Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery Read online

  Maids of Misfortune

  A Victorian San Francisco Mystery

  By M. Louisa Locke

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2009 Mary Louisa Locke

  Cover design Copyright 2009 Michelle Huffaker

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Discover more information about the author, the world she has created, and forthcoming works of fiction at http://mlouisalocke.com/

  Chapter One

  Monday morning, August 6, 1879

  The bastard!

  Annie Fuller gasped, shocked at even allowing such an unladylike expression to enter her mind. She had been enjoying her tea and toast while sorting through her mail in splendid solitude. This was one of the privileges of being the owner of a boarding house, and absolute heaven after the dreadful years she had spent living off the charity of her in-laws, not a room or a moment to call her own.

  However, this morning, the mail contained a slim envelope that had blasted her peace to shreds. With trembling hands she reread the letter, which followed the standard business formula, direct, very much to the point, and devastating in its implications.

  Mr. Hiram P. Driscoll

  New York City, New York

  July 25, 1879

  Mrs. John Fuller

  407 O’Farrell Street

  San Francisco, California

  Dear Madam:

  I hope that this letter finds you in good health. It pains me to have to introduce such a difficult subject, but it is my duty to remind you of your obligation to repay the loan I made to your late husband, John Fuller, by September 30, 1879.

  To reacquaint you with the particulars: the original loan was for $300, to be paid back within six years. Under the terms of the loan, interest was to be paid monthly at a rate of 5% until the loan was repaid. In respect for your departed husband, for whom I had great affection, and in recognition of your financial difficulties at the time of his death five years ago, I did not insist that this part of the agreement be met. However, since none of the interest has been paid, you are now responsible for the original loan, plus accrued interest, a total sum of $1,380.00.

  I confess that I have been quite concerned about your ability to meet your obligations, and I was greatly relieved when I heard from your esteemed father-in-law about your good fortune in inheriting property in such an up-and-coming city as San Francisco. I must be in your fair city the last week of August on business. I would like to take the opportunity to stop by and visit with you at that time. I am quite sure that we will be able to come to some agreement of mutual benefit.

  Your obedient servant,

  Hiram P. Driscoll

  Annie's skin crawled as she thought of Mr. Driscoll, one of New York City's most successful entrepreneurs. "Your obedient servant." The hypocrite! She realized some women found his unctuous manner attractive, but after each encounter with him she always felt soiled. At parties he had leaned close, his husky voice whispering inanities as if they were endearments, his hot breath blanketing her cheek and his hands roving unceasingly over her person, patting a shoulder, stroking a hand, squeezing an elbow.

  Annie shivered. Standing up abruptly, she crossed the room to close the window, shutting out the chill early morning fog. She had suspected that Driscoll had played some role in her late husband’s dramatic slide into financial ruin, but she hadn’t realized the man played the part of loan shark. Not that she was surprised at the debt. Creditors swarmed from the wainscoting in the months following John's death, picking over what was left of his estate. Few of them got a tenth of what was owed, since her father-in-law, as John’s executor, hired an expensive but skilled bankruptcy lawyer to ensure that at least his own assets would not be touched. But Annie had been left destitute and dependent on John’s family.

  Dependent, that was, until she inherited this house from her Aunt Agatha last year. She had returned to San Francisco where she had lived as a small child and turned the old mansion, located just four blocks from Market Street, into a respectable boarding house. Annie’s features softened as she walked to the fireplace and turned to look at the room that had grown golden with the sunrise. The furnishings were sparse. There was an old mahogany bedstead and mismatched wardrobe and chest of drawers, a simple round table on which the morning tea tray sat, and a comfortable armchair, next to the fireplace. A worn Persian carpet covered a dark oak floor, and the only decoration was the two simple blue jugs holding dried flowers sitting on either side of the mantel clock. These jugs and the clock were all that was left of her inheritance from her mother, who had died over thirteen years ago. She didn’t care if her surroundings were unfashionable because she loved everything about the room and the house and the freedom they represented.

  Oh, how unfair to have Driscoll and his loan surface at this time, when she finally felt safe. He was clever to have waited, accumulating the interest. If he had tried to collect on the original loan five years ago, he would have gotten very little, perhaps nothing, back. Everything she had brought into her marriage, including the house her father gave her, had gone to settle her husband’s debts. But now she had Aunt Agatha’s house, and Driscoll wanted to take it from her. The last part of the letter implied as much.

  Annie began to pace. The house was small, built in the early 1850s, and she had only six rooms to let out. After all the expenses of running a boarding house, she barely broke even. There was simply no way that she could, on her own, pay off Driscoll's loan, without selling the house itself. Fighting Driscoll in a New York court would be equally expensive, as he would be well aware. He probably counted on being able to frighten her into turning over the house. The lawyer who was executor of her Aunt Agatha’s estate had suggested that she might get nine hundred, or even a thousand dollars for the property, located as it was near the expanding commercial sector of the city. Clearly Driscoll had figured this out.

