A Race to Splendor (10 page)

The defeated combatants had promptly labeled America “Imperialistic,” but none of this had concerned Amelia. She had been so focused on her engineering studies, she hadn’t even been aware that the Presidio of San Francisco had become an important jumping-off place for American troops going overseas and, later, a demobilizing base for those returning to U.S. soil. Hence the ample supply of tents.

“What possessed Mr. Thayer to go to Cuba? He doesn’t strike me particularly as the patriotic type.”

“That’s what his parents wondered,” Angus chuckled. “They couldn’t forgive him for joinin’ up… ’specially as a foot soldier.”

“How old was he then? And why wasn’t he an officer? Surely, his family had the money and influence.”

“Wouldn’t provide one cent of support for such a daft adventure. Who could blame ’em? But ol’ Jamie was at odds with his family as a young lad, and was determined to show ’em they couldn’t run his life when he up and enlisted. We met in the battle for San Juan Hill. At one juncture, the man saved m’life and later, I did him the favor of leaving his leg on when he took a bullet. This round, I’ve put his ribs to rights, so I’m up one on him.”

“Not if you play cards with him, you’re not,” she replied, arching an eyebrow.

McClure chortled. “How right you are.” Thayer might be a boon companion of Dr. McClure’s, but Amelia had not forgotten his role in the loss of the hotel. Inside her skirt pocket, she fingered the three cards found in her father’s hand. The physician merely shrugged. “I’ve learned to limit my exposure to his gamesmanship. See, Jamie’s the reason I came out to San Francisco, as a matter of fact. Told me the new hospital was hiring ex-Army physicians, and so here I am, ready to stitch you up, my dear.”

The whiskey had done its job. Amelia felt warm inside now and couldn’t have cared less what the good doctor planned to do next.

“Now, tilt back your head, there’s a good lass,” he murmured. “Fortunately, this shouldn’t take more than a tick.”

And even more fortunately, Dr. Sawbones did quite a credible job repairing the wounds on her forehead with very little discomfort—except for a mild headache the following day.

Chapter 9

The following day, Thursday, hundreds of individual fires across some five hundred city blocks converged into one monstrous inferno fed by super-heated winds. By Friday evening, both the sun and the moon glowed a malignant blood red. A group of injured firefighters Amelia attended confirmed that, indeed, all but a few structures on Nob Hill had virtually burned to the ground and the Bay View Hotel was part of the smoking wreckage.

Amelia clung to rumors that Oakland had largely escaped the awful fate of its sister city across the bay. She hadn’t been able to gain any word of Aunt Margaret or glean news of the welfare of Miss Morgan and her colleagues because the few operating telephones and the telegraph office were reserved for emergency use only. There was simply no way of communicating with the people who mattered most.

The other unsettling reality in Amelia’s world was that aftershocks continued to rattle their surroundings. She began to regard the very earth beneath her feet as unreliable and the sky a hot blanket that might soon smother them all. Her emotions careened between an aching sadness over the death of her father and utter numbness in the wake of the chaos reigning everywhere. Buried even deeper was a private, raw grief about her other losses that she kept hidden, surrounded as she was by a sea of fellow-sufferers.

Henry Bradshaw had been buried swiftly and without ceremony in an area of the Presidio designated for the post-quake victims who’d survived the natural disaster, only to succumb ultimately to disease and exposure.

Towards that evening, Angus appeared at her tent and handed her a tied-up bundle.

“These are your father’s trousers and jacket that we took off him when he first arrived and needed examining,” he explained. “You’ll probably want to reuse the wool, given the shortages and all. And I’m sure you’d want this,” he added, reaching into his own pocket. “He gave it to me for safekeeping.” He placed in her palm a small watch and a gold fob dangling from a finely wrought chain. Tiny gold nuggets the size of sand grains were encrusted on the metal cover. Angus closed a fist peppered with fine red hairs over her hand as she clutched the timepiece. “A souvenir of better days, eh, lass?”

Amelia stood frozen in place, too shaken to weep. A deep melancholy and the memories stirred by the sight of her father’s pocket watch careened in her mind.

No matter how drunk or down on his luck her father had been, he never wagered his watch. To Amelia, the elegant gold timepiece represented the upstanding family man even Henry Bradshaw knew he might have been.

She wasn’t even aware that Angus had backed out of her tent as she carefully placed her father’s garments at the head of her cot to use as a pillow. Wool cloth was indeed in short supply, and besides, the possessions Angus had returned to her were all she had left to remember her father.

