Jessie is indignant. “I do not lie, cheat, or steal!”
Zhu and Daniel join the throng of women sweeping into a downstairs salon, which is set with dining tables and chairs. The sideboard offers hot tea, cream, sugar, scones, bread pudding, candied violets, and a large Lady Baltimore cake shaped like a shamrock and iced with green butter frosting.
“What, no champagne?” Jessie complains.
“Cake and no champagne,” Daniel whispers to Zhu. “Positively barbaric.”
“The temperance movement supports woman suffrage, too, doesn’t it?” Zhu says, recalling the signs and demonstrations she’s witnessed all over San Francisco. She tries a candied violet. The vile thing tastes just exactly like purple sugar. “They wouldn’t approve of champagne or sherry at this high tea, would they?”
“Quite right,” Madame De Cassin says, helping herself to tea and a scone. She licks her lips. Zhu gets the impression that the spiritualist wouldn’t mind a nip of sherry with her tea, herself. “However! Miss Anthony has asked the WCTU and other temperance interests not to meet in California this year as they’d planned. The liquor interests are keen on defeating the woman suffrage referendum. They’ve invested a bundle of money into the campaign against it.”
“The liquor interests,” says Mariah scornfully, “exploit the friendship between temperance and woman suffrage every chance they get. What drinking man who beats his wife and whose wife hates his habit wants to let her have a say-so in the government? Let alone a vote to go dry?”
She aims an evil look at Daniel, who fusses with the lace on Zhu’s cuff. Hmm. How will he vote? Zhu wonders.
She finds a table for her and Daniel, helps him sit. He’s still so frail and weak. She hurries to the sideboard and fixes up a tray of tea and scones and bread pudding. Jessie, Madame De Cassin, and Mariah join them.
Now a plump young blond woman plunks her tea things on the table and sits next to her.
Zhu stares, disbelieving. What wonderful new reality has she found herself in, now that she didn’t die on the Chinese New Year? Maybe living in a Closed Time Loop won’t be so bad, after all.
“Li’l Lucy? Is that really you?”
“Just Lucy is fine, Miss Zhu.” Lucy looks radiant and fresh, with neatly combed yellow hair, a scrubbed face, and a high-collared gray cotton dress. “I met this wonderful fellow, a business man in shipping, not a sailor. He loved me at first sight--though what a dreadful sight I was! He helped me kick the booze and the dope. I do declare, Miss Wong, I shall never go back to the sportin’ life.” She giggles, and it’s the same old giggle, only the girlishness is real. She touches Zhu’s arm. “We got married last week--can you imagine?—and bought a house in the Western Addition. Oh, it’s a very small house and the neighborhood is still so rough. But I do believe Randolph and I will make a go of it.” She glances enviously at Zhu’s belly. “With luck, I’ll look just like you come autumn.”
As Zhu exclaims over Lucy’s good fortune and congratulates her, a tiny, tightly corseted and veiled lady sits tentatively beside Mariah. Fanny Spiggot smiles nervously at the assembled company, avoiding Daniel’s eyes.
Mariah says, “Welcome, sister,” and smiles. Though she switches her handbag to her other arm.
Now a tall, elegant lady in a pompadour thickly streaked with white sweeps into the salon and seats herself beside Lucy. “Good afternoon, ladies,” Donaldina Cameron says with a dour look at Jessie and Zhu. She hesitates, clearly pondering whether she should be seen in such questionable company, but the other tables have all been filled up with attendees. Cameron shrugs—Zhu knows from her own experience this proper lady is much tougher than she looks—then studies Daniel’s face for a long moment. “Have we met before, sir?”
Zhu glances at Daniel as he coughs into his napkin. “I believe you must be mistaken, miss,” he says. Then whispers in Zhu’s ear in an insinuating tone, “Her special friends call her Dolly.”
Zhu punches his arm. “Yeah, and how would you know?”
He chuckles. “Never you mind. That was a long time ago.”
Suddenly Mariah cries out and leaps to her feet. She ushers a stately woman into their midst, bidding her to sit in the last seat available at their table.
The stately woman joins them. White hair pulled back in a severe bun, a pince-nez planted on her eagle’s beak of a nose, her stern face ravaged by sun and