A Splendid Ruin: A Novel

by Megan Chance

  The Rich Are Just Like Us!

  The latest disaster has made all classes equal. The rich have no more than the poor, and stagger about the relief camp on Nob Hill in filthy boots and stinking clothes like the veriest beggar on the street, most of them clad by today’s most popular of designers, the Red Cross.

  Mrs. James Sheldon wears overalls and a flannel shirt, and Miss Bessie Osmoss treads through the mud to the soup kitchen where today’s banquet consists of canned soup and Postum, and the decorations are stockings and unmentionables hanging on the many laundry lines stretched from tent post to tent post. After dinner, instead of dancing, the best of San Francisco society sit around campfires like their hallowed grandfathers, who pried from the earth the fortunes that built their houses, which are now only piles of rubble. The earth giveth, and the earth taketh away . . .

  While some toil at cleaning up the city, others toil at love. The city reports an astonishing rise in the application for marriage licenses, and one cannot turn a corner without stumbling upon a new engagement announcement. Disaster is the best aphrodisiac! Some are so anxious to tie the knot that they will not be waiting for churches to be rebuilt, as they fear it will take longer than nine months . . .

  The writer was indeed Alphonse Bandersnitch, though I would have known it even without his byline. I recognized his style, his sarcasm. He was still alive. Until that moment, I didn’t know how afraid I’d been that it was otherwise. I thought of him sitting beside me that first time at Coppa’s, smoking his cigarette, his dark eyes that seemed to miss nothing as he took me in. “You’re no coward, Miss Kimble.” And then, later at the Anderson soiree. “I find you puzzling . . . Nothing about you makes sense, unless . . .” He’d never finished the sentence. I’d never known what he meant. Now I wondered if Dante LaRosa had suspected that I was caught in the Sullivan game not as a player but as a victim.

  But perhaps that was wishful thinking. Be clever, I reminded myself. I did not know yet whether Dante LaRosa was a friend, and first there was the camp on Nob Hill.

  It would be dangerous for me to go there; I knew that. Goldie would recognize me in any garb. But Shin had been with the Sullivans when I’d seen her last. Could she be there still? Surely it was worth a visit to see.

  Truthfully, Shin was as much an excuse to go as a reason. I wanted to see the people who had destroyed me. I wanted to revel in their suffering. I needed Shin, yes, but what were the chances that she would still be working for them now, after all this?

  A visit to Nob Hill, and then . . . Dante LaRosa, whether or not I found Shin. My plans put into motion at last. Excitement, anticipation, and fear powered my steps as I made my way to my old neighborhood. The landscape was wind- and fog-swept, black, here and there a copse of singed trees and hedges that had somehow eluded the fire. But the mostly destroyed world showed signs of regrowth among the relief lines and soup kitchens and ramshackle huts erected wherever there was space. Signs of burned wood read RESTRANT or HOT COFFEE AND SANWICHES, DONUTS—obviously no one cared much about spelling—and one said, BROWN’S CAFÉ: CHEER UP! HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE AND REST. WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER. Work crews labored, soldiers shouted orders, and exhausted and starved-looking horses dragged wagons piled high with refuse or building supplies.

  The most direct way to Nob Hill was through Chinatown. It had been strictly forbidden to go there until now, so I hadn’t explored it, and I was surprised at its condition. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched by work crews. The streets were so filled with wreckage that I had to pick my way through. Pools of stagnant water filthy with silt and ash created perilous potholes. It stank, too, and not of its usual fragrant mixture of fish and incense and sandalwood, but of rot and corruption—bodies still in the debris.

  Also, there were few Chinese there. I didn’t know whether they had not been allowed back into the city, or whether they’d decided not to come, but the people crowding and digging through the detritus did not look as if they belonged there. Women in shirtwaists and skirts and some in their Sunday best, hatted and cloaked. Men in suits. I was surrounded by white men and women, many who looked to be the kind of people I might have known in society. It was not safe for me to be here.

