City of Ash (3 page)

Nathan simmered in a way I recognized too well. My father was there, but as I went to him, he made a gesture, and suddenly Nathan was hurrying me out of the gallery. The whispers vibrated in the air. Nathan bundled me into the carriage and stared out the window at the falling snow. I was unsettled. I began to feel sick. This had not turned out as I’d hoped. I’d meant only to alienate Nathan, not my friends. But they had turned from me, and Nathan was still here—why was he still here? Why did he say nothing? I couldn’t bear his silence. I forced myself to say, “Nathan—”

He slammed his fist against the carriage wall so violently I jumped and shrank back. When we pulled to a stop before my father’s house, my childhood home, I was grateful. My father would understand. He would soothe society and help me with Nathan. This could still end as I’d intended.

We had just hurried up the snow-slicked walk when there came the sound of my father’s carriage. He and my grandmother got out, and then they were in the foyer beside us, and we gave up our cloaks and scarves and hats in silence. My grandmother’s face was drawn and white—she’d aged ten years in an hour. But it was the disappointment on Papa’s face that startled me. It was unexpected and impossible. I realized suddenly what they believed, what everyone must believe. I’d thought only of the
scandal of posing, not of what an unclothed sculpture said about me and Claude. They thought there’d been an affair.

“Oh no,” I began. “You don’t understand—”

My father pointed to the parlor. “Wait in there, Geneva, while your husband and I discuss what is to be done.” The forbidding cast of his face made me swallow my objection; with the habit of obedience and adoration, I went into the darkened parlor while the three of them went down the hall to Papa’s study.

When they finally sent for me, what felt like hours later, I was stiff with dread. The study was too bright after the parlor and the dim hallway, electric light illuminating everything too well: my grandmother’s pink scalp beneath her thinning white hair, the fleshiness beginning to show on my husband’s face, the brown age spots at my father’s temples. My grandmother sat in a burgundy-striped chair by the fire, erect and regal. Nathan sat on the matching settee, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them. Handsome Nathan, his uninjured fingers flexing and unflexing while the other hand was wrapped in a bandage. He looked up at me with reddened eyes—no anger now, but a calculation that made me even more anxious.

My father stood, half leaning against the expanse of his polished rosewood desk. His eyes, so often laughing, were not laughing now but inestimably sad, as if he’d borne a mortal hurt. “Sit down, Geneva,” he said tiredly.

I perched myself on the very edge of the nearest chair and folded my hands in my lap. “It’s not what you think,” I said quickly. “I would never … Claude and I are friends and nothing more.”

“Oh, please, Geneva,” my grandmother said sharply. “Surely you don’t think us fools.”

“But it’s true. I only posed for him—” Her look made me swallow the rest. I felt guilty in the wake of it, and ashamed, and that made me angry. There had been no affair; there was no reason to feel guilty. “You must believe me.”

“You’ve put us in an untenable position.” How stern my grandmother sounded.

I felt the urge to comfort her, to comfort them all. “Yes, of
course, but surely it can be mended? Once everyone knows the truth—”

“Robert Montgomery withdrew his offer to partner with Stratford Mining tonight,” Papa broke in. “He said he does not wish his company to be associated with debauchery.”

“Debauchery?” Suddenly I was afraid. If there was one thing my father valued above me, it was Stratford Mining. “You cannot be serious.”

“This is no trifling matter, Geneva. Your behavior has affected my business. You’ve embarrassed your husband and your family. Your lack of discretion—”

“I tell you there was no indiscretion. And you have a room full of nudes just like that one. You told me it was art. It
is
art.”

“For God’s sake, Geneva, you’ve exposed yourself needlessly to ridicule and shame, and not just yourself, but your husband. How is Nathan to feel now that the whole world knows you were Marat’s … mistress?”

My eyes filled with tears. I could not look at Nathan or my father. “I was not his mistress,” I insisted. “It was not an affair. We are friends only.”

Papa said, “I need someone to oversee the acquisition of a coal mine in Seattle. Nathan has suggested he do so, and that the two of you go there. Which is very generous of him, considering. Therefore the two of you will be leaving for Washington Territory in the morning.”

It took effort to understand him. I managed, “Washington Territory? I … forgive me, but I don’t understand.”

“Marat has left the city,” Nathan said tonelessly. “He at least realizes how this looks.”

Papa said, “I’ve told you this before: you’re a married woman, and it’s time you act like a wife. Your husband is good enough to forgive you and to sacrifice his own happiness on your behalf. You will go to Seattle with him until such time as things are forgotten and you can return.”

Grandmother said, “It won’t be forever, you know. Something else will take the place of this scandal, and memories fade with time. I should say only two or three years.”

This was not what I’d expected, not what I’d wanted at all. Why wasn’t Nathan threatening to leave me? “Two or three years? You must be joking. Why should I go? I’ve done nothing wrong!”

Nathan sighed. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but I’ve spoken to Dr. Robertson at Bloomfield Estates—”

“The asylum?”

“A place to rest,” he corrected, and there was that calculation again that frightened me. I remembered his mother. Of course he would know all about asylums. “We’ve all seen how unbalanced you’ve been recently. The doctor agrees … he is quite certain you will do very well at Bloomfield.”

I could not believe the words. “Nathan, no. You know I’m not the least bit mad. I only posed. I meant to … it wasn’t what you think. It wasn’t what anyone thinks.”

Nathan looked away. Desperately I looked to my father.

“You’ve suffered a derangement of the senses, Ginny,” Papa said gently. “It’s affected us all. No one would say we were wrong to send you there.”

Grandmother said, “You are not yourself, my dear.”

“We can have you installed at Bloomfield within the hour,” Papa said, and this time it was his expression that shamed and frightened me. “Or will you choose Seattle?”

