A Race to Splendor (47 page)

Amelia looked away and murmured, “Fifteen months ago? Yes, I believe I would have.”

“And now?”

Silence filled the room. J.D. pointed at the tawny skin on his face. “Look carefully now, Amelia. How do you
truly
feel about aligning yourself with what my father so delicately calls ‘a bunch of half-breeds’?”

Amelia slid her hand across the desk and touched the tips of his fingers with her own.

“I’ll always remember the terrible sight of Ling Lee’s arm poking out from the rubble,” she said softly. “It haunts me to this day. And now that I know and love Loy and Shou Shou and still feel the loss of Foo, I… like you just said earlier…look at some things very differently now.” She seized his hand and gave it a soft squeeze in what she prayed he’d take as a gesture of reconciliation. “After everything you and I have been through together, J.D., I’d be appalled if you’d abandoned that child.”

She smiled at him faintly. “And now there’s one more confession I think
I
should make.”

Amelia was surprised to see the vulnerable expression that invaded J.D.’s eyes.

“And what confession might that be?” he asked.

Chapter 36

Amelia lightly stroked the top of J.D.’s hand with her fingertips. “From the first day I saw you in Grandfather’s old office, I admit it: I quite admired that tawny skin of yours. If that’s thanks to your Spanish blood, I say ‘Bravo’!”

J.D. remained silent, as if he were absorbing her last sentence, a word at a time. Then he said, “There’s nothing like an earthquake to shake up a narrow view of the world, is there?”

“I suppose you’re right,” agreed Amelia. “But, there’s something else I’ve never understood about your relationship with your family. I can see why you’re estranged from your father, but why your mother? And also, why, then, was she here tonight?”

J.D. rose from his desk and poured them both a brandy from a decanter sitting on the sideboard. He handed her a snifter and then resumed his seat while he disclosed the chain of events in his childhood that led to his grandfather’s suicide. He described his bitter feelings toward both parents, resentments that drove him to make his own way in the world as a virtual orphan, cutting himself off from any contact with his parents.

“Until lately, that is.”

J.D. spoke briefly of his mother’s virtual imprisonment on Octavia Street and his determination to wean her from Dr. Ellers’s medications and provide her a safe haven in his household. Tonight, he explained to Amelia, was his first attempt to show Consuela Reims-Diaz Thayer a world where she could become accepted for the person she truly was: a loving mother who needed no sedatives to dull her painful past.

“It has taken me a long time to begin to forgive Connie Thayer for standing silently by while her husband swindled her own father out of his last penny and made it appear to the old man that the loss of his money was his fault,” said J.D. “I can never ride a ferry across San Francisco Bay without reliving the sight of my grandfather’s body sinking slowly into the water, while all I could do was lean against the railing and watch him disappear.”

“Oh, J.D.…” Amelia felt a rush of tenderness, but before she could squeeze his hand again, he began to tap his fingers on the leather-topped desk.

“They didn’t find him for weeks,” he said quietly. “When the body finally washed up at the mouth of the Napa River, my father even refused to travel there to make an identification. My mother sent me with our livery driver to go claim it. Every time I think of it I—” His voice broke.

Amelia seized both his hands. “You were just a lad, J.D.! It must have been horrific.”

He gazed at their entwined fingers as if he hardly saw them.

“My parents wore mourning clothes for months and pretended it was such an unexpected tragedy—and then the matter was never mentioned again. Mother knew perfectly well what her husband and Dr. Ellers had done to her own father,” he said, looking away. “To this day, the sight of a black arm band makes me want to throttle the wearer. They were all such hypocrites!”

“I would imagine that your mother had few choices,” she reminded him gently. “She was a woman without the support or training to do anything other than seek shelter and food from whomever would give it to her. The law of our land said it was perfectly acceptable for your father to take over managing her fortune. How could she have escaped his dominance? She had
you
to consider. In this country if a woman deserts her husband, the children of their marriage are then considered the property of their fathers.” Amelia again folded her hands in her lap. “Rather like Mother and me when my father assumed control of Grandfather Hunter’s estate without consulting either one of us.”