  I drew back as much as I could into the crowds, trying to decipher what I saw. I thought at first they were digging for bodies. But then I realized they were pillaging. People attacked the piles with shovels and rakes. They were too busy to look at or notice me, too focused on digging. Every block was the same. Everyone furiously shoveling and picking while armed guards looked on, now and again calling out things like, “Try over there! No one’s been at that yet!”

  The few Chinese who wandered through the streets looked helpless and dazed. Some stood to watch those brazenly looting what had been their homes and businesses. People carried off sacks and baskets of melted bronze and chinaware, and no one stopped them. Only a few days ago, such looters would have been shot.

  One young woman scrabbled through a mound, tossing aside bits of rubbish. Her skirt was filthy with soot and ash halfway up its length. She dragged something loose, calling out, “Look, Elsie, look!” She held up a scorched plate.

  The woman above her on the mound squealed with excitement. “Oh, lucky you!”

  “I can get three dollars for that, don’t you think?”

  “I’d say so. It’s the burned bits that are worth the most.”

  Behind me, someone called out, “Behold, the Stinking Catacombs of Vice!”

  I turned at the horrified gasps and titters to see a group of people snaking their way through the devastation. A tour led by a dirty-faced young man, who gestured dramatically, his voice loud enough to carry through the grasping of the looters.

  “The most notorious of the tunnels were just over there. You can see them if you look closely—be careful, miss, not too close! I can’t guarantee your safety. No one knows what’s left down there, but that was once a secret entrance to the Subterranean Hellholes. The Underground City branched out for blocks and blocks. We still don’t know the reach or the depth of them. Some say it went at least three stories down. Now, if you’ll come this way, I’ll show you what was once the most Notorious Opium Den in Chinatown.”

  His voice faded as he led the group down another junked corridor that must once have been a street. It was hard to tell.

  The place was a mess, and not only that, but crowded, and I hurried through. It was impossible not to think of the last time I’d been here—the gambling house, the opium den—impossible to look at the blocks I passed and not wonder where the place had been. How far up the hill had I come from Coppa’s? Halfway through Chinatown, perhaps. There had been a store on the corner, with silk robes in the windows and embroidered slippers, and next door to that, bins of long beans and big white rounds of some unfamiliar vegetable and gnarled knobs of pungent roots tumbled in a basket.

  None of it was there now. I had found Chinatown frightening and foreign, but also interesting, and its absence made me melancholy, and I wondered what Goldie would do now that her opium procurer was gone, and again, did it matter? What had changed in the time I’d been in Blessington? Secrets only mattered if they were still poisonous.

  Please let them still matter.

  I kept walking.

  Nob Hill had been transformed beyond recognition. The only buildings still standing were James Flood’s mansion and the Fairmont Hotel. Flood’s brownstone had been gutted; it was only a skeleton with empty sockets for windows. The Fairmont—which had not been finished when I’d been sent away—loomed in the near distance, its pillars unwarped and its windows glassless, the only obvious effects of the fire the scorching across its facade, stretching black silhouettes of flame. The fire had transformed marble into lime and melted steel and iron into bizarre shapes. Runnels of liquified glass and lead sash weights dripped over sills and pooled in hollows. Granite blocks had turned into boulders, their outer layers crumbling and gritty. A bright green parrot, the only spot of color in a fog of b
lack and white and gray, perched on what remained of a stone gate, squawking raucously. Everything scorched and crumbled, and now the rounded peaks of army tents crowded the ruins, looking no different than any relief camp in any part of the city. Women and children crowded near communal tent kitchens. A line of wooden latrines—a far cry from baths with delft sinks and marble-like commodes—and wash lines were humiliatingly out in the open. How far the rich had come down in the world, that everyone could see their unmentionables. In the middle of the camp, someone had erected a flagpole, and the American flag rippled contentedly over all. The earth giveth, and the earth taketh away. I bit back a smile.

