Joseph Justinian Grandbanks smiled at the wiggling bubbles in his goblet of seltzer.

They reminded him of the champagne he still craved. But he thought on the beautiful woman who had saved him from alcohol and the sculpted lines of care around his eyes softened. He lifted the glass in a toast.

Across the little side table sat William Seward, a clear-eyed, earnest young man with muttonchop whiskers and sideburns which gave his face an elfin quality it might not otherwise have had. With muted excitement and a sweet smile, he lifted his glass with its golden ambrosia (Grandbanks only exacted absolute temperance of himself, never of guests) and saluted his uncle. Then both men turned to the other one present and raised their glasses to her.

Making the third vertex of a triangle was a handsome woman in her late thirties, with a head of rich black curls and low eyelids that cut off the top third of her iris and made her eyes seem ever lifted to the heavens, even when she looked straight at you. The first shadow of a moustache dusted her upper lip and a lock of vagrant hair hung like a sideburn on each side of her face. Her lips were pursed in what might have been a smile or might have been a secret that she would only share if she thought it necessary. Her hands were in her lap and there was satisfaction in the calm intricacy with which the fingers interlaced.

On the small table between them, a disk of striated marble on iron legs that seemed to curtsey, was a list of names which Hiyako Miyazuki would find in the library’s collection a century later.

Grandbanks murmured, “A la Santa,” and smiled with sad, wise eyes at the woman. She bowed her head, accepting the compliment. Seward reached across and took her delicate hand in his trembling, boyish ones.

“You don’t suppose,” he said in a sweet tenor voice and a charming Mayfair accent, “that we might go and have a look at the place? You know, have a real visit before anyone moves in?” He looked with hopeful eyes at the woman.

Carmen Pilar Ortega squeezed his hand as if to reassure him there was no harm in asking. While Grandbanks smiled at Seward’s enthusiasm, the woman who had once been the curandera known as La Santa de Corona went away for a moment. Her eyes stayed open but they lost their focus and though they did not move, they seemed more than ever to be looking up to heaven.

“Yes,” she said, returning, and Seward bounced so his sideburns wiggled. “If we wish to do this,” she said in a deeply beautiful Mexican accent, “then we are to go now. Tomorrow, when the children begin to take residence, we may not enter again the space which is theirs.”

“Well, jolly good then,” Seward said, standing. “Shall we go now?” He extended a hand to his wife. She took the hand as a gift to him, standing under her own power with no help needed. But his sensitive fingers felt that her pulse had sped up.

Even Grandbanks looked like an aged schoolboy about to go on a picnic. “Come, William, let’s go get the car. Carmen, we’ll honk when we’re ready.” He spoke the slow careful American speech of the early 20th century, with a tinge of Boston reaching all the way to the west coast.

He told Jensen that he and Mrs. Bratwell could go to bed, then let himself out the ornate front door, leaving the electric lights on for Carmen. He had replaced the gas lighting with electric after the great quake and fire of 1906 when his house had come only three blocks from being burned with most of the rest of the city.

San Francisco was so new now, the signs of ruin all but gone on this pleasant evening. A fabulous World Fair was under construction on the north coast to show off the rebuilt city. It was April 12, 1912, and in three days, the world would gasp at banner headlines that a great ship called the Titanic had struck an iceberg. In just two years a Bosnian Serb would shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the world would lurch toward a war that would engulf every nation.

But on this night of April 12, Grandbanks, eager careworn face framed and traced with the sideburns and moustache, whistled as he pulled open the twin doors of the garage. Then he waited with a gentle smile while Seward plunged into action. Grandbanks was a man of the last century: he could plod through the complicated process of starting an automobile but he missed the simplicity and quiet (though not the manure) of a horse.

But Seward was an automobile enthusiast. In one continuous motion he knelt before the car, slid his finger into the choke ring near the right fender and pulled it while giving the crank lever a cheerful twist, then leapt into the driver’s seat to slide the plump sensuous key into its slot and turn it. Of the two levers on the steering wheel he flawlessly clicked one up and the other down, then was back in front of the car. With his left hand (less likely to be broken if the engine backfired), he gave the crank a firm, confident turn and the engine roared awake just as the manual said it should. Back in the driver’s seat without breathing hard, Seward made more adjustments almost without looking and the rasping roar slowly smoothed. Grandbanks shook his head with pride: he would have taken a strenuous quarter of an hour with the manual in hand and the car would still have growled like an angry tiger.