  “The God-damned bastard!” This time Annie said the words out loud.

  She may have been only twenty-six, a widow without any immediate family to protect her, but she refused to let Driscoll, or any other man for that matter, rip her home and independence away from her a second time.

  When Annie finally left her bedroom, it was a quarter to seven. Descending the narrow uncarpeted backstairs, she caught the tantalizing odor of the morning bread baking and heard the faint clatter of breakfast dishes interspersed with bursts of conversation emanating from the kitchen below. She yearned to go down one more flight and join in whatever joke had caused the sudden laughter, but she couldn't, she had work to do. She turned off the stairs on to the first floor and entered a small room at the back of the house.

  At one time this room had been a gloomy back parlor where her Uncle Timothy had retired with his port after Sunday dinner to smoke his cigar and subsequently snore away the long afternoons. Annie had remodeled it by having a small entrance cut from this room into the larger parlor in front,
installing a washstand and mirror in one corner and replacing the horsehair sofa with a small desk and book shelves.

  Annie stood in front of that washstand and began a curious morning ritual. First, she liberally dusted her face with a flat white powder that rested in a box on the top of the washstand, effectively erasing all signs of the freckles sprinkled across her nose. Then she dipped the little finger of her right hand into a small tin containing a sticky black substance, which she applied liberally to her eyelashes, normally the same reddish-gold as her hair. Using her middle finger, she transferred a minute quantity of rouge from another tin to her lips, turning their usual soft pink into a strident scarlet. After washing the black and red stains from her hands with the rough soap she kept beside the washstand, she bent and opened the cabinet door under the stand and removed a disembodied head.

  She placed this apparition, a be-wigged hairdresser's wooden form, on the stand. After tethering her own braided hair securely with a net, she carefully lifted the mass of intricately entwined jet black curls off the form and pulled it snugly onto her own head. The transformation was startling. Her eyes seemed to grow instantly larger, turning from the color of heavily-creamed chocolate to the deep rich hues of coffee, taken black. Her features, normally pleasing but unremarkably Anglo-Saxon, emerged as flamboyant and Mediterranean. Annie smiled mockingly at her image in the mirror. Then, after putting the mute, scalped hairdresser's form away, she draped a silken shawl of scarlet and gold over her severe black dress and opened the door to the front parlor, where she would spend the rest of her day at work, not as Annie Fuller, the respectable, widowed boardinghouse keeper, but as Sibyl, one of San Francisco's most exclusive clairvoyants.

  Chapter Two

  "Mr. Harper, please, do not be so impatient. The reading I took last week was quite explicit. For a Taurus like you, there will be a definite improvement in financial status in the months to come. But this will take time. The signs were not for a sudden windfall, but a gradual improvement."

  Annie kept her voice pitched carefully in the lower registers, with extra emphasis on her sibilants. She had always had a good ear for accents, and she found it easy when she was speaking as Sibyl to call up the cadences of the Italian porter who had worked in her father's investment firm in New York City.

  She stared at the man who stood at the fireplace with his back to her, noting the tension in his curved shoulders and the nervous way he scrubbed his hands, trying to capture some of the fire's warmth. While it was chilly this morning, as was usual for August, it was not cold enough to explain why Mr. Harper had hovered next to the fireplace throughout this whole session.

  "Mr. Harper," she spoke more sharply. "You did sell that stock in Furngell's Cable Company, as we discussed last week? The notice of bankruptcy was posted Friday. You should have been able to unload the shares before then."

  The dispirited droop of his shoulders eloquently foreshadowed his answer. "Oh, Madam Sibyl, I didn't sell. I got to talking with Mr. Heller later that day, and he swore he'd heard the company was about to be bought out by Hallidie's company. I thought I'd just wait another week."

  In her guise as Sibyl, Annie frowned and scolded him for failing to heed the advice of the stars, but inwardly she smiled. Mr. Harper was an indecisive little man who tended to follow every tip he heard. His constant buying and selling of stock as San Francisco lurched its way slowly out of the terrible depression of the mid-seventies nearly ruined him. Since he only owned a few shares of Furngell's now-worthless company, this last mistake would not seriously hurt him. But it might make him more willing to follow her advice in the future. So she decided to let the poor man off the hook.

  "Mr. Harper. Come and sit down. It is not the end of the world. It takes great strength of will to avoid what fate has prepared for you. Last week when I cast your horoscope, I saw a small obstacle in your way. Perhaps you might have avoided it if you followed my advice. But, I understand. Fate this time was too strong for either of us. Do not worry. The stars also forecast success for you in the long run, and you will not be easily able to avoid that future either."

