A-Splendid-Ruin(87)

I rolled the pencil in my fingers. I had banished my talent. I had glimpsed beauty with a gnawing longing and let it go untouched and unheralded. I had gathered it for only the briefest of moments and determinedly ignored the ache it left behind, and after a time, not so long, the urge to capture such things had died from lack of nourishment. What if it meant to punish me by staying away? But there again, that touch, the familiar way the pencil settled into my hand, and the images I’d suppressed roused: the light from the thick panes of my windows reflected on the floor, the tea rose in Mrs. Donaghan’s garden, the orange smoke clouds against a starry sky, and the red roses in the alien light, those garishly gorgeous roses. At first tentative, waiting, hopeful. Now? Waiting for my no, as I had said no a dozen times, a hundred, in the past year, and there too, that prick of fear, the warning of complacency that meant defeat and acceptance.

But I was free of Blessington now. I was no longer a prisoner. I’d denied my talent and my comfort to save myself then, and I knew instinctively that to use it would save me now. The earth had set me free. The city was at my feet. I forgot where I was and that I had not touched a pencil in months.

When I was finished, I let the pencil drop. The drawing was smudged, pressed hard into cheap paper to make it show, the edge of my hand smeared black. It was not my best drawing. The imprint of Dante’s words—Charles, the dates—made a palimpsest of my rose-bedecked bier, which blazoned richly in pencil, nearly glowing with release and with joy. I had not been defeated, the drawing said. I had not lost myself.

For the first time since the earthquake, I slept deeply, without waking at every noise, without being on the alert for any possible attack. I’d burrowed into Bobby’s blankets, which were musty and stinking of sweat, but I was warm for the first time in days, and when I woke, the sun was fully up and I smelled coffee.

When I stepped from the bedroom, there was Dante, again in shirtsleeves and sitting at the kitchen table, drinking from a tin mug and writing furiously in his notebook. He glanced up with a smile. “At least you don’t snore.”

“Does Bobby?”

“When he’s been drinking. Which is all the time.” He gestured to another tin mug on the table. “I brought you some coffee from next door. It might not be hot. And there’s no sugar, and no milk unless you’ve got children, which I don’t, so—”

“I don’t care.” I picked up the mug and took a deep and grateful sip. It was lukewarm, but it was coffee. I’d had it from the relief wagons, but somehow it was better gifted by a friend. “What are you writing?”

“Notes from last night. You do want me to tell your story? I wasn’t mistaken about that? You want me to help you ruin the Sullivans?” His eyes glittered; he was afraid I would say no.

“Yes. Soon. But the Chinatown articles first. Then we’ll have the evidence of my uncle’s corruption and Goldie’s gambling that China Joe promised, and that will give you more than just my word.” I sat down next to him. “Today, we’re going to see him.”

“Your servant, milady. I’ll send that telegram to my friend too. In the meantime, about Farge . . .” He grabbed the rest of the bread from last night, and set it before me for breakfast. “We’ll need Shin for my plan. Do you think she’ll help?”

“Help how?”

“You said Farge has your sketchbooks.”

“If they didn’t burn. Everything on Nob Hill did. The last place I saw them was at his office, but—”

“The Monkey Block is still standing,” Dante said.

I had avoided the area completely, afraid to come upon anyone I knew, and also because the memories of Ellis’s office, of Coppa’s, were not ones I wished to revisit. “It’s still there?”

Dante nodded. “They saved the whole block. Coppa’s too.”

“How lucky for Ellis.” I could not keep the bitterness from my voice.

“Luck follows him everywhere.” Dante’s voice was equally caustic. “Time for it to run out. What do you say we steal those sketchbooks back?”

I only looked at him.

“What? He’ll be lost without them. Tell me what happens when he can’t fulfill any of his contracts because his idea source is gone. He’ll be ruined.”

Of course it appealed greatly to my hunger for revenge, which felt boundless. An appropriate justice, to destroy Ellis with his own weakness. Still . . . “How exactly do you intend to steal them back?”

“It will be easy. Or it should be. If they’re in his office, we simply walk in and take them.”

“Don’t tell me they don’t know you there.”

“They do, but I’m not doing the walking in. You are.”

“Dante! They’ll recognize me. I worked with him for weeks.”

“They won’t recognize you like this.” He gestured to my attire. “They know a woman, not trousers and a flannel shirt. We’ll give you an old jacket of mine, and you can keep my hat. We’ll smudge you up a little, and there you are, Mack Kimble, errand boy. They’ll see what they expect to see.”

I would have argued with him about that if I hadn’t already known that he’d been invisible at every entertainment I’d attended. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed him, given his magnetism, but then, I had been busy trying to fit in, and the truth was that, even when I tried, I couldn’t remember the face of any servant beyond the ones at the Sullivan house. Dante was right; I simply hadn’t seen whomever I’d thought unimportant.