She slipped the watch into her pocket, next to the three cards Henry Bradshaw had claimed had been part of a royal flush. Then she stretched out on the cot and fell into a dreamless sleep.

***

From the first day of the disaster, citizens of Chinatown had been segregated at a refugee camp on the western edge of the Presidio lands and already a campaign had been launched to prevent them from rebuilding within San Francisco proper. The Empress of China immediately telegraphed Washington, offering funds to help restore Chinatown on its original site, once the fires were extinguished. All the talk at camp was that President Roosevelt declined her largesse. Her outraged ambassador reminded Administration officials that the Chinese sovereign
owned
several blocks in San Francisco’s Chinatown and intended to rebuild exactly where she pleased—or she would impose severe trade sanctions. Diplomats scrambled as an American disaster acquired global dimensions.

Adding to the ongoing nightmare, a few cases of typhoid and smallpox were reported in the refugee settlements. Angus alluded to suicides and mental collapses among several of the displaced populace. For Amelia herself, the mere act of recalling her narrow escape from the building on Montgomery Street was enough to make her palms moist and her mouth dry.

As for members of the state militia that had been called up, they tended to be a disorderly, undisciplined lot. Amelia had heard tales the soldiers had shot homeowners trying to salvage their own possessions and then carried off the ill-gotten booty under color of authority.

As the hours ticked by, her world as a practicing architect had taken on a dreamlike quality. Like many of the able-bodied seeking shelter at the Presidio, she was pressed into service as a volunteer nurse. Reality now consisted not of drawing buildings to scale, but of swabbing wounds and stabilizing the broken bones of quake victims until Angus McClure or another doctor appeared to treat the case.

In Amelia’s agitated state, sleep began to elude her till far into the early hours of the morning, and she feared life would never seem normal again. In a perpetual state of anxiety, she stumbled back and forth to the food tent and the open pit latrines with the other women in camp.

“Amelia? Is that you?” asked a female voice behind her in the breakfast line.

She turned. “Edith Pratt? Oh my goodness, of course you’d be
here
! I should have asked Dr. McClure about you.”

Nurse Pratt gave Amelia a fierce hug. Like Julia Morgan and Lacy Fiske, she’d been a classmate at Berkeley and also Amelia’s late grandfather’s caregiver in his final illness. In fact, Amelia recalled ruefully, Edith’s status as a friend in her youth had been cited by Judge Haggerty as proof of “undue influence” when it came to Charlie Hunter’s revised will granting his entire estate to his granddaughter.

Within minutes, the two friends of long-standing were sitting beneath a cypress tree sipping cups of anemic coffee and nibbling bread from the supply trains beginning to arrive from Los Angeles and points east.

“I was on another private nursing case when the quake hit,” Edith explained. “The house I was in collapsed, but because I was quartered with the servants, our back bedroom built as an addition jutting out from the ground floor was the only room left standing. Everyone in the main house died.”

“How awful!” Amelia exclaimed. “What news about your family?”

Edith shook her head. “I hear the telephone company workers are trying to get the phones up again in the Western Addition, where my parents live, but so far, I can’t get in touch with anyone. What about you?”

“The same.” Amelia gave her friend’s shoulder another squeeze. “I pray my Aunt Margaret survived in Oakland. I’ve not had word either about Julia or any of my colleagues at her architectural firm. What worries me most is if the flames aren’t soon extinguished at Van Ness Street, the Western Addition could burn too. God help us if the fire comes all the way to the Presidio.”

“Think you can swim across the bay to Sausalito?” Edith asked grimly.

Amelia offered a bitter smile. “I heard that Mayor Schmitz and his crony, Abe Reuf, are already plotting to cut down every tree in Marin County over there, and rake a profit on each one when serious rebuilding gets under way.”

Amelia was sure that Ezra Kemp had found the means to parlay his lumber business in Mill Valley into City Hall’s profitable schemes. Then the thought crossed her mind that perhaps her father
had
been telling the truth: what if Kemp did, in fact, see
her father lay down a royal flush the instant the quake struck? And what about Thayer? How much had
he
witnessed that night?

Or had Henry Bradshaw been hallucinating on laudanum about a longed-for winning hand? Anything was possible.

