A Race to Splendor (9 page)

As the Winton pulled away from the roadside, Amelia detected that Henry Bradshaw’s chest was moving, but his battered face looked like a death mask. She squinted at a sky turning peach and black as smoke surged skyward in huge funnels.
Dante’s Inferno and the end of the world, all rolled into one
, she thought, picturing fire engulfing the Bay View and the spanking new Fairmont Hotel in the next hours. She was grateful Grandfather Hunter wasn’t alive to witness such devastation.

What did it matter what was in the safe or who had won the blasted card game the previous night? After today, the only future that seemed clear for the entire populace of San Francisco—J.D. Thayer and herself included—was a choice between misery and destitution… or death.

***

Angus McClure piloted the Winton toward the U.S. Army’s base at the Presidio as the conflagration raged in their dusty wake. Along the road, Amelia saw humans transformed into draft animals, men as well as women pushing baby carriages, wagons, box carts, and even wheeled toys in a desperate effort to move possessions to safety. One wild-eyed man wheeled an upright piano through the chaos.

The Winton slowed to a snail’s pace when it approached a group of fifty or so Chinese women struggling along Van Ness Avenue in two columns. Amelia could hear high-pitched chatter among the throng clad in colorful silk and cotton dresses, carrying their worldly goods in fat bundles balanced on the ends of broom handles.

“Good God, J.D.!” Angus exclaimed. “There’s Donaldina Cameron! She’s even got the children marching.”

The Winton drew up beside a tall, imposing woman with rust-colored hair akin to Dr. McClure’s. This was the famous, perhaps notorious, Miss Cameron, noted for scaling walls and climbing down skylights in Chinatown in her ongoing effort to rescue victims of the “highbinders” who kidnapped women in China to serve as unpaid domestics—or worse—in San Francisco. The noted young woman wore somber attire and hair piled neatly on top of her head. A distinctive streak of premature white waved at the crown of her forehead—
like angel’s wings
, Amelia thought.

“Those are the residents of the Presbyterian Mission Home, on Sacramento Street,” McClure called to Amelia as she clutched the rear passenger door in order to steady herself on the motorcar’s running board.

“I know of Miss Cameron’s efforts,” Amelia shouted against the wind. “She tries to help girls like the one killed in the gambling club.”

Thayer suddenly returned to life. “No. Not like her. Ling Lee was no willing—”

“Ling Lee was an unusual woman,” Angus volunteered over his shoulder. “She was one of the lucky few who escaped from China Alley and was brought to the Mission Home. If it hadn’t been for Donaldina, Ling Lee would have died long before the earthquake got her.” He watched his patient struggle to sit up. “And you, J.D.,” he added ominously, “you’d better not move a muscle if you don’t want to puncture a lung.”

As they slowly passed by, Miss Cameron raised a hand high to halt her group and strode toward the car. McClure pulled over and waited.

“My dear Angus! And Mr. Thayer! What a blessing it is to see you both alive.” Her beatific smile abruptly faded when she got a closer look at Thayer and heard the low cries of the older man sprawled on the backseat. “Can I do anything to help? We’ve carried some medical supplies with us and will gladly share.”

“That’s kind of you, Donaldina, but you should hoard every bandage you have. You’re going to need them.” McClure introduced Amelia and identified her father as the most gravely injured. Then he asked, “What happened to the Mission Home?”

“The brigades started dynamiting firebreaks. The soldiers ordered us to leave so I thought it best if we moved the women in broad daylight. The highbinders are vigilant about their ‘property,’” she added, referring to Chinatown’s brothel owners and procurers. “They’d snatch their girls back in a heartbeat if they could—never mind the quake and fire. We’ll spend the night at the Presbyterian Church on Van Ness Street.”

Thayer shifted in his seat and dug in his pockets, gasping in pain in the process. He extended her a gold piece. “Please take this. To help the children—and little Wing Lee.”

Miss Cameron smiled faintly, nodded, and retrieved the coin. “Bless you, Mr. Thayer.” Her regal bearing softened and she regarded him kindly. “And Ling Lee?”

