what, I’ll arrange a little dinner for the three of us, how’s that? If he’s on the edge, I guess the two of us can figure out how to push him over.”

  I took a sip of my drink. Again, I felt that mix of apprehension and excitement, the little stir of yearning. I thought of a curtain, footlights. “Just tell me when, and I’ll be there.”

  Johnny drank the rest of his whiskey and slammed the glass onto the bar and said, “That’s my girl. I’ll schedule it. You got any special plans for the next few days?”

  “What plans would I have?”

  “How should I know? What about with your tall friend? I’d hate to interrupt any sewing circle.”

  “Go to hell, Johnny.”

  He laughed and backed away from the bar, and he was still chuckling to himself when he went into his office. I didn’t know how to feel about the fact that he knew about my relationship with Charlotte, whether to feel pride because I’d never thought myself capable of friendship before now, or vulnerable because Johnny had never failed to use a weak point to his advantage, and Charlotte felt like a weak point, something I should protect.

  That night was warm and sultry, strange for July, which was as often cloudy and cool as not, and as Charlotte and Duncan and I stepped out from the Palace, I had a sudden thought, and I turned to Duncan and said, “You don’t need to see us home tonight. Charlotte and I are going for a walk.”

  He frowned. “Ain’t a good time for walking, Marguerite. You know that.”

  “I’ve got my derringer.”

  He snorted.

  “We’ll be all right,” I assured him. “You go on to bed. And wasn’t that Sarah I saw waiting by the bar?”