A plan began to form in her mind. She would track down Kemp and J.D. Thayer and simply look them in the eye and ask them what really happened in the moments before the Bay View Hotel annex fell down around their well-tailored shoulders. The land on which the hotel stood had value, she calculated. If she could prove her father won it back and she, now, owned it, it might offer a way of starting over…

***

Amelia’s nursing assignments left her no time or opportunity to conference with J.D. Thayer. On the fourth day, the blessed rains came and the fires still smoldering all over San Francisco were finally extinguished, but not before twenty-five thousand structures were demolished within a four-hundred-square-block area. Equally devastating, more than two hundred thousand of some four hundred and fifty thousand city residents, now officially homeless, were told they would likely remain so for a year or two. Unless Amelia could find her way to her aunt’s bungalow in Oakland, she too would be counted among those statistics.

Thanks to Dr. McClure’s connections, Amelia finally was able to get notes delivered to Harold Jasper aboard the
Berkeley
to pass on to her aunt and Julia Morgan in Oakland—if they were still alive. Her brief communication to each explained that she was serving as a nurse under the order of martial law and would return to Oakland when the authorities gave permission.

She had barely closed her eyes that evening when she was roused by the arrival of an orderly.

“Miss Bradshaw, wake up!” The young medical assistant glanced curiously at the other volunteer nurses trying to sleep. “Doc McClure needs you in the bone tent.”

Amelia walked across the fog-shrouded parade grounds and stepped into the large canvas ward marked M
ALE
A
MBULATORY
. She peered at a row of a hundred or more cots stretched out on the damp grass. In the course of Amelia’s nursing duties, she’d often seen J.D. Thayer sleeping for hours at a time, or observed him staring vacantly into space. Edith too had remarked that like so many quake victims, his spirits seemed to be sinking, for he barely acknowledged his surroundings, or anyone in them.

Angus had already left on his rounds at the military hospital itself, leaving instructions that she was to change all dressings that needed attention in this big tent. For several hours, she worked her way down the rows of cots inside the stuffy enclosure. Then, with more than just bandages on her mind, Amelia squared her shoulders and approached Thayer’s litter.

“You’re next, I’m afraid, Mr. Thayer. Let me help take off your shirt and I’ll change your bandages.”

By now, she’d learned to forego any embarrassment at the dishevelment of the patients—or the stench. Nor did she blanch at nudity or exposed genitals, whether male or female. Most of the injured were grateful for her ministrations, but Thayer merely muttered, “I’m fine. Go help the others.”

Amelia paused and then spoke softly so his tent mates wouldn’t hear. “Not to put too fine a point on things, Mr. Thayer, you and your bandages smell. Nurse Pratt told me you declined her help yesterday, so changing them is a must today, if only to spare your neighbors.”

She knelt down beside J.D.’s stretcher. “Look, Mr. Thayer, I’ll do my best to make this as painless as I can. Let me help you sit up, if you would, and let’s get this shirt off you. I’ve brought you a clean one from the donation pile.”

Obviously still in pain, he slowly hoisted himself upright and allowed her gently to remove his shirt.

“Take a deep breath and release it slowly as I pull your arms through the sleeves,” she cautioned. Divested of his shirt, she could see the well-defined muscles of his chest wall tighten, but he made no sound as she began to unwind the tight bandages. The skin under his arms still bore the purple marks of a serious bruising, but the rest of him was burnished a healthy bronze with little body hair, except for a dusting of black on his chest.

As Angus had taught her to do, she lightly pressed her fingertips against Thayer’s rib cage.

“Does this pain you?”

He shook his head slightly.

“What about this?” she asked, pressing only slightly harder.

His answer was a swift intake of breath.

“Oh, I
am
sorry!” she exclaimed. His dark eyes appeared to dilate as she swiftly pulled her hand away. “I need to do this to know how tightly to wind the new bandages, but I do apologize if I’ve hurt you.”

“So it’s not an act of revenge then?” he said on a long breath.

Amelia realized that he was attempting to make light of how much her palpating his rib cage had pained him. She fell silent then and dipped a clean cloth into a bowl of soapy water and washed a week’s worth of sweat and grime from his back.

“Ah…”

His sigh was one of utter contentment, startling her with its expression of naked pleasure. “From devil to angel you are, Miss Bradshaw,” he murmured.

“Turn toward me, please,” she said crisply.

Angel.

He was merely teasing, of course, but she felt a jolt of… well, something she’d rather not admit to. How long it seemed since Etienne had spoken such endearments…

She continued gently to scrub Thayer’s upper body from his face to a trim waistline. She hadn’t been this close to a man’s bare chest since the last night that she’d made love in her garret on the Rue de Lille. She imagined that the junior ship’s officer was currently doing something similar with yet another American traveler he’d met aboard the
Normandie
and she wondered, briefly, if news of the San Francisco disaster had been telegraphed to all the ships at sea.