  She smiled briefly at him as he came and sat across the table from her. A man in his mid-fifties, he dressed conservatively in brown worsted as befitted a hardworking retailer of lady’s sewing notions. But the yellow silk vest that peeped from under his frock coat testified to the more daring side of his personality. From the first she had found him easy to read. She saw her task as trying to harness the two aspects of his nature in tandem.

  Taking up his right hand and softly tracing the lines in his palm as she had done each session, she began to speak. "Mr. Harper, see how this line is strong and reinforced in several places? Remember how I told you this represents the conjunction of the both the moon and Venus ascending?"

  She noted, as her patter continued, that the worried lines in the man's forehead began to smooth out, and he began to nod with each point that she made. "Now, Mr. Harper, I believe that by the middle of next week you shall have good news that will greatly relieve your concerns about financing your September trip."

  Annie mentally crossed her fingers, although she was feeling fairly confident in her predictions. The close reading she had made that weekend of the San Francisco Commercial Herald and Market Review revealed that a particularly good wheat harvest was going to increase the value of the investments Mr. Harper had made in local flourmills. She was certain that some of the increase would be reflected on the California Stock Exchange before the end of next week, since she would not be the only one who would have drawn that conclusion. Within the month, he should be able to sell at a tidy profit, enough to bankroll his annual buying trip to New York.

  He had resisted buying the stock originally. Agricultural-based investments were always risky; however, she had based her advice on sound information gleaned from the small central valley newspapers. Yet, to Mr. Harper it would seem that Madam Sibyl was truly clairvoyant.

  "Clairvoyant, specializing in business and domestic advice, consultations by appointment only, fee $2” stated her simple advertisement that ran weekly in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Unlike the other men and women who listed themselves as mediums or fortunetellers in the city, Sibyl did not have open consultations nor did she hold séances. She neither promised to contact the dead through slates, move tables, speak in a trance, produce materializations, nor tell amazing information about the past. Through the casting of horoscopes and reading of palms, she offered only to see clearly into the future and give advice. After less than a year at the business, Sibyl had twenty-six regular clients, a few who had bi-weekly consultations. Her fee was twice the going rate, because she had found that the higher fee and the "appointment only" rule kept away those individuals who were shopping for news from the spirit world and helped her develop a steady clientele that really could benefit from her expertise. She brought in a substantial sum each month, enough to pay for the additional expenses connected to transforming a family home into a boarding house.

  She had even accumulated a few hundred dollars so she could make some investments of her own. But all of this would have to be liquidated if the importunate Mr. Driscoll had his way. This thought distracted Annie, and she found Mr. Harper looking puzzled at her momentary silence. She mustn’t permit her own concerns to interfere with her work.

  The clock over the fireplace chimed the half-hour as she leaned forward and stared at Mr. Harper’s hand as it lay face up on the table. She looked up and gave him a strong, encouraging smile.

  "Mr. Harper. You will have a very good day today. You will be kind but firm with your head clerk, Mrs. Parker, inquiring after her daughter's health, but insisting that she be pleasant with the customers. You will eat lightly at lunch, and when Mr. Rosenthal needles you about the Furngell bankruptcy, you will not become angry. You will realize that, as a Gemini, Mr. Rosenthal is simply a talker who speaks from his envy of those who are willing to take a chance in this life. And you will know that you
have done no wrong, simply followed what the stars had planned for you.

  “Then, after a very productive afternoon, you will return home early, surprising your wife with the brooch you bought for her birthday. You will find your evening congenial, your wife amiable, your children full of high spirits, and your appetite good. I will see you at eight next Monday morning, and I am sure you will have good news for me then."

  Mr. Harper sighed lightly and smiled as if in anticipation of this pleasant future. He stood up and briskly crossed to the coat rack by the door, where he retrieved his hat and cane. Bowing with surprising grace, he said, "Thank you, Madam Sibyl. As usual your advice makes a good deal of sense." Then he left the room.

  Annie slumped for a minute, listening to the murmuring in the hall as her maid, Kathleen, escorted Mr. Harper out the front entrance. She now had nearly an hour to prepare for her next client, a young, newly married woman who was having a good deal of difficulty with her mother-in-law. Pushing herself up from the table, she moved to the front windows and pulled open the thick dark green curtains that so effectively shut out sounds from the city street below. She opened one window a crack, since Mr. Harper, like most of her male clients, had smoked when he had first come in. Kathleen would soon bring in several vases of flowers to help sweeten the air.

  Moving around the room, Annie made other changes in preparation for her next client. She pulled a comfortable armchair close to the table she always sat behind as Sibyl. Women who had been on their feet since early morning were quite content to remain stationary throughout their consultations. A large tea set would be placed at the armchair's side, with some of her housekeeper's delicious pastries temptingly arranged on a plate. She found that in this cozy atmosphere women were more likely to unburden themselves willingly, with little hesitation.