Amelia watched as J.D. Thayer bowed his head and did not reply.

Angus cast a concerned glance in Thayer’s direction. “She died in the quake,” he explained cryptically. “Killed instantly, she was, when a ceiling caved in on her.”

Miss Cameron put a sympathetic hand on Thayer’s sleeve. “I am truly sorry to hear that. It’s a tragic time for so many in our town.” To Angus she said, “God bless.”

And with that, she glided to the head of her “troops” and motioned for them to continue their march. By this time, Thayer had closed his eyes and appeared to lapse into semi-consciousness.

As for Henry Bradshaw, Amelia couldn’t tell if her father was dead or alive.

Chapter 8

It was late afternoon before the Winton reached the Presidio’s Lombard Gate, inching past a quake-torn crevice paralleling the crowded escape route. Once on the grounds of the army base, Amelia saw a wide field on her right already filled with rows of round, white army tents. The canvas structures were topped with conical roofs that made the encampment look like a scene out of the
Arabian Nights
. Sloping to the water’s edge, the area offered a spectacular view of the bay, even as smoke from the scores of fires downtown cast a pall over the local surroundings.

The doctor drove the group directly to a large tent off to one side that had a placard reading M
ALE
A
MBULATORY
. A group of uniformed orderlies greeted them as the car rolled to a stop in front of the open canvas flap.

“Easy, men… this fellow is definitely
not
ambulatory,” Angus said with a physician’s sense of black humor. “In fact, he’s unconscious and probably broke his back, and
this
one,” he added, referring to J.D., “is awake and nothing but trouble. He has a couple of broken ribs. Don’t make ’em any worse if you can help it.”

To Thayer he said, “Lie still on your cot in there, and don’t do anything but drink water till I come back to see you. I’ll look after your dog.” The second set of orderlies eased Henry Bradshaw out of the car and onto a stretcher. “Take him to Ward H and start giving him laudanum. A large dose.”

Before Amelia could protest, her father was swiftly borne away. J.D. lifted his head from his stretcher and rasped, “Don’t crash my car, damn you, McClure.”

“Aye, laddie,” the doctor replied. “And what can you do about it if I do?”

***

Henry Bradshaw had been assigned to a tent for those who survived the quake and fire, but for whom little could be done.

“Every ward in the hospital is already full, and we’re starting to put even critical cases in some of the tents,” announced Angus McClure to Amelia as they walked from sunlight into the dim interior. “Your father is housed here in Ward H on the far side of the parade ground.”

“Next to the military cemetery,” Amelia noted, squinting at the bright white tombstones visible through the open flaps of the tent.

“Aye, lassie,” McClure answered soberly. “Now anyone can be buried at the Presidio.”

It was only later, when Amelia was pressed into service as a “volunteer” nurse that she learned Ward H stood for “hopeless.” On the day of the quake and fire, however, her spirits had already sunk to a new low when she realized that her father had been given so much laudanum for the pain that he had consequently taken up residence in the land of the living dead.

“He has broken his back in at least two places,” McClure confided as she stood dejectedly next to her father’s bedside. “Nasty business, I’m afraid.”

“So he will be an invalid? In a wheeled chair?” Amelia asked.

“With the bad weather rolling in and the primitive conditions around here, pneumonia’s a real danger. I’m afraid you should prepare yourself for the worst.”

McClure gently took her arm and drew her away from her father’s bedside to have a private word. “You’re welcome to sit by his side for a bit, and then ask someone to find me so I can stitch up those cuts on your forehead. After that, report to the nurses’ tent and they’ll give you a cot. You’d best get some rest while you can.”

At the mention of bed, Amelia experienced such a wave of fatigue she thought she might simply keel over then and there. The idea of a clean, horizontal surface to sleep on sounded like a gift from heaven.

“Thank you, Dr. McClure. I appreciate that.”

Once again, his lilting Scottish accent made her think of her late grandfather. It seemed impossible now that Charlie Hunter had still been alive only six weeks ago, before her world turned upside down.

“Do call me Angus,” the doctor said. “No point in maintaining such formality when we can’t rely on the earth beneath our feet, eh, Amelia?”