J.D. caught her glance.

“I know this will infuriate you, my dear Amelia, but I’ve only just begun to understand the injustice of such traditions.”

Abruptly changing the subject, he rose from behind the desk and opened the walk-in safe. “That brandy doesn’t quite suit, do you think? Let us celebrate all this newfound wisdom with a glass of champagne, shall we?” he proposed, pulling out a plump wine bottle and an envelope that he slid into his inside jacket pocket.

“Veuve Clicquot?” she asked, her spirits beginning to rise for the first time in a week.

“Ah,
oui
,” he replied in a terrible French accent. “Would you be so kind as to accompany me upstairs, mademoiselle?”

Amelia was torn between longing for J.D. to enfold her in his arms and wanting to ask him additional questions she needed answered before she succumbed to what she knew J.D. was planning. She remained rooted to the spot as she watched his back recede down the basement corridor, but at length she followed him from his office and caught with him at the elevator. Before he could press the button, she covered the brass plate with her hand.

“Not so fast, monsieur. We were speaking of women with few choices. What of poor Matilda Kemp now?”

“She and Emma want to move to Boston.”

“Do they have the funds?”

“I have no idea. I hardly know the woman. Perhaps Emma has family money.”

“That’s rather cavalier of you, don’t you think? Surely you can feel some sympathy for Matilda’s public humiliation tonight—mostly caused by
you
?”

“Now, before you start flashing those accusing brown eyes at me, let me tell you that my assumed fiancée wasn’t humiliated in the least by what happened tonight.”

“Oh, come now—”

“As a matter of fact, she’s very, very relieved that she and I are not to become husband and wife.”

J.D. quickly recounted the relationship he unwittingly discovered between his intended bride and her school friend, Emma Stivers.

Amelia shook her head in disbelief. “You mean, they’re…?”

“They are,” J.D. replied with some amusement.

“Lovers?” Amelia blinked as she said the words aloud. Then she shook her head. “When I met Emma and Matilda at the Fairmont opening, I assumed they were just ordinary women friends, like Edith Pratt and me. Then, when I read the announcement that you were going to marry Miss Kemp… well, I was rather upset—”

“To put it mildly,” J.D. interrupted, removing Amelia’s hand from the elevator buttons and pushing the top one to summon the car. “You packed a pistol in that little handbag of yours, remember?”

Ignoring him, she continued, “When I read about your engagement, I thought Matilda a terrible snake-in-the-grass—and you as well!” Amelia paused. “The wrong assumption can certainly lead to the wrong conclusion, and ultimately, the wrong action.”

“My, my, you
are
becoming wiser by the minute, Miss Bradshaw,” he said with a chuckle. “Ah, here’s the car. Let’s first see how the party is progressing, shall we?”

Amelia nodded, grateful she could pursue a few more important questions that remained before inevitably heading to the penthouse.

“Thank you, George,” J.D. said to the operator, and the three of them in the elevator traveled in silence until they reached the main floor.

The elevator doors parted, revealing the lobby packed with more guests than ever, drinking from champagne flutes and chatting in groups around the tables laden with trays of cheeses from the dairy farms north of the city and an elegant array of canapés. Amelia caught J.D.’s arm and pulled him slightly to one side near the protective fronds of several large pots of ferns and palm trees.

“What I still want to know, J.D., is
why
would you agree to this marriage if you knew neither you nor Matilda wanted to go through with it?”

“To protect you.” He stashed the bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the nearest potted palm.

“There you go again!” she said, exasperated. “I’ve told Angus and I’ll tell you, not every woman is asking for some hairy warrior to shield her from life’s vagaries. I had finished the job here and told you in my letter that I was departing for France. You had no cause to ‘protect’ me. And you had a duty to tell me what was going on!”

“All right, Miss Woman Warrior, I
will
tell you what was going on. Kemp said that if he ever
saw you and me together, he’d have you thrown overboard from the ferry on your way back to Oakland. Apparently, he thinks the purser—Harold Jasper, is it?—owes him a favor.”

