Mercedes Lackey: The Fire Rose

The restaurant staff were attentive without being obnoxious; perhaps her look of mourning made them so. They showed her to a secluded table for one, took her order and brought it immediately, and thereafter left her alone. Only once did anyone approach her, just before her entree appeared. One of the waiters, a young, red-haired boy, hesitantly intruded on her solitude, a collection box in hand.

"We wondered, ma'am, if you or Mister Cameron would be interested in contributing to the Palace Hotel Vesuvius relief fund?" he said, very shyly, thrusting forward the cardboard box with a smudgy newspaper photo of a volcano in eruption pasted onto the front of it.

"Vesuvius relief?" she repeated, and shook her head in confusion. What on earth could the boy mean by that? "Why? Has something happened in Italy?"

He stared at her as if she had just crawled out of a cave, and she felt moved to explain lest he begin to suspect that something was wrong and start a train of gossip.

"I have just come from Mister Cameron's estate in the country," she told him, one hand going unconsciously to her throat where she touched the golden round of her watch. "It is very remote, and we have not even had delivery of newspapers. Please, tell me, what is it that has happened? If it is something serious, I shall have Mister Cameron told at once."

The boy relaxed, as if he had not been quite sure of her sanity. "That volcano, Mount Vesuvius, ma'am. It blew its top clean off. There's whole towns under the lava-hundreds killed, thousands hurt. Two hundred fifty people were killed in one market, buried under ash! It's bad, ma'am, there's people collecting all over the city, and the Palace has a special fund going and they asked us waiters to try and get up some of the fund money?"

He spoke the last on an uncertain, interrogative note. She smiled reassuringly, although it hurt one side of her mouth to do so, and dug into her handbag. She hadn't emptied it since the last time she was in the city, and she hadn't spent all the pocket-money Cameron had given her for that trip. Surely there was something in there she could give the boy!

Mount Vesuvius erupting-She remembered now, as from a time ten years in the past, how she had dreamed of fire, earthquake, and disaster the night she arrived here. Had that been a premonition of this calamity in Italy?

Then her hand closed on a thick wad of banknotes, and she froze, looking down into her lap.

There was a roll of bills in her purse at least an inch across. Under cover of the table, she opened the roll and stared at the result. None of the bills were smaller than a ten-dollar note. Beneath the roll, lying loose, were the scattered notes of smaller denomination from the last trip. How had that gotten into her purse? Was it Jason?

Of course it was. How else could it have happened? As clever as the Salamanders were, she did not think they were clever enough to realize that one needed money to pay for things.

She extracted two bills, one of them a twenty, and handed both to the boy, whose eyes went wide as she placed them in his box. "There," she said, "The ten is from me, the twenty from Jason Cameron. It is the least that Mister Cameron and I can do."

He stammered his thanks and went on to the other patrons of the restaurant. She extracted another couple of bills and secreted the rest in a side pocket of her handbag so that she would not pull them all out inadvertently. I am not such a gull as that; even here, I would not be certain of my safety if word passed that I had such a quantity of cash money on my person.

She paid for her dinner-leaving a generous tip and sought the concierge for aid in acquiring a taxi to the Opera.

Perhaps warned by the restaurant staff and in anticipation of a fine gratuity for himself he managed to find her one despite heavy competition. Although it was a Wednesday and a working-day, carriages full of opera-goers were already on their way to Mission Street in the cool breeze of the early evening. The fair weather tempted many out for an evening of entertainment, although the theaters would be dark by midnight. Besides the Opera, Babes in Toyland was still playing at the Columbia Theater, and John Barrymore held forth in Richard Harding Davis' play, The Dictator. And of course, there was vaudeville at the Orpheum, and the disreputable entertainments of the Barbary Coast, which never seemed to close for long.

The concierge handed her into the cab, and smiled his thanks when the gratuity was the size he had hoped for.

Rose hardly noticed the congestion; surrounded by all the bustle of a busy city street, she felt oddly isolated, as if she were not entirely centered in the real world, as if only part of her rode to the Opera, and the rest of her was elsewhere.

The journey from the Palace Hotel to the Opera House was not a long one; soon enough, she descended from the cab to join the rest of the three thousand music-lovers fortunate enough to have tickets to hear the great tenor in his San Francisco debut.

She settled herself in Cameron's box and asked the usher to draw the curtains part way closed. Tonight she had no wish to see or be seen by anyone in the audience. In honest truth, she wanted most to be alone with her thoughts, but the isolation of her hotel room was not the kind of isolation that she craved.

She settled back as the house-lights went down, and the first strains of the famous overture rose from the orchestra.

But music did not have the usual effect of taking her out of herself or even of removing her from reality to that fairyland where the incredible events of a lifetime could pass in three or four hours. Not even Caruso's unbelievable voice could lift her spirits, even though the pudgy tenor seemed to grow in stature and nobility the moment he opened his mouth. He easily transformed from a fat little Italian with oily hair, to Don Jose, the noble soldier and tragic lover. Perhaps the problem was with his co-star, a Wagnerian soprano from Germany, normally found filling out the breastplate of a Valkyrie or donning the gold-horsehair braids of Elsa von Brabant. She was making her debut in the role of Carmen, and it was one she was ill-suited for. Instead of being transformed by the music as Caruso was, she seemed ill-at-ease in the role of the Gypsy temptress, as ill-at-ease as Rose herself was tonight. She switched her skirts as if she was chasing flies rather than trying to seduce Don Jose with a glimpse of leg and bosom. And as for the fight with the other cigarette girl-they looked like a pair of hausfraus squabbling ill-naturedly over a cabbage, rather than a pair of ill-bred Spanish cats ready to take knives to each other. The audience was as restless as she, and probably felt the same; when Caruso sang, a perfect hush filled the theater, but when the diva took the stage, she heard whispers, the rustle of programs, and other noises of inattention.

So at the interval, although Rose had enjoyed every note Caruso sang, she had not been distracted much from her troubles; certainly not as much as she had hoped to be.

When the lights came up for intermission, she decided to remain in her box rather than brave the crowd in search of champagne or milder drink. It seemed like far too much effort to squeeze through the mob just to obtain a single glass of indifferent wine or weak lemonade.

But a tap at the door of the box startled her, and she answered it before she thought. "Yes?" she called, revealing that the box did have an occupant. The intruder took her tentative reply as an invitation, and opened the door.

She found herself facing a middle-aged man of relatively good looks; one whose figure suggested that he might be allowing good living to overcome the athletic physique of his youth. His dark hair was perfectly groomed, as was his small mustache. He was attired in perfectly-tailored evening-dress, and the cut of the suit suggested that the large diamond stickpin in his cravat was the genuine article and not paste.