She nodded and tried to smile. “Angus, then.” She turned to study her father’s immobile features. It only then occurred to her that the doctor had been trying to tell her that her father would be dead by dawn’s light.

“I’ll just sit here a while,” she murmured.

***

That night, Amelia refused to leave her father’s side, making her bed on a nearby cot and listening to his labored breathing until she fell into an exhausted sleep. Long past midnight, she heard him call her name. Scrambling to her feet, her blanket gathered around her shoulders like an Indian squaw, she stood shivering by his bedside.

“What is it, Father?” she murmured, not wanting to wake the other patients. No one had come to administer laudanum and he sounded more like himself in sober days.

“I was dreaming about you, Melly,” he whispered between gasps for breath, “and when I woke up, there you were… sleeping on the cot.”

“Yes?” She was touched by the wistfulness of his tone. She knelt at his side and felt his forehead. He was feverish, which Angus warned might bring on vivid dreams. “I’m right here. Feeling any better?”

“Sand castles…” he said with a sigh. “You were building sand castles down by the bay.”

She felt a stab of nostalgia at the memory of constructing fanciful turrets with a tin bucket as a child, but all she said was, “Was it Blarney Castle I was building? Remember how you’d always say that was the one we should make?”

“Well, we Bradshaws
are
Scots-Irish. We’re canny people, but we’ll still spend our last penny on a whiskey. And sometimes our next-to-last too.” His stab at humor resulted in a fit of coughing. When the attack subsided, he seized her hand. “In the dream, you were building the castle all by yourself. You can do that now, can’t you?”

“Well, maybe not castles, Father, but I can build buildings.”

“I know,” he whispered. “You’re a clever girl.” It was a rare compliment, she thought, and all the more precious since the alcohol he’d consumed the previous evening had evidentially worn off. “That’s why I had to try to win back the hotel. I did it for you and your mother, Melly,” he added, peering up at her. “To make up for… for all the harm I’ve caused.”

In all her years as his daughter, she’d witnessed a sober Henry Bradshaw act charming, witty, even sometimes wise, but she’d never
ever
seen him truly repentant.

“It doesn’t matter now, Father,” she hushed, brushing a stray shock of hair off his forehead.

“It does, Melly! It does.”

She gently patted his bandaged hand. “Of course, it matters, but what I mean is that I always knew, somehow, you were sorry when you hurt us.”

Her father motioned for her to lean closer. “I think earlier tonight, I dreamt I was back in Donner Pass,” he whispered, “trapped in the ice cave.”

Her father had never once mentioned this unspeakable subject. Amelia had assumed he’d mercifully been spared any memory of the many days the Donner Party a half century earlier endured the snows near Lake Tahoe without proper food and supplies. He had only been three years old at the time and Aunt Margaret barely seven when their parents died en route. Little Henry wouldn’t have even understood the word cannibalism.

“Maggie gave it to me,” he murmured. “She chewed on a piece of cowhide and gave me the only real food she had. We were just young ’uns, but I remember that cave and people dyin’, one by one, and the bitter cold. And then, there was just me, along with a cow wrangler, a farmer, and Maggie alive in that hellhole. When the cowhand died… well, the survivors reckoned we
had
to, Melly.”

Amelia shuddered at the allusion to the topic that had been forbidden all her life.

“That was a long, long time ago, Father,” she said softly. “You need to sleep now.”

“They said it was wrong. The newspaper fellows hounded us for years afterwards. Still do. Came sniffing around just before Christmas last year. Coming up on the anniversary, y’know. They said Maggie was bad to feed me and I was wicked to take it.”

“You were a tiny little boy,” she said with genuine sympathy for the horrors he and Aunt Margaret had endured. “None of it was your doing.”

“The whiskey made it all disappear, Melly. That was wrong too, but the memories and pesterin’ get so bad, I have to find a way to blot it out. Your mother never understood about the cave. How
cold
it was. How hungry we were…” He was shivering with the fever—or was it because of the horrible memory, she wondered.

Soon he appeared to drift to sleep. Amelia was about to return to her cot when he suddenly opened his eyes.