  I stayed to the outskirts. I walked casually, my hands in my pockets, trying to blend in, and no one seemed to look twice at me. When I thought I saw someone I recognized, I moved quickly away, or slowed to walk behind someone else. I saw no sign of my uncle or my cousin. The camp was larger than I’d imagined, and more crowded. Obviously the only way to find them would be to walk through, and I was not that stupid. If Shin was here, there was no good way to find her.

  A blasting horn from an automobile behind me made me start and jump out of the street. The car bounced jerkily over the cracked road, no doubt on important business. Automobiles all over the city had been hired or requisitioned by the military and the government, and this one too held soldiers, and a man I recognized, though I’d only seen him once, at the Palace Hotel. But he loomed large in my mind, so often had he been mentioned. I could not forget him. Abe Ruef.

  The car pulled to the side of the road. Abe Ruef got out. He crossed the street, and hailed someone, who emerged from a corridor between tents.

  My uncle.

  That distinctive hair, that red gold that splintered in the sun, though it was disheveled and unoiled—and his ragged jacket was so uncharacteristic that it took me a moment to convince myself it was really Uncle Jonny. I dodged out of sight behind a decapitated lion guarding a broken stairway, but I could see them if I leaned just so. I watched the two of them talk.

  My uncle gestured to someone behind him, and brazenly, in public view, Mrs. Dennehy joined them, clad in a plain skirt and shirtwaist, with diamonds around her throat and that diamond on her finger throwing reflections on the side of the nearby tent. She twined her arm through my uncle’s, proprietary as she’d been that day in Union Square while my aunt, half-mad, poisoned by laudanum, suffered in her dark room. Now, the three of them smiled and laughed—worry-free, unchanged by events, untouched—and my resentment and anger churned so hot I broke into a sweat.

  They spoke for a few more minutes, then Abe Ruef returned to the car, and the soldiers drove him away. My uncle and Mrs. Dennehy disappeared. I sat by the headless lion and tried to calm myself.

  Now I knew my uncle was alive, as was his mistress. There, at least, was something to focus on. If my uncle existed, there was a way to clear my name and get back my money. There was a way to punish the man who was truly responsible for my aunt’s death. I rubbed the gold button in my pocket. It had truly brought me luck. What of Goldie, then?

  I could not leave after that. I stayed out of sight and watched people move about the perimeter of the camp. At the asylum, I had grown adept at waiting, and I did that now. I watched as the sun set, and the oil lamps and lanterns began to light, and women gathered at the communal kitchens. When it became dark enough that I knew they could not see me outside the perimeter of lamplight, I moved farther up the stairs, hoping for a broader view, and was rewarded with a full sight of the kitchen, women crowded about a stove. The flash of blond hair glowing golden struck me with its familiarity, bringing with it a mix of emotion I hadn’t expected. Anger, yes, but also a wounded, bewildered pain. Why I should still feel that, after so long, after everything she’d done to me? To think that I had ever trusted her at all or ever wanted to be her friend . . .

  Goldie wore men’s overalls with a shirtwaist. She lifted a sloshing bucket, set it outside the tent flap, and called for someone. There was something about the way she called, her posture, her imperiousness, something that told me just who I would see, and I was right. Shin, who came to grab the bucket of water and took it away.

  Shin. Thank God.

  Shin, alive, and still with the Sullivans. I had hoped for that, but now I wondered what exactly it meant. I saw none of the other servants, not Au or Nick or Petey. How, after everything, after helping me, could Shin still work for them? Not only that, what did it mean in terms of helping me again?

  I was puzzling over that, as well as how I might meet with her, when a shadow approached Goldie, and then resolved itself in the light, and I realized I was looking at Ellis Farge.

  I had not forgotten him, of course, or his role in my commitment, but I’d thought him just one of Goldie’s pawns. I’d never expected to see him again. More than Ellis himself, I mourned the opportunity that had been a lie, and the part he’d played in letting me believe such a thing could be possible for a woman. I’d wondered what he’d done with all my sketchbooks. Thrown them in the fire, I imagined. How readily I’d believed him when he’d said I had talent. Now, the thought of him raised only humiliation, and I could not bear to think of his false admiration, the flattery I hadn’t seen through, and that evening at Coppa’s . . . my God, that evening, when I’d drawn on the wall and shown them all the extent of my dilettantism. I was glad that Ellis had smeared it. If the restaurant was still standing, I hoped it had been wiped away.