They were silent. Watching me. Waiting.

There was no choice, and I knew it. I had been naive and foolish. How had I not seen that the collusion of society and marriage and family would keep me firmly in my place?

The answer came to me quickly. Because I’d been too self-assured. Because I’d thought I was invincible.

I looked down at the floor, the convoluted pattern in the carpet, twisting vines and leaves, and said, “Yes. I’ll go to Seattle with Nathan.”

My father let out his breath. “Very well.”

“Perhaps you could look at it as an opportunity to make a new start,” Grandmother suggested.

I glanced at Nathan, and he met my gaze, and I thought of all the ways I’d loved him. A new start. Yes, perhaps that was what we both needed. To be away from all these things that had come between us. To somehow find each other again.

Papa said, “In Seattle, you will do as Nathan directs, Geneva. I rely on him, as you know, and he has suffered much for you. I expect you to behave dutifully and honorably. I want them to view the Stratford name with respect. This is the only time I will suffer a business setback on your account. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Papa. I understand.”

He said in a voice sadder than I’d ever heard, “I have never before been ashamed of you.”

The next morning, my father directed our servants to pack up our things, to close up the house. By three that afternoon, Nathan and I were on our way to Seattle, Washington Territory, sitting together and silently on a train that whisked us away from Chicago and everything I knew.

Beatrice

S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON
T
ERRITORY
, 1888

T
here are three rules to remember in theater. Three rules you learn when you’re a nobody in the corps de ballet wearing flesh-colored stockings and not much else. Rule one: Don’t be late; Rule two: Know your lines; and Rule three: Never trust a manager or another actor.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how well you know something. Sometimes you can fool yourself into thinking the rules don’t apply to you—at least not then, not at that moment.

I met Stella Bernardi on my one night off from performing
at the Regal Theater. She was in Seattle as part of a touring company booked at the Palace, and I was only there because my company needed an actress to play the traveling lady line, and Lucius Greene, our manager, had said, “Go on over to Langford’s, my dear, and see if you can’t persuade some ambitious young lovely to join us.”

I noticed Stella right away. She was playing a trouser part that night, but she did it with style, and Lucius had always liked style. So when the show was over, I went backstage and waited outside the dressing room door until she came out. She was pretty, which always helped, and blond. She would be a good foil for me, who was her opposite in coloring, and match our current leading lady, Arabella Smith, and I was certain Lucius would think so too. When I proposed that she come to the Regal to audition, she was smart enough to see that it was an upward move.

Lucius liked her. After she won the line, he pulled me aside and stroked the waxed ends of his large brown mustache and said, “Well done, sweet Bea. I shall remember this,” and I was ambitious enough myself to be glad. There’s no better currency than a favor owed by a manager—if you could trust him to remember it, and with Lucius, you usually could.

I’d been at the Regal three years. I’d come to Seattle with the rest of a touring company from New York, expecting to debut
Rip van Winkle
at a theater whose name I can’t remember now because the advance man had got into a fight with the theater manager, and we ended up stranded with no money and nowhere to play and no way to get back either. Two of us had got on with Lucius’s company at the Regal, myself and Brody Townshend, who was sixteen then and a pretty boy with almost no ambition. The only reason he was still onstage at all was that he’d discovered women liked an actor, and fucking was all he cared about. God knew I’d never met a man who didn’t practically live for sex, and Brody was the worst of them when it came to that. Some nights there was a crowd of girls waiting for him to come out the backstage door, and once or twice I’d seen him leave with two or three at a time. He was nineteen now, and he’d boasted to me that he’d probably had more than two hundred women, and I didn’t doubt it.

The Regal Theater was one of the most popular houses in Seattle, although it wasn’t luxurious. There were ten boxes for society, and the parquet had been fitted with decent seats that had wire cages beneath to store your hat, but it was small, with maybe only four hundred seats, and it was built of green lumber, so it weathered badly. The narrow stairs to the gallery were crooked and pitched, and half the time someone up there was swooning from the heat or the gas fumes that settled up near the ceiling because there was no ventilation—which you might think would be a blessing in the winter, but it was only cold and damp and wet then, and no pleasanter. In fact, there was no time of the year when the Regal was comfortable, but people loved it just the same, as much because of its location—sited exactly between the St. Charles Hotel and the Occidental, so we got not just society but everyone else as well—as because of the bill of fare.

Lucius Greene had turned the theater into the best melodrama house in the city. The Regal was a favorite with the “gallery gods,” the newsboys and miners and lumbermen who paid their ten cents for the worst seats in the balcony and thought it entitled them to an opinion on everything. They hooted and whistled and clapped their way through the crashing spectacles Lucius thought up, learning the songs by the second night a play was performed, shouting tunelessly along with whoever was onstage and sometimes so loud you couldn’t hear yourself, and society loved it too. There was no one who didn’t love a spectacle, and Lucius was a genius when it came to knowing what would please a crowd.

He was a fair enough manager too, though like all of them he was always looking for a way to make a profit and didn’t necessarily care who he had to step on to do it. And he wasn’t one of those who expected favors from his actresses either, which already made him better than three-quarters of the managers I’d worked for. He liked to think of his company as a family, and so, because Stella was a stranger to Seattle, he made me responsible for her.

Another favor he owed me, and I added it to his tally. Stella clung to me like a barnacle. I got her a room on the floor below, and Stella got into the habit of coming upstairs to my room after the performances, when we were both giddy and flushed and it
was hard to be alone after the noise of the audiences and the crowded halls backstage full of admirers. I had a fondness for candy, and she for absinthe, and that was how we spent whatever extra money we had, which was never much. I’d buy a little packet of hard candy, and as we never had sugar, we’d melt a cherry or orange lozenge in water to add to the absinthe, and sometimes we were still drinking near dawn.