Amelia’s eyes widened and she steadied herself on J.D.’s arm. “Oh my,” she said in a small voice. She told him then of her glimpse of Dick Spitz on the ferry that very evening conferring with the purser. “Harold Jasper was Aunt Margaret’s neighbor, for pity’s sake! Kemp’s tentacles reach everywhere.”

“Good Christ, Amelia! Spitz was on the ferry
tonight
? The plan was to have you thrown from the boat and make it appear a suicide over your despair that I had married Kemp’s daughter, leaving no strands that could be traced back to him.”

“I thought it odd, seeing him on the
Berkeley
, but I suppose our group of four women on board made me unapproachable, thank goodness! Spitz vanished among the disembarking passengers and I didn’t notice him again until I arrived in the ballroom.”

“I’d learned from Kemp himself that Spitz, Kavanaugh, and Kelly have been assigned for a long time to keep an eye on you and, more recently, were ordered to do you harm.”

“No wonder Joe Kavanaugh was furious when I discharged him.”

Where were those rogues now, Amelia wondered, her apprehensive gaze darting around the crowded space. The small lobby orchestra had taken seats again and the leader raised his baton as dancers spontaneously began to sway to the lilting music, even though a larger ensemble was playing in the ballroom.

“As I told you when I posted the Pigatis on the roof,” J.D. explained, “Kavanaugh figured that you and I—well, that we
might
be more than just client and architect. Kemp knew how my grandfather died and how I felt about it, so he figured that I’d take seriously his threats to have you thrown overboard—which I
did
take seriously, by the way,” he added somberly. “So much was happening so quickly, I figured marrying Matilda was the best way to insure the safety of practically everyone involved—at least until I could get to France and explain to you what had happened.”

“And bring Matilda with you as Mrs. Thayer?” she asked, incredulous. “I don’t think I would have given you a very welcome reception, J.D.”

“Matilda and I had already agreed that if we were forced to marry, we would, of course, never consummate it and would grant each other complete freedom.”

“Perhaps so, but I still wouldn’t have received you in Paris,” Amelia insisted.

“Why ever not? Surely, you bluestockings don’t hold with such outdated conventions as marriage, do you?”

“I don’t hold with conventional marriages, no indeed.”

“Ah… so are you referring, now, to shackles? Being ordered about by your lord-and-master? Things of that sort?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied loftily, cocking her head to one side as if she were intently listening to the music.

“Angus said that’s how you view matrimony. As a trap for hapless women. I figured that even if Matilda and I had to enter into this damnable alliance, a ‘modern’ woman like you wouldn’t look particularly askance if I came calling in Paris—if, indeed, you wanted to see me again.”

“Well, you miscalculated,” declared Amelia, turning to meet his glance. “I have no wish to be shackled, but neither do I approve of marriage as a sham. I believe in an equal,
legal
union of hearts, if both parties respect each other—which is
rare
,” she added pointedly.

“Well, that’s a relief,” he said, and Amelia could tell he was suppressing a smile. Then his expression grew grave. “Would you have wanted to see me again, even if your principles cautioned against it?”

She hesitated. This notorious gambler was clearly asking her to lay her cards on the table.
Well,
she thought,
in for a penny, in for a pound.
She was thoroughly tired of not speaking her mind.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I would have wanted to see you again. Very much, actually.”

“Ah ha!” J.D. said triumphantly.

“But before you count your chips, Señor Thayer, let me explain that I would probably have refused to see you, nevertheless.”

“Why?” he demanded.

“Experience has shown me that most men feign approval of women working in the public sphere. Then, when it comes to the washing of socks and tending hearth and home, they do an about-face and wish their wives to be their servants.”

“So I’m to be tarred by the brush of Monsieur Etienne Lamballe?”

Amelia shot him a sharp look.

“I think it’s rather unfair of you to use what I told you about him against me,” she said. “But no… not just him. Even dear, sweet Angus McClure is like that. I have no desire to be any man’s servant. I wish to be a practicing architect. Someday, I might be willing to share my life with someone I love and have children with him, but only as an equal partner. And from what I’ve observed, the hallowed state of holy matrimony in our country—even in the twentieth century—generally rules that out.”