  I had not expected to see him now with Goldie, in this camp. She’d said there was an attachment between them, I remembered. Had that been true? What kind of an attachment?

  Now, they spoke briefly, and then he left her again, and I put him from my mind. He was not the problem I had just now. My problem was getting to Shin.

  The camp took on the look of Mark Twain’s mining camp story. Glowing tents, soft talk, campfires. Carefully I made my way to the line of latrines. The stench was nothing compared to the asylum, and it was easy enough to wait there—at some point, everyone must use them. All I had to do was stay out of the way. The shadows behind the temporary buildings were dense; I waited where I could see up the line. The camp grew quieter and quieter. I grew more and more anxious. It would be dangerous now to make my way back to town. I would have to find a place here to spend the night, and hope that I would not be caught, but it would be worth it if I could talk to Shin.

  The night grew cold; I drew my coat more closely about me. She wasn’t going to come. She’d used a pail instead. I should find a place to sleep among the ruins. But then, a shadow approached, a hurried walk I thought I recognized. I waited until I was certain, and then I stepped out. She started with a gasp that echoed in the space between us. I saw confusion in her eyes reflected in lamplight, and then recognition, and then . . . fear.

  “No,” she whispered. “You cannot be here.”

  “I need to speak to you.”

  She shook her head. Again, she said, “You cannot be here.”

  “Just a word—”

  “You must go!”

  My aunt’s words. The echo shook me, and turned my desperation into anger. “I can’t go! Don’t you understand? I’m tired of warnings and demands. I’ve risked a great deal to find you, Shin. I want the truth, for once, and I think you know it. I deserve to know it. Please. I need your help.”

  I’d surprised her, I saw. She looked furtively about. “I cannot be gone long or they will wonder. Can you meet me tomorrow?”

  I couldn’t hide my relief. “Wherever you say. Whenever you wish.”

  “In the morning. The first thing. I am supposed to be in the relief lines, but they can be very long.”

  I understood. They would not question her if she were gone for some time. “Where?”

  “The Fairmont.” She put her hand on the latrine door—it seemed to glow in the darkness. But before I’d taken two steps, she cautioned, “Do not be seen. They cannot allow you to be dead, but they don’t wish you alive, either.”

 
I frowned. “What?”

  Shin said, “Tomorrow morning. Be careful, Miss May.”

  Now all I needed was a place to wait for morning. If I was to meet Shin at the Fairmont, why not there? In the darkness it loomed, an ominous shadow. I crept into a lower-story window when a cadet’s back was turned, and into the vestibule of the Fairmont Hotel. It smelled of plaster and wood and smoke, newness tainted by fire and fallen stone. There, hidden well away, and feeling strangely at peace, I slept.

  When morning came, the daylight highlighted the worst of the damage, lath and plaster fallen from walls and ceilings, construction scaffolding broken and teetering. The hallway felt narrow and confining; I remembered the severed foot and my own burial with a dizzy panic, and hurried into the broader vestibule. Marble pillars gave the illusion of vastness, and one could imagine that it would be elegant when it was finished, the damage repaired, the exposed brick plastered over. It had held very well in the earthquake, but it was dark and shadowed and huge, and I wondered where Shin had thought to meet me, and decided that the vestibule was the most obvious place.

  I sat on the unfinished stairs, staring at the brick wall, trying to ignore my stomach grumbling. It wasn’t long before I saw Shin’s familiar dark and shining hair.

  She said again, by way of greeting, “You should not be here.”

  “I needed to find you. You helped me before—”

  “You don’t understand. It is impossible.”

  “You know I didn’t kill my aunt. You know they’re stealing my money. You tried to warn me, and I wasn’t paying attention. But I need you now. I’m going to take my money back. I’m going to clear my name—”

  “How?”