The enormous round eyes of the luxury car flared into life like the questing eyes of a none-too-clever beast, and it pulled slowly from the garage. Grandbanks slid into one of the gleaming leather rear seats. Just ten years ago automobiles had still looked comically like proper horse-drawn carriages sans horse, as if the horse had gone to lunch and left his invisible cousin to do the pulling or as if a ghost horse trotted along rasping out noisy foul-smelling farts. But his 1910 Oldsmobile was a luxury thing from a dream fantasy kingdom, gleaming with gold and green and dragon red, rich with soft leather and relaxed into its slowly evolving proper shape.

They pulled around in front of the house. Seward gave an enthusiastic “toot toot” and Carmen came out, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. She seemed to put no weight on her feet as she glided down the stairs and sat next to her husband. Seward drove them along the San Francisco streets.

Almost every block was paved differently. The car drummed over rough cobblestones, packed-in rocks which injured horses when they came loose. Then it hummed along a block paved with the new asphalt. Then came a block paved with wooden blocks and a deep, mellow thrum.

They left the districts which had been spared by the fire and passed along streets proud with young houses and fresh pavement, or billowing clouds of fresh dirt. Few others were out in the darkening evening as they headed towards Market Street and sailed along its course, broad and straight as the Nile, to its end at Castro and 17th. The waning crescent moon would not rise until the small hours.

Each had different thoughts as they journeyed through the city which slept or played quiet parlor games. Grandbanks worried about the countless souls he could never help, pour out his fortune though he might. Seward drove with the pride of an expert and the enthusiasm of one who still believed the world could be made perfect one day.

And she who had been La Santa de Corona? Did she think on the long, dusty trail which had led her from the rancho of Don Tomás in her girlhood where she’d learned from the gruff old curandera and had her first visions? Did she think of the thousands who had used her name and carried her picture as they took the bullets of the dictator Diaz? Did she think of the vision which had come to her during her wasting illness in 1908, the illness which had nearly finished her?

They reached the end of Market Street at the corner of Castro and 17th. Seward turned onto the steep 17th Street hill and the car rattled its way up, seeming almost to defy gravity with no horse pulling. At the top of the hill was the entrance to the toll road along the side of Twin Peaks. It would have been a pretty drive looking down on the firefly sparks of the city lit by gaslight and electricity -- but there was no access from that road to the cul de sac in which the Carmelcita Apartments had been built. Besides, the road was gated and locked at this time of night with no toll-taking guard on duty.

Instead they drove down the other side of 17th Street and into the developing Sunset district. In Grandbanks’s youth, this had all been sand dunes known as The Outlands, except for a little enclave called Carville where scruffy dangerous men lived in abandoned cable cars and trollies. Then Golden Gate Park had bloomed like a desert oasis, straight and square into the heart of the dunes. And since the great quake, street after street had been ploughed into the dunes and houses tucked where sand still drifted into their back yards. Now the neighborhood through which the great car hummed was laid like a ghost image in a double photograph over a wild set of rolling hills. Eventually the seams would close and the dunes would be gone.

They climbed into the rich, luxurious but still empty Forest Hills development. When homes here were offered for sale at the monstrous price of $3,000 or more, it would go without saying that those of color need not apply. Grandbanks drummed his fingers on the side of his seat: he and Seward, with Carmen’s vision, hoped to change that sort of thing.

They came to a wide street that marked the end of the Forest Hills area. A dirt road on the other side seemed to lead nowhere but Seward, flashing a grin at the other two, put the car’s great nose to that road and with a crunch of dirt and spitting rocks, they drove into a wasteland. Carmen lifted a hand and crossed herself, also touching a piece of green stone that hung around her neck.

A sudden left, a steep climb, another left and a turn that nearly doubled back on itself. They coasted to a stop in front of a beautiful Spanish style building which glowed in the headlights almost as if it were made from moon stone.

The place Carmen had seen in her vision, the place she had helped create.

The place which would soon become her cage.