“Did you keep those three playing cards?” he demanded hoarsely.

She patted the pocket of her skirt. “Shhh… yes, they’re right here.”

“Good girl,” he rasped. “Go back to the club. Find the other two.”

“I’m sure the club burned in the fire,” she whispered, seeing in her mind’s eye flames licking at the buildings a block away from the Bay View. “I expect everything on Nob Hill’s gone by now.”

Continuing as if he hadn’t heard, he said, “We were playing five-card stud. I had four cards up and one face down. After the call, I turned the last one over. Kemp saw me put that winning ace on the table, I know he did! He was sitting on my right side. He
had
to have seen it! J.D. was across the table, though, so I’m not sure if he—”

“
Quiet
over there!” croaked a voice from the dark.

“Shhhh,” Amelia soothed her father and glanced at the rows of shrouded cots. “We’re waking the others.”

“But, Melly—”

“You must sleep,” she insisted firmly. “We’ll talk more in the morning.” She bent down and kissed his forehead. He’d had no liquor for hours now and, sober, seemed much more like the man she’d adored as a girl.

Spent from the effort to talk, he soon drifted back to sleep, leaving Amelia to wonder forlornly what life might have been like if her father hadn’t taken to the bottle, and if the shock that followed his injuries was the cause of his wild story about drawing a rare royal flush.

She continued to kneel in the damp grass beside her father’s cot, studying his pallid cheeks. They had sunk into craters of parchment, as if death had already carried off Henry Bradshaw to an unknown land. Soon, he was barely breathing. She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “I love you, Melly…” he murmured. “Always have.”

“Good-bye,” she whispered in his ear, choking back tears. “I love you too. I’ve always loved you. God speed, darling Daddy.”

After that neither of them spoke again. By morning, he was dead.

***

On the day following the quake, Dr. McClure appeared in his office, his shoulders slumped with exhaustion. Barbary was curled up quietly in the corner, one of the luckier victims of the quake, mused Amelia. McClure greeted his patient with a sympathetic nod.

“Not a good day any way it’s sliced, is it? I’m sorry about your da.”

“Thank you,” she murmured. What else was there to say?

“’Twas peaceful, they told me.”

“Yes. At least it was that.”

A kind of gentle acceptance had come over her this morning, a sense of serenity that her father had died a loved and loving man. Now if only she could learn the fates of Aunt Margaret and friends like Julia, Lacy, and her grandfather’s nurse, Edith Pratt.

Meanwhile, the doctor busied himself removing a thin needle and something resembling thread from inside his black bag. He turned toward a white metal cabinet pushed against the wall and withdrew a bottle of whiskey, pouring a stiff shot into a glass and handing it to Amelia. “Drink it all, please. We’ll wait a minute for the spirits to take effect and then I’ll clean your wounds and stitch you up.”

“What kind of doctor
are
you, anyway?” Amelia asked, eyeing the needle that he was threading with a few false starts.

“I’m just an old sawbones,” McClure answered with a shrug. “I joined the U.S. Army when I got out of medical training in Edinburgh and came to this country.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“What is?”

“That you’ve actually had formal medical training.”

McClure shot her a look and then appeared to recognize her weary attempt at humor.

“That’s how I know Thayer,” he explained. “In fact, ol’ Jamie and me, we met in Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, back in ninety-eight. The U.S. Army needed doctors and I sailed over from Scotland and signed up. After I mustered out, I came to the Presidio as a contract surgeon when they opened the hospital here. Used to be a Major.”

“J.D. Thayer was in the
army
in Cuba?” She had difficulty imagining Thayer taking orders from anyone.

“Indeed we were,” McClure said proudly.

The regiment that fought the Spanish-American War was famously staffed by adventurers and soldiers of fortune, joined by a smattering of blue bloods like young Teddy Roosevelt who’d made a name for himself during the conflict. While Amelia was finishing college at Berkeley and before departing for Paris and L’École des Beaux Arts, the treaty with Spain had been signed, giving the United States control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and—after a twenty million dollar Congressional appropriation